Once again demonstrating its gift for fiction, the Wall Street Journal offered a hilariously pathetic treatise on the hate-mongering and intolerance of liberals. Just three weeks after Bruce Bartlett took to the Journal's opinion pages to insist that Americans overlook the Republicans' racist present to instead focus on Democrats' racist past, Arthur C. Brooks today in "Liberal Hatemongers" argued that "that political intolerance in America is to be found more on the left than it is on the right." Sadly, the misguided professor Brooks is confusing liberals' current disdain for conservatives with the political strategies, tactics and messages of hate. And that brand of hyperpartisanship and selective demonization of Americans is almost exclusively the province of the right.
The Syracuse professor contends that "the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others" is a myth. To quantify his supposed conventional wisdom busting, Brooks turns to a device called "feeling thermometers," in which survey respondents are asked to rate other people on a scale of 0 to 100. The frosty response conservatives trigger in the liberal mind, Brooks insists, prove that it is those on the left who get their hate on:

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.
Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

In a side-splitting exercise of circular logic, Brooks goes on to argue that unprecedented unpopularity of President Bush itself confirms his liberal hate thesis. While objective measures exist to show that the American people overall generally liked Bill Clinton at this point in his presidency (with approvals numbers in the 60's) while reviling George W. Bush (approval numbers in the 30's), Brooks contends liberals' greater disdain now that conservatives in 1998 is proof of left-wing intolerance:

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

And that is the very essence of today's Republican Party and the conservative movement which supports it.
As I wrote in "The Party of Hate," with its evangelical base splintered and big business supporters jumping ship, the only message seemingly uniting Republicans is disdain - of immigrants, of blacks, of gay Americans and above all, Muslims. Bereft of ideas and increasingly rejected by the American people, the conservative movement's profound identity crisis leaves it certain of only one thing: hatred of the other. (For extensive docoumentation on the GOP's hate-mongering tactics, see here and here.)
That hatred and fear-mongering is the defining characteristic of the two-pronged Republican strategy of "Divide, Suppress and Conquer." First, fire up the base with red meat issues such as abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, while using the proven conservative "distribution" channel of churches and single issue advocacy groups to get them to the polls. Second, drive down the participation of potential Democratic and independent voters through curbs on registration, unprecedented redistricting, onerous new ID requirements, and brazen polling place eligibility challenges. (Last but certainly not least for the Republican party of Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, when in doubt, just cheat.)
Despite Americans' overwhelming preference for Democratic positions virtually across the board, Republicans enjoyed victories in 2000, 2002 and 2004 thanks to divide, suppress and conquer. If not for the scope of the Iraq disaster plus the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals, the GOP might have retained its hold on Congress in 2006.
In 2008, a desperate Republican Party in search of a new wedge issue has turned to immigration. While national opinion polls from CNN and CBS now show that the economy has surpassed Iraq as the most important issue to Americans, the otherwise low priority concern of immigration topped the list for GOP voters in Iowa and South Carolina. (Mike Huckabee's pledge just three days before the Palmetto State primary that he will deport all illegal aliens was no accident.) Much to the chagrin of conservatives, the deteriorating economy may make their immigrant-bashing gambit a tougher sell in November.
Just in case, President Bush and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill have waged an unprecedented campaign of obstructionism to deny the majority Democrats any legislative wins and thus brand theirs a "do nothing Congess." While President Bush promised to stay "relevant" with vetoes and recess appointments, The GOP's omnispresent talking point of "Up or Down Vote" magically disappeared after November 2006. As Robert Borosage detailed in July, while Democrats in the House kept their promise to pass a raft of legislation including Medicare drug negotiation, the minimum wage, student loan reform and more, Republicans in the Senate stymied overwhelmingly popular bills at every turn. As former Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott boasted, "The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."
Arthur Brooks is reading his thermometer right when he says that the current political climate is a chilly one. But the Republican Party is almost solely responsible for that state of affairs by appealing to the fearful, dark side of the conservative mind.
Which, as it turns out, has also been measured in another recent academic study. As the Los Angeles Times reported last September, "exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work."
While liberals may not currently be very fond of their conservative counterparts, researchers at New York University and UCLA in their computer pattern tests found that liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy. The results, Frank J. Sulloway of UC Berkeley noted, suggested that liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.
But not necessarily bad ones, which is one plausible explanation for liberals' understandable antipathy towards their conservative counterparts.
As for Arthur Brooks and the right-wing amen corner at the Wall Street Journal, their latest sociological fantasy comes even as they laud Jonah Goldberg's new hatefest, "Liberal Fascism." But reality, as Stephen Colbert famously noted, has a "well-known liberal bias." And the reality is that it is indeed today's conservative GOP which is the Party of Hate.
UPDATE: Predictably, Michelle Malkin and other conservative bloggers laud the WSJ's phony math.