Naive

It's sometimes said that if you're a conservative when you're twenty, you have no heart, and if you're a liberal at fifty, you have no head. A gross oversimplification, perhaps, but - so some think.

But indeed, political liberals in America have more of a reputation than conservatives of having their heads in the clouds. Whenever conservative pundits aren't making the case that liberals have actively malignant designs against our country, they're arguing that liberals are naive and out of touch with reality. (The potential incompatibility of these two portrayals - self-consciously subversive elements versus hapless, bumbling fools - is not discussed, and it's usually assumed that liberals somehow embody both caricatures.)

This is amazing to me, considering that many conservatives believe that:

-it is unimportant to have an intelligent, or even functionally literate, person occupying the office of President of the United States

-evolution is false, because a book written two millennia ago says so

-abstinence education actually works on teenagers

-homosexuals choose to be gay (but somehow, heterosexuals don't have to choose to be straight)

-if everyone is armed, then society will be safer for it

-our Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians

-the ninth amendment doesn't exist

-the first half of the second amendment doesn't exist

-the environment's capacity for abuse and exploitation is limitless

-we don't need to understand anything about a country in order to invade it and set up a new government

-we can keep doing what we're doing in Iraq and somehow everything will turn out swell

Now, of course, liberals aren't without their fair share of mistaken theories and unrealistic notions, but how do they get labelled as the head-in-the-clouds party, while by contrast the conservatives can bill themselves as worldly pragmatists? Sounds a little naive to me.