Judging People Based on Their Political Views

by David Sims

THE QUESTION was asked: “Should you judge someone based on his or her political opinions?”

Sometimes, you can. Sometimes, you shouldn’t. There are people who hold harmful political opinions, but they don’t know that they are harmful, much less why. A lot of trouble comes about because most people over-rate their competence to perceive, to understand, and to judge public policies, and the political agendas and ideologies that inspire them.

Young people, for example, are often very sure that they know better than their elders. If you were to ask these self-assured young people whether they planned to learn nothing during the next 30 years of their lives, they’d answer you with “Of course I will!” And then ask them: “Don’t you think that they did?” And then watch the leftist youths smugly offer reasons for why their generation was born with an especially generous helping of wisdom to which other generations weren’t privy.

Most members of each generation do that when they’re young. Then they grow up and learn better, and, sometimes, they change ideological sides when their wisdom has grown to a level sufficient to show them why they should.

But, sometimes, this changing of sides never happens. One reason for that is that a few people never attain wisdom.

Another reason for ideological stasis is that the character of the liberal (usually, such people are “liberals”) gets corrupted over time for one reason or another.

He might actually get a job that he’ll keep only so long as his employer and his coworkers are convinced he has all of the Politically Correct views. Let him get caught thinking outside the leftist box even once, and he’ll be singled out by the purity mob and fired. A threat to the paycheck will make most people pretend to believe every lie they ever heard.

Alternatively, he might become an evil Marxist. Often the reason is that the liberal has gone into debt as the result of student loans, and he spent the borrowed money to get a useless degree (e.g. in feminism, social justice, etc.) that won’t enable him/her to earn a living in the working world. He’s in a financial trap, and the only hope he has of keeping his economic head above water, of avoiding homelessness, is pushing as hard as he can, often with similarly situated leftists, to make sure that the world turns to Marxist socialism. He needs to get a free economic ride while he employs his social justice warrior skills or joins Antifa so he can get a check from one of George Soros’ foundations.

So when deciding whether to judge someone based on his political opinions, you must first know whether he holds those opinions in ignorance. Or whether, on the other hand, he holds them in spite of knowing that they are opinions that would work harm to the nation if they were to become decisive in making laws, public policies, and changes to traditional culture. Not everyone with bad political opinions is a bad person. But some of them certainly are.

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