"The average liberal cannot enunciate what they believe in..."

They can't, and that's why they are so vicious in their attacks against the opposition. They try to clarify their positions and support their reasons for holding them, but when they actually look for the language that would explain it, they only come up with, "This is right because I believe it, I believe it because I'm good, I believe it because it's good, therefore it's right, I'm right, my beliefs are right, my beliefs are good, believing good beliefs is good, and you're a genocidal, racist, sexist, xenophobic Nazi."

A better way to TRY talking to them is to ask them for their second-degree thinking, which will be utterly new to them. Don't give them a lecture, just use Thomas Sowell's phrase, "And then what will happen?"

I offer an example. My father quoted me this from a conversation with his (college age) stepdaughter about welfare and her ideas about how many people should be on it. She stated that it wouldn't bother her if half the population lived on welfare. A few deft qustions from my dad told him she had never thought through where those welfare dollars came from. She "knew" that taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor was a good thing, and that doing so was going to allow a hundred million people not to have to work.

She had never thought about how the government mistreats the dollars it seizes, passing it though the hands of unproductive offices, bureaus, and government workers who only shuffle papers around for their living, until that one hundred cents has turned into twenty-eight cents. She had never seen how the pittance that is paid to welfare recipients is so puny that people cannot prosper because of it and are essentially forced either to stay in a world of poverty or are forced to get off the roles and get a job. In spite of this, she "knew" that efforts under Reagan to push people off welfare were evil.

She had never once thought about productivity, and how America's being the most productive country in the world was what made us the country with the higher standard of living in the world, and how if the average amount of productivity were cut almost in half, that our standard of living would crash through the floor, and take these welfare recipients along with it.

And because she has never thought about any of these things, she is a liberal, and "knows" only that taking from the evil rich and giving to the pathetic, helpless, pitiful, incompetent poor is a good thing.

People like this need to learn to think. I'm not worried about their learning to think well; for now, they just need to think at all.