Posted on 05/07/2004 2:58:54 AM PDT by maryz
These days, conservatives and liberals seem to find it hard not only to get along, but even to comprehend one another. What liberals don’t understand about conservatives would fill several years’ worth of this magazine, and has. The chief thing conservatives don’t understand about contemporary liberals is why they hate President Bush. Conservatives see him as a decent, moderately conservative, and not-especially-partisan figure. They can’t understand why he arouses such strong dislike. What follows is an attempt neither to excuse nor to damn the Bush haters, but to understand them.
Some of the reasons for their animosity are quite obvious. We conservatives may think that Bush won the last presidential election fair and square, and find most of the Democrats’ complaints about Florida foolish. Bush foolish grievances can also be understandable ones. An election that close, with so many disputes in its aftermath, is going to lead to hard feelings.
The country’s cultural divisions, and the way they underlie our political ones, account for another large chunk of the hostility. Much as President Clinton became a symbol to conservatives of everything they detested about “the Sixties,” so has Bush become the symbol of what liberals dislike about modern America. They see in him the narrow-mindedness they associate with the Bible Belt and the boardroom.
Related to this is the tendency of liberals to regard liberalism as the natural home of intelligent and sophisticated people. This self-image, which seems to be quite important to them, is rooted in primordial memories of ancient quarrels between the party of reason and the party of tradition. Bush never defers to this liberal self-image. He has made it pretty clear that he, unlike some previous Republican leaders, does not care what the editors of the New York Times think about anything.
Even the hostility directed at Bush because of the Iraq war may be largely a function of the culture wars. Surely part of the reason that this war and the Kosovo war were greeted so differently by liberals (and conservatives) is that the latter was seen as a blue-state war and the former is seen as a red-state one. Much of the public debate seems to be turning on people’s attitudes toward Europe, American exceptionalism, and other value-laden topics.
These liberal tendencies reinforce one another. Florida, for example, changed Bush’s alleged stupidity from a source of disdain to one of anger. Subsequent events have made things worse. To be opposed by a fool is one thing; to be bested by him, repeatedly, is far more galling.
Which brings us to what may be the deepest cause of the Democrats’ current mood: their dispossession. They do not run the White House, or the Senate, or the House, or a majority of the governor’ mansions, or a majority of state legislatures. Republicans do not like being out of power any more than Democrats do. But Republicans are used to it. Three times in the last 40 years, Republicans have been shut out of national power: 1960-68, 17680, and 1993-94. Democrats, on the other hand, have not had so little power since the 1920s. No so long ago, the House was their family heirloom. By 1995, they had held it for 60 of the previous 64 years. For Tom Daschle, being shut out of power must feel something like losing a birthright. For Al Gore, it may feel exactly like that.
The change in the media has been at least equally disturbing. Once upon a time, liberals could count on the media to broadcast what liberals saw as the truth. What the truth was did not depend on where you turned the dial. then came Rush Limbaugh and, still worse, Fox News. It is impossible to overestimate how big Fox News has become in the liberal bestiary. Liberals talk about it as though Brit Hume were our answer to TomBrokaw, when he is really, in terms of viewership, our answer to Judy Woodruff. For liberals, the other networks provide the truth and Fox spews propaganda. It outrages them that it is treated as a legitimate news outlet on a par with the others. “Non-stories,” such as the politically embarrassing portions of John Kerry’s Senate testimony in 1971, can now get pushed into the news. First some conservative website makes it an issue, then Fox gives it coverage, and then Democrats are forced to spend time talking about it on real news shows like Meet the Press. The world has turned upside down.
And the millennium had such promise! In the late 1990s, liberals began again to feel, for the first time in decades, that history was on their side. President Clinton was popular, and the public had met the Lewinsky scandal with a shrug of indifference. True, liberalism had been somewhat chastened by the failures of the 1970s and 1980s. But it was marching on. In 2000, a larger percentage of voters chose a left-of-center presidential candidate than in any election since 1964. Liberals had their best Senate election since at least 1986. And there was a huge surplus in Washington, just waiting to be invested in the liberal program.
Now the surplus is gone, and there is a chance that George W. Bush will inaugurate a lasting Republican ascendancy. Horrible as it is to be shut out now, liberals must face the positively terrifying prospect of being shut out for a long time to come.
It all seems so terribly unfair. Someone must be to blame. Liberals quickly came up with an explanation: Conservatives cheated. They go their buddies on the Supreme Court to install Bush as president. They exploited the war on terrorism. They smeared the patriot Max Cleland. They undid the election of Gov. Gray Davis in California. They started that sinister television channel. Daschle and the rest were just too nice to fight back in kind.
When liberals began planning to start a radio talk-show network of their own, conservatives jeered that they already had NPR. But the conservatives missed something important. The pretense to objectivity of an NPR may seem laughably or infuriatingly false to us conservatives. But that pretense imposes real constraints on the media. The liberalism has to be kept implicit. Dan Rather may be more effective than, say, Michael Moore in getting Americans without deep political convictions to absorb liberalism. But for the very reason he is more effective, he is less emotionally satisfying to liberals. Conservative media figures have mostly felt free to say what they really think, especially about the other side. Respectability in the wider media culture was not an option. Now liberals feel beleaguered, and they want a Limbaugh of their own.
Note that what liberals are doing here is not simply moving left. The Democrats have moved left on some issues, notably trade. But what chiefly distinguishes the Al Franken Democrats from their predecessors is not their leftism. Franken himself seems actually to be a free-trading, budget-balancing New Democrat, his policy views boringly Clintonian. He is just a bit nutty about the Right. You could see the outlines of this Democratic party forming in Gore’s 2000 campaign. His “populism” often seemed to consist of screaming at the top of his lungs about wanting a slightly different version of the patient’s bill of rights from the one Bush was proposing.
Perhaps it will work better for Kerry. But an escape hatch is already being prepared in case it doesn’t. Kerry has already invoked “the Bush attack machine.” If Kerry loses, expect liberals to spend years saying that the 2004 election was unfair.
Right! You'd think he'd have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, where it belongs, and not risk offending liberals' delicate sensibilities!
"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first."
John 15:18
I will email this to the libs I work with and start their weekend on the RIGHT foot!
Better simplify some of the big words, first. :-)
I think this just about sums it up. The loony left allowed themselves to be tricked into believing that Dubya is a "fool" and can NOT comprehend that this "fool" slaps them down at every opportunity!
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