They shoveled her driveway — and she shoveled dirt at them in return. By now you might have heard about Virginia Heffernan, liberal Lost Angeles Times writer and tacitly professed ingrate who recently responded to her “Trump” neighbors’ charity with malignity. Heffernan expressed confusion at how such people could be so helpful, apparently ignorant of how even studies show that conservatives are in fact far nicer than liberals.
The New York Post reports on the story:
The Brooklyn-born writer, also a cultural columnist at Wired, wrote on Friday that her neighbors, “who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.”
“How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?” the 51-year-old wrote.
“Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?”She added: “This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.”
Heffernan went on to spark a backlash with her comments about Hezbollah, “the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, which also gives things away for free.”
“The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities Tyre and Sidon probably don’t involve snowplows, but, like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own — the Shiite sick, elderly and hungry,” she wrote.
“They offer protection and hospitality and win loyalty that way. And they also demand devotion to their brutal, us-versus-them anti-Sunni cause. Some of us are family, the favors say; the rest are infidels.”
Most troubling is that Heffernan is likely sincere, as she lives in a small, shallow, insular world in which everything is a political calculation and altruism is alien. When she says that back in the city such charity isn’t delivered, this isn’t entirely true; I’ve seen it happen, and I and a friend helped dig out a man’s snowbound car without payment when I was 13. But it does less frequently happen in the city, a place dominated by leftists. Might there be a connection there?
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Journalist Byron York tweeted about the Heffernan haughtiness (below).
Despite her wariness, however, Heffernan did deign to offer her neighbors the following:
So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the [Sen. Ben] Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.
I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.
But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.
It’s nice of Heffernan to be so magnanimous as to present the hoi-polloi the get-out-of-jail-(almost)free card of absorption into the collective. But she shouldn’t be befuddled about her Trump neighbors’ charity because you shouldn’t “listen to the liberals,” wrote Peter Schweizer in 2008 — “Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows.”
As I reported in 2017, the studies Schweizer cited found that relative to conservatives, liberals are:
• far less likely to believe they have an obligation to care for a seriously ill spouse or parent;
• far less likely to believe you derive happiness by putting another’s happiness before your own;
• far less likely to believe getting married is important;
• far less likely to believe having children is important;
• nearly twice as likely to say parents shouldn’t sacrifice their own well-being for their children’s;
• less likely to hug their children;
• “more likely to rate ‘high income’ as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say ‘after good health, money is the most important thing,’ and agree with the statement ‘there are no right or wrong ways to make money,’” as Schweizer writes;
• less likely to donate money or devote time to charity, and, when they do, they more often support a political cause than help the needy; and
• are more envious.
Yet there are two reasons Heffernan won’t accept the above. One concerns what others would think of her, the other what she’d think of herself.
Saying something unreservedly nice about conservatives in pseudo-elite circles can get you circled — then canceled. Just ask former Obama “green czar” and Trump critic Van Jones, who was recently pilloried on The View for giving Trump credit for his work with the black community. Even being a self-professed “communist” didn’t help him. So Heffernan can only preserve her power by stepping on the weak.
Yet she also must preserve her self-image. Since she’s fond of Nazi comparisons, note that our leftists are like the National Socialists in that they seek elite-group status — the feeling of being better.
It’s reassuring and works wonders for self-worth: No matter how insecure, lacking, unaccomplished, and unimpressive you are (you can even be a frumpy, mediocre writer working at a fake-news paper), at least you’re not like the group on which you look down. You’re part of an elite.
Except that in today’s pseudo-egalitarian, woke world, there aren’t many groups you can look down upon without becoming a pariah. In fact, white conservatives may be the only one.
They’ll remain that, too, because leftists are emotionally dependent on their unjustifiable sense of superiority. Relinquishing it would collapse their whole world.
But, Heffernan, know that the explanation for your neighbors’ charity is quite simple:
They’re better than you are.
