Dan Greenfield unloads on the very same people with this superb essay:

The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

American liberalism has traveled a slightly altered road to get to the same place. But its place is still at the top and everyone else’s place is still at the bottom. Its persistent denial of this basic truth leads to the perennial absurdity of millionaires like Elizabeth Warren playing class warrior when the only class they represent is the class of people who work for the government.

The oligarchy which is busy bleeding the country dry does not represent any group of working people anywhere in the country. Not Protestant or Catholic, black or white, or of any other creed or identity. Like every ideology incarnated in a system, it represents its own interests. The Democratic Party is the government party. It exists to create jobs in government, to dispense government subsidies and to expand the power and scope of its organization. It is not fundamentally any different than Putin’s United Russia or Israel’s Kadima or similar political creatures around the world.

The strange intermarriage of New England moralists, New York merchants and European radicals eventually led to a system of pushing immigrants into government service, mandating tolerance and running every aspect of human life through Washington D.C. It took a while to get there, but the system is a decade or two away from being complete. When it is complete then all our lives will be run in every possible way by the Elizabeth Warrens who will smile condescendingly at us, nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go, and when we don’t go there, then the fines and the tasers come out.

No matter how far back you go, the roots of American liberalism lie in a fear of the people, a distrust of the great unwashed. American liberals have championed voting rights, so long as they were confident that those voting were their inferiors and could be herded into voting the right way. They have always distrusted the instincts of the public, no matter how much pious ink they spilled fighting on their behalf.

That view of man’s sinful nature still informs their deepest thinkers, and the sins are still the same, the failure of fellowship, the refusal to consider the welfare of others and march in lockstep to create that ideal society. The New Jerusalem of universal brotherhood. Those ideas have been dressed up in modern clothing, transmitted as denunciations of racism and bigotry, immigration advocacy and hate crime laws, but underneath is the same notion that a society of good will to all can be forced through rigorous regimentation by the truly enlightened.

The populism of the American liberal is a cynical dumbshow where representatives of the oppressed gather in conclaves to demand more oppression by their liberal oppressors. This spectacle is at the heart of a political oligarchy, which like every oligarchy is built on government subsidies and special access to power for the privileged. And like all oligarchies it must disguise its nature by playing the protector of the people. Unlike them it must also disguise its true nature from itself.

The convergence of the ideal society and the government society was inevitable from the start. It took a while to overcome the technological and cultural barriers to running an entire country from a central point. Those barriers have never been truly overcome, but the technocratic mirage makes it seem as if they have been. And the ongoing faith in a perfectible society run by the saints makes it seem as if it must be.

The American liberal would still like to play at being humble, a 99 percenter fighting against the chimera of a 1 percent oligarchy. But the entire 99 percent theme is that the 1 percent isn’t paying enough taxes. And whom do those taxes go to but to the administration and employment of the professional class warrior millionaires.

It is the very Everest of hypocrisy for the members of the oligarchy to be bemoaning all the extra tax money that could be used to pay their six figure salaries, while passing off their naked greed as a crusade on behalf of the oppressed.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Stephen G. Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa, in the Atlantic, describes with wonder and deep contempt the bizarre and backward culture of the state in which he disapprovingly resides.

Whether a schizophrenic, economically-depressed, and some say, culturally-challenged state like Iowa should host the first grassroots referendum to determine who will be the next president isn’t at issue. It’s been this way since 1972, and there are no signs that it’s going to change. In a perfect world, no way would Iowa ever be considered representative of America, or even a small part of it. Iowa’s not representative of much. There are few minorities, no sizable cities, and the state’s about to lose one of its five seats in the U.S. House because its population is shifting; any growth is negligible. Still, thanks to a host of nonsensical political precedents, whoever wins the Iowa Caucuses in January will very likely have a 50 percent chance of being elected president 11 months later. Go figure.

Maybe Ambrose Bierce described it right when he called the U.S. president “the greased pig in the field game of American politics.” For better or worse, Iowa’s the place where that greased pig gets generally gets grabbed first. ...

Iowa is a throwback to yesteryear and, at the same time, a cautionary tale of what lies around the corner.

Which brings up my dog. And here’s why: My dog is a kind of crucible of Iowa.

What does Hannah, a 13-year-old Labrador, have to do with an analysis of the American electoral system and how screwy it is that a place like Iowa gets to choose—before anyone else—the person who may become the next leader of the free world?

For our son’s eighth birthday, we wanted to get him a dog. Every boy needs a dog, my wife and I agreed, and off we went to an Iowa breeding farm to pick out an eight-week-old puppy that, when we knelt to pet her, wouldn’t stop licking us. We chose a yellow Lab because they like kids, have pleasant dispositions, and I was particularly fond of her caramel-color coat. Labs don’t generally bite people, although they do like to chew on shoes, hats, and sofa legs. Hannah was Marley before Marley.

Our son, of course, got tired of Hannah after a couple of months, and to whom did the daily obligation of walking the dog fall?

That’s right. To me.

And here’s the point: I can’t tell you how often over the years I’d be walking Hannah in our neighborhood and someone in a pickup would pull over and shout some variation of the following:

“Bet she hunts well.”

“Do much hunting with the bitch?”

“Where you hunt her?”

To me, it summed up Iowa. You’d never get a dog because you might just want to walk with the dog or to throw a ball for her to fetch. No, that’s not a reason to own a dog in Iowa. You get a dog to track and bag animals that you want to stuff, mount, or eat.

That’s the place that may very well determine the next U.S. president.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Tim Grosseclose.
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A mild rejoinder from the Des Moines Register.
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Iowahawk responds with “Is This Hell? No, It’s Iowa.”

