And a great column. Go and read now.
UPDATE: I didn't want to excerpt because it's all so good, but one section is so great I must:
Liberals have been slow to grasp the mainstream reaction to the no-values culture, chalking it up to Karl Rove, sinister fundamentalists, racism, or the stupidity of the American voter. Since November 2, the withering contempt of liberals for ordinary Americans has been astonishing. Voting for Bush gave "quite average Americans a chance to feel superior," said Andrew Hacker, a prominent liberal professor at Queens College. We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow. Liberals might one day conclude that while most Americans value autonomy, they do not want a procedural republic in which patriotism, religion, socialization, and traditional values are politically declared out of bounds. Many Americans notice that liberalism nowadays lacks a vocabulary of right and wrong, declines to discuss virtue except in snickering terms, and seems increasingly hostile to prevailing moral sentiment.
This is my big beef with the left these days: if you can't sell copiers, or houses, or your band's CDs, you can't blame your failure to close on the stupidity of your prospective customers without being labeled a whiny loser. But it's mainstream liberal thought these days that the American people are too dumb to know what's best for them and the rest of the world. How can anyone stand to be associated with such disgusting, self-deluding hatred for their fellow man and woman?
I think more and more once-proud liberals will leave the sinking ship, as many of the truest, smartest liberals I know have. When only the fringe dwellers remain, the Democratic Party will just fade away. Again, good riddance.
2 comments:
I don't get it,
Liberalism is part of America and part of what has made it great. I can't imagine America without the new deal, without unions giving "perks" like weekends, without social security feeding millions of retires, without at least trying for social justice for people who aren't white.
Democrats standing for these things aren't stupid, aren't elitest, and the fact that they were only 48% of the vote last time round shouldn't mean that traditional American values of caring for the old (and I think that caring for the old is also an old time conservative value) should be blown away.
How can you label 48% of America elitest? Because you don't agree with them?
I think Americans are great - even the ones whom I didn't like the vote of, The post you link to is written to try and start a fight. America is already fighting one war, and even if I disagree with that, I think we can all agree it doesn't need another civil war on top of that.
fringy
This is just one of many similar columns, most of them by left liberals themselves (see the Martin Peretz piece here). And I appreciate what Democrats have done in the past, but I don't think that gives them a pass today. They have been wrong about too much, and obstructed too much of the good Republicans are doing and trying to do, to be taken seriously. And it's getting worse.
Howard Dean, the new DNC Chair, just called liberals good and conservatives evil a day or two ago. Not long before that, he said he "hated republicans and everything they stand for." This kind of thing seems far more damaging to democrats than any of the columns recently written, again mostly by lefties, that decry the lack of ideas and unwillingness to compromise in order to actually get some good things done that so many on the left have come to embody.
I am as sick about this as anyone, and I don't mean to come off like I get a thrill from the miserable death of the American liberal. Ask my brother how he feels about his party leaving him and most other true-blue Democrats, not the other way around. It's heartbreaking for people like my brother to see what's happened to their party, I'm sure, and it's the fault of the party leadership. Dean is not a serious person, or a serious candidate. Whoever is driving the Democratic Party bus doesn't get that Dean is part of the problem, not the solution. They don't get that he would have gotten his ass kicked by Bush by a much larger margin than Kerry did. And they don't have anyone who can win in 2008.
The funny part of all this is that the self-image liberals have is that they don't see the world in black and white, and they know how to compromise, and they will work together with ideological opponents to get good things done. Nothing could be further from the truth; those are qualities that only Republicans bother with any more. Isn't that ironic?
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