Posted on 05/04/2003 7:23:52 AM PDT by harpu
If Liberalism is Such a Dead Horse, Why Beat It?!?
No one in American public life has become so much a pariah, so ready a punching bag, as the liberal. He can trace his lineage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, no less) and Thomas Jefferson all he wants. He's still a lib-ril, and for that reason hounded from elective office, hammered on talk radio and -- as if injury needed insult -- hung out to dry in bestselling books.
The titles and subtitles of these volumes betray more than an adversarial point of view. They drip with bile.
A sampling: Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.
Liberalism's crowning achievement was the New Deal and its last hurrah the Great Society. But those were decades ago, when the Democratic Party's liberalism reflected the values and hopes of most Americans.
In the years since, it has drifted -- sometimes willfully -- ever farther from the American middle class. It has become easy sport for barrel-chested pundits to take careful aim at the barn door and knock off for the day.
To be a liberal in America today, you might think, is not to be an American at all. As one conservative has written, there are Americans and there are liberals. Which is to say: If you are American -- a real American -- then, by definition, you are conservative.
Look around: How many political candidates advertise themselves as liberals? You don't have to go looking for conservatives. Why, then, the need for so many cobbled-together indictments of a political philosophy whose adherents have all died off or gone underground?
One answer is that these books provide conservatives with a bracing tonic. They validate their resentments. In truth, liberals have had some of this coming. Democracy, H.L. Mencken said, was the theory of government based on the notion that the people know what's best for them, and they deserve to get it good and hard.
But it's one thing to beat an opponent when he's down and another to keep at it when he's gone into rigor mortis. It would serve conservatism better if some of these bestselling authors -- no one would call them writers -- trafficked more in ideas and less in impulses.
No impulse is so pervasive in these books as deep-seated contempt.
"Let me say this before I go any further," writes Sean Hannity, the author of Let Freedom Ring and a Fox Television talk-show host. "My quarrel with liberals and liberalism is not personal. Just because I think liberals are wrong on the issue doesn't mean I don't like them."
Believe it if you wish. To my ear, it's disingenuous.
I am not a regular viewer of Hannity & Colmes, but I happen to find Hannity -- the conservative half of the show -- right on many of the issues, and yet he seldom offers arguments or reasons. He doesn't have to. His viewers don't demand them. If this does liberalism a disservice, it does conservatism one as well.
Conservatism, every bit as much as liberalism, is heir to a rich and varied intellectual tradition, from Edmund Burke, John Adams and T.S. Eliot to William F. Buckley Jr., George Will and The Weekly Standard's choir of wits and polemicists. Give credit where credit is due: These are provocative thinkers and stylish writers.
Theirs is a conservatism of temperament, public policy and intellect. Politically and culturally, it rests on a bedrock of ideas, some in uneasy accommodation with others. Buckley is only the intellectual cousin, not the twin, of William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; and neither is interchangeable with, say, political scientist James Q. Wilson, Danielle Crittenden or a dozen others.
Almost 10 years ago, before the Standard was even founded, Kristol wrote incisively of the predicament in which contemporary liberalism found itself: "[I]f, once upon a time, conservatives felt a Burkean responsibility to uphold sound social habits and traditional customs against liberal debunking, now it is liberalism that constitutes the old order, dictating 'correct' habits and permissible customs, while conservatives can become the exponents of light and air, of free and open debate, of demystification and even of political and intellectual liberation."
This is a point of view refined by ideas.
But it is not, by and large, what many Americans imply when they call themselves "conservative."
Theirs is the rotgut distillation, rough around the edges, concocted for imbibing today. Packaged between book covers, it is often accompanied by a picture of the author -- a giveaway that the contents are boilerplate.
Thus, on the cover of Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, a honey-blond Ann Coulter sits in a pose of imperial ease, like a lioness on one of those TV documentaries about the Serengeti Plain.
"Political 'debate' in this country," she writes on her opening page, "is insufferable. Whether conducted in Congress, on the political talk shows, or played out at dinners and cocktail parties, politics is a nasty sport. At the risk of giving away the ending: It's all liberals' fault. As there is less to dispute, liberals become more bitter and angry."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an unpromising start if one comes to the book expecting a joust of minds.
The literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the early '50s, declared the tug of war between liberals and conservatives all but over. "In the United States at this time," he said, "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition."
The opposite could almost be asserted today: Conservatism is ascendant, liberalism moribund.
Labels obscure more than they disclose, and political labels are of billboard proportion. Most Americans, by now, understand that what is a conservative today was a liberal yesterday. Freedom of the individual today is an article of faith in the conservative catechism.
Even so, details of taxonomy matter less than what ordinary people believe from one generation to the next. The year after Bill Clinton was elected president, Kristol wrote: "Contemporary liberalism … has not captured the hearts and minds of the American people. Indeed, its resort to the machinery of political correctness -- the attempt to impose sanctions on views contrary to liberal dogma -- has been driven in part by just this failure to capture those hearts and minds."
It required only liberalism's self-mutilation from the '60s through the '80s for a majority of Americans to realize what they were not. They might be Democrats or they might be Republicans, but they were not liberals.
And they realized something else: The conservatives so smugly caricatured by academics and much of the mainstream media were not werewolves after all. They were people like themselves, wanting nothing more than a future for their children, schools they could respect, neighborhoods where you could walk the streets without looking over your shoulder, and an affirmation of values that liberals sneered at. They realized they were conservative, if not by conviction then by default.
