“Why are liberals so condescending?” asks Gerard Alexander, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, in a probing piece at the Washington Post. (This week, for your information, he will deliver the American Enterprise Institute’s Bradley Lecture, titled “Do Liberals Know Best? Intellectual Self-Confidence and the Claim to a Monopoly on Knowledge.”)

Alexander’s road map to the liberal mind should hold much interest for conservatives who find themselves often befuddled by the deeper mainsprings of liberals’ perverse outlook.

One of his insights concerns their claim that conservatives are motivated by emotion and anxiety, while liberals take on the superior job of hearkening to logic and and evidence. On this score Alexander samples the pronouncements of liberal academics:

George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, “still believe in Enlightenment reason,” while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. “They like to read and think,” Westen wrote. “They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right.”

Alexander places this sort of self-puffery in the context of a liberal tradition that has long brought low America’s debate on vital issues. A must-read, folks.