[Billthedrill]

Hanson has hit on several aspects of a single theme, and for me it is best described by just how tribal politics has become for the left. I think this is traceable directly to the advent of the "new" left during the early 70's and extensive and deliberate efforts made by its leaders to romanticize its stodgy Stalinist precepts and glorify anti-Americanism as a hallmark of independent political thought. Those became tribal totems, clung to long beyond any resemblance to reality - tenuous from the beginning - had long dropped away.

It is in this tribal context that all the factors Hanson describes here come into play. Bush isn't, in my view, a particularly proselytizing Christian, but to some apparently sincere Bush-haters he's Torquemada reincarnated. He isn't, actually, a particularly doctrinaire conservative (read FR for any 24-hour period for proof) but to his detractors he's Cotton Mather reincarnated. He is a far cry from the economic innovator that Reagan became but is portrayed as Mazarin all over again, intent on enriching a shadowy clique of insiders. All of these points are so fantastically exaggerated that one must wonder if their proponents aren't believing their own propaganda, and I submit that the latter is precisely the case - Michael Moore and his acolytes are a perfect example of this.

In short, they hate Bush because he is, in nearly every respect, not One Of Us. Clinton certainly was; his wife, She Who Is Not To Be Named, is as well. What we are talking about here isn't, in their obvious cases, any Eastern seaboard blue-blooded family-connect nonsense, but a total dedication to the ideals propounded by the left in the 70's. It is that class that finds itself in the critical position of taking power now or fading, through age, to impotent rage as the next generation of idealists comes along.

[Tolik]

It is hilarious that one of the secrets why Clinton was more or less accepted by the middle America is his running to the middle. It may have not been sincere on his part at times, but he made a clear attempt to move to the center. His use of Dick Morris triangulation tactics helped that. We had enough of good reasons not to like him, but, honestly, very many less political Americans accepted him as somebody left of the center, but not too far. To contract this, in the last few years the Democratic party made another big step to the left. Dean and Michael Moore are two big proofs of that. There is only one reason why it is not the subject of wide debate in the country: media continuously redefines the middle in its own image: the middle is where the media's middle is, which is quite to the left of where it actually is. Many moderate conservatives became by definition the right wing, and truly right wing moved behind the horizon.

It is an axiom of politics that the wings of parties are more active politically than the remaining mass. Everybody knows that and usually discount the more activist speeches and actions. But now, because of the left shift, the activist left became much more mainstream left and brought with it its extremists' habits, like not just disliking the opponent, but actually hating him. This is an attitude that mainstream figures thought of as a bad taste to display, but now it suddenly became not just acceptable, but even fashionable.