So. What is your opinion of this phrase? Personally, I think it is used incorrectly and hypocritically a lot of the time. A person will say "You need to be more open-minded" or "I am very open-minded" on the assumption that 'Open Minded' is the same as 'Liberal' or 'Progressive'. But that isn't close to what it means, and most people who think this way are ironically very close-minded, not caring to even bother refuting the 'ignorant' and 'backwards' opponent, because they are so sure of their argument's merit. This really grinds my gears. Now, not picking on Liberals here. Just as many other people are stupid and can't have a proper debate. The reason I chose Liberals is that they are almost always the ones claiming to be 'open minded', even if they are the opposite, and then those close-minded Liberals will dismiss any conservative (or even another Liberal) response because it is 'close-minded', which I have come to see as code for 'doesn't match my opinions'.
I think the term gets misunderstood as "having no opinion" and many who claim to be open minded enjoy slamming those who have opinions. My definition is that while you may still have an opinion, you try to see other's perspective instead of just saying they are wrong and that's it.
I don't think it has much to do with liberals directly, but younger people statistically tend to be more liberal and in recent times the idea of open-mindedness where relevant to actual progressive politics has been used to advocate for more culturally aware and politically correct points of view. This has more to do with the baggage that "liberals" and "conservatives" tend to carry along with the direct meaning of those titles, and less to do with what it literally means to be a liberal or a conservative. Beyond those semantics, I agree with the OP to a point, but I also think that it can sometimes be a sign of close-mindedness to assume that another person is not open-minded simply because they have not expressed the fact that they are open-minded. As of that point in any conversation, their open-mindedness or lack thereof is an unknown. Some people give deep consideration to the possibility that they're wrong while simultaneously expressing their beliefs or arguments with great confidence simply for the purpose of communicating efficiently. This sort of exchange leads to two people sitting together getting nowhere in their discussion, where each think the other is close-minded, and is the result - in part - of poor communication. TL;DR - People read into this stuff too much.
I think you misunderstood. You are right that it is not directly related to being Liberal, it just correlates. But I'm not assuming anyone's not open minded because they didn't say so. My complaint is that a lot of people DO claim to be open minded, when they are not, simply because they are under the impression that their viewpoint is 'the one open minded people have'. Especially in political topics, these people are almost always on the Liberal side. Finally, forgive me if I'm not willing to believe that these people are 'secretly open minded'. I have talked with many of them, and what all of them do is spout the same argument(s) over and over regardless of whether it's been refuted, and ignore or refuse to refute any argument made against their point, because they believe the reason you disagree with them is that you 'are not open minded enough', and that is grounds to believe you are automatically wrong no matter what you say because everything you say is 'close minded bull ****". If these people have some sort of internal struggle, they are damn good at bluffing. I can't understand why a person would keep making a bad argument in favor of a position they weren't sure of, though.
Conservatives tend to be idiots. Liberals can be informed idiots. Be a person with a brain rather than a political ideology. That's about it.
It is usually much more likely that two people do not understand one another than that one of them is an idiot. Also, I didn't mean to say that what I was describing regarding assumptions of close-mindedness was the case with your encounters, just that it happens a lot in general. I wasn't intent on projecting that fact onto your claim.
Well, perhaps it is a misunderstanding more often than I or most people believe it is, but I still think that the misunderstanding is caused by one person communicating poorly and not really listening to what the other person is saying, which is nearly impossible to distinguish from someone who's actually an idiot. So there's no way to actually know.
