I wasn't degrading a point of view. I was making fun of Hopper/Millsapa.
While I can't absolutely disprove your thesis here, I am not convinced it's so. I guess if it's just "making fun" we can lower our intellectual effort quite a lot, right?
If I ding you for going low once in a while, I'll also rep you about twice as often when I see the kind of wit I like, regardless of whether I agree with the point.
The mental midget characterization of conservatives is of the same class as the various slurs against "progressives" some think are "making fun". I'm more in line with LG on all this, if we aren't making a lot of progress giving up ground just slinging mud, maybe there is a way to make some real progress as Americans if we will give credit to one another for good intentions and move the discussion to higher ground. If we care more to understand the problem and solve it.
For example, I have a fundamental postive view of unions because I believe unions helped to give our middle class a new lease on life for a season in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and I think in the long run it's something we need to nurture and protect as the basis for a strong economy and for fundamental human rights. But I see a problem here with most of our private sector unions basically in a sold-out relation to their American workers because leadership is more interested in lush new "markets" in other countries and in the migrant workers/immigrant/illegal worker departments where they can use inside influence with corporate interests to get all these low-paid workers paying their union dues, while in the public sector the worker comp packages are now more than our taxpayers---lots of them long-time Americans who've lost higher-paying jobs to overseas/transborder outsourcing as well as the influx of illegals---just can't afford.
Long term, an extremely lucrative pay/benefit package for government workers is just unsustainable. Not just because there's not a strong economy or sufficient tax base to pay for it, but because it's entirely the wrong idea for public servants to be the fatcat lords of our society.