If some have traded civility for braying boorishness -- and they assuredly have -- they've effected an unflattering reverse image. The same contempt and hubris that did liberals grave harm now is reflected back at them.
With the tables turned, conservatives of a certain stripe are proving themselves as capable of ignorance as anyone in the faculty lounge.
townhall.com
The Censorship Conspiracy?
David Limbaugh (back to web version)
May 3, 2003
Call me paranoid, but I smell a growing move afoot among the declining liberal media oligopoly to push for government intervention to rescue them from their waning influence. They are merely laying the foundation now, but I suspect more will follow in the relatively near future.
Only close-minded liberals would deny that liberals enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the major media, say, from the sixties until fairly recently. But they have watched it slip away since the advent of conservative talk radio, the Internet and now Fox News, and they're beginning to panic.
They dominated (and still do) the editorial boards of most of the nation's influential daily newspapers. They controlled (and still do) the three major television networks, including their news departments and anchors. Check the voluminous data provided at mediaresearch.org under "Media Bias Basics." No space here to set it all out, but the objective evidence is powerful and unarguable.
Their bias is palpable, permeating their news selection and content so seamlessly they might not even realize it's there. Indeed the eeriest revelation of Bernard Goldberg's Bias <read review> was the elite media's obliviousness to their bias. They don't see their liberalism as bias, but objectivity. To them the only ones guilty of bias are those who deviate from their objective norm, namely conservatives. (By the way, how can people so devoid of self-criticism operate as watchdogs over anything, much less themselves?)
The media elite are not used to competition. Liberal politicians, pre-Rush, were not used to much media accountability. But all that has changed. The jig is up, and they don't like it. (Remember Bill Clinton's pathetic complaint from the bowels of Air Force One that it was unfair there was no "truth detector" to compete with Rush Limbaugh's three hours a day? Transparency didn't suit him too well.)
Rush started and continues to power an avalanche. Strong Conservative voices, like Sean Hannity, are emerging all over -- and they're succeeding in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, liberals have made excuses for their failures. Their first one was that talk show audiences consist of angry white guys and liberals just don't fit that description. Actually they do, but that's beside the point. In fact, Rush's listeners and those of many other conservative hosts are intelligent, informed and of good cheer.
Their next excuse is more serious. They say there is institutional resistance to liberal expression. Here they pull out all the tired cliches. Big business conservatives, they say, control talk radio and TV, and are blocking liberals from entry. That is absurd. No one has kept liberals off the talk show airwaves or cable TV shows. No one, that is, except an unreceptive public.
Even admitting, for discussion's sake, that Fox News is conservative, so what? Roger Ailes can't force you to watch Fox over the other cable networks. Yes, Fox provides a refreshing alternative to the monolithic viewpoint previously inhabiting the networks and cable, but there are no barriers to entry. People are voting with their remote controls.
But liberal whining is increasing and on multiple fronts. A coincidence? Possibly, but regardless, it's gathering steam and will soon demand action. Just consider:
The bottom line is that liberals are not going to take this whipping lying down. They will try to invoke the power of the state to rectify the "injustice" of their drubbing in the marketplace; it's just a matter of time. When they do they'll have some euphemistic excuse to conceal their assault on free speech. They'll say controls are necessary to protect the public interest, or to muzzle hate speech, or something equally lame. Mark my words. And be prepared.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Contact David Limbaugh | Read his biography
townhall.com
I like them both so don't give me any gas.
Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot, by liberal Al Franken.
Stupid White Men, by liberal troglodyte Michael Moore.
Not exactly The Berenstain Bears. Looks like "bile" isn't exclusive to the Right.
And then there are the famous quotes: Alec Baldwin saying he should shoot Henry Hyde and his family; Spike Lee and his .44 Magnum wet dream, etc.. The Left's treatment of Linda Tripp and Ken Starr were models of refined restraint.
The Left daily oozes a river of bile.
Socialists turn to the government to implement their ideas by force rather then seeking the consent of the governed because they are so arrogant that they are right, hence justified in imposing their will on the unwilling.
It's the same attitude seen in the reation to their views in the 2002 election and the anti-war rallies. Their failure must have been that their message just didn't get out, not that people rejected their message. There was no talk of assessing their message, much less changing it.
Because it deserves it? It hasn't yet been sufficiently punished for it's crimes, which are ongoing in any event.
And there are still multitudes of parasites out there who will glady flock to the polling places (or get rousted out of bed at noon and bussed to the polling places) and vote for Democrat candidates with their promises of "free stuff" who will confiscate more and more money.... from their neighbors. And there will always be plenty of Democrat whores who will do exactly that in order to buy themselves their nice offices and all the perks of power that go with it. Screw Skube and his obituary for liberalsim. As long as it has a pulse we must keep out foot on its throat.
There's a long list of things for which they can and should be held accountable.
Oh, we're prepared all right. Rather than let power slip entirely away, the resposne of the Left will be desperate, stupid and brutal in the extreme. Bring it on.
It needs to have a stake driven through it's heart....it's head cut off...and it's mouth stuffed with garlic.
"The liberal horse is a long way from dead. You'll know it's dead when a Pulitzer Prize winner submits a piece this incompetent, this smarmy, to a major American newspaper, and the editor turns it down."
That's the same thought I had when readin the article. Liberalism is like a bacterial infection in that if not completely eradicated, it will just come back in a more viulent form.
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