Farhad Manjoo, Cornell ‘00, is Slate’s Technology Columnist, so his take on toy guns, one would expect, ought to be well-informed, sophisticated, appreciative, and realistic.

A technology columnist really ought to be the sort of person who knows all about real guns. Firearms are an extremely important and interesting, downright fundamental, form of technology, after all.

But Farhad Manjoo’s holiday article in Stale this year is rather different from what one might have expected.

Nerf guns (which propel sponge rubber tipped plastic darts) frighten Manjoo and send him into a tizzy of anxiety. He describes the Nerf Barricade as “one of the most powerful toy weapons ever built, capable of sending a 3-inch foam dart hurtling 30 feet through the air, and then doing it again and again every half second.”

How does that compare, Mr. Technology Columnist, to the old Daisy Model 25 pump action BB-gun, my generation’s idea of a toy gun, which fired a copper-plated .177” diameter BB at a velocity ranging from 375-450 fps (fast enough to break glass) from a tubular magazine as rapidly as you could pump the slide?

Shooting one’s friends in the face was regarded as verboten (you might put out an eye), but BB gun wars did regularly occur. The impact of a BB on human flesh stung smartly, even through clothing, and characteristically left a mark. It was a common form of deterrence to shoot oneself in the hand without flinching and then display the bruise. One’s interlocutor was thereby given to understand that you were not afraid of being shot with a BB gun, and was significantly less inclined to initiate hostilities.

Older generations of American boys additionally commonly played with home-made slingshots, a leather pad attached to two lengths of rubber strips cut from a discarded inner tube then affixed to a Y-forked branch. A good slingshot could propel much larger projectiles like marbles, ball bearings, or suitable rocks with good accuracy at very effectively damaging velocities.

We were bloodthirsty hunters in my boyhood, and we used to, I regret to say, kill the occasional incautious songbird with those BB guns. More becomingly, we also sometimes successfully nailed a rat found skulking in the open around the dump with our slingshots. (BBs just bounced off rats.) Try taking any variety of game with a Nerf gun.

But, it isn’t really the ballistic capabilities of the Nerf gun arsenal that sent Mr. Manjoo into a tailspin. It is, of course, the ethical considerations.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood.

One feels bound to question the expertise and judgment of the technology expert who would describe the above Nerf Barricade as “ultrarealistic.” So few real firearms are made of yellow plastic, and when Mr. Manjoo expresses awed respect for a toy gun’s ability to propel a harmless foam rubber dart 30’, he seems to have lost completely any sense of proportion and relative capability between the real weapon and the toy.

Someone who finds a harmless toy “scary” is, by my standards, an incredible wimp. And the kind of people who have all these hyper-sensitivities and moral issues over boys playing at war are prigs and decadents. Our blue state pseudo-intelligentsia resides in a haute bourgeois dreamworld, perfectly safe and far removed from the ugly realities of human conflict and criminal predation, protected by rough men they neither know nor respect, in homogeneous enclaves in which they have created their own Eloi-style culture in which gross moral self-indulgence parallels their conspicuous material well being.

Ace summarizes and talks back to the commentators.

There is a little more to all this, which I think needs to be noted. Obama’s failure doubtless has several causes, but I think his presidency is particularly interesting because Barack Obama is really demonstrating the failure of liberal economic policies publicly and emphatically because he so firmly believes in them.

Barack Obama is a classic product and representative of elite American academic culture. He knows what the consensus of the best people is. He believes in, and in fact personally embodies, that consensus. The American liberal elite comprises the best people with the best educations occupying the top positions in the most prestigious institutions. How could they possibly be mistaken or misinformed about anything?

Barack Obama has done exactly what he was supposed to do, on the basis of the consensus of the best people, and it hasn’t turned the economy around or even resulted in the masses rallying to his cause. No wonder he is depressed and at a loss.

Moe Lane marvels that, after so long a time, the Democrat Party’s New Deal coalition, consisting of “unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals,” is being pronounced dead by the New York Times. The new coalition of the American left is simply writing off the white working class, period.

Whether you agreed with the New Deal program or not, you could always actually define it in terms that were internally self-consistent. Broadly speaking, it was a broad agreement among various groups that America’s most pressing problems could be managed and ameliorated on a broad scale through ‘expert’ and judicious government intervention; and that such intervention dampened the uncertainty and anxiety that might otherwise cause societal panics and economic dislocations. Again: you don’t have to agree with that (I don’t) to recognize that it existed as a coherent policy.

But now that has gone by the wayside, to be replaced with a system that . . . apparently plans to trade support for permanent government dependency programs for minorities, in exchange for legislating the fringe progressive morality of affluent urbanites. Aside from the utter lack of an unifying intellectual or moral framework to such an arrangement, it’s unclear exactly who benefits less from it; while it’s certainly not in minority voters’ long, medium, or short-term interests to become a permanent underclass, it’s not exactly clear that minority voters are even particularly ready to vote for a progressive social policy (as an examination of recent reversals in same-sex marriage movement in California and Maryland will readily attest). But then, that is not really the goal, is it? The goal is to re-elect President Obama—which is something that poor African-American and rich liberal voters both wish to do—and if that is accomplished, then anything else is extra. Which is just as well, because nobody really expects Obama to have much in the way of coat-tails this go-round.

Jim Geraughty, in his Morning Jolt email, responds:

Ah, but look, today’s Democratic party isn’t really about addressing economic opportunity or even dealing with America’s most pressing problems. For starters, many Democrats are not persuaded in the slightest that the annual deficit, accumulating debt, and ticking time bomb of entitlements are pressing problems at all. If Democrats really expected electing Obama would solve problems, they would be angrier with him than we are. No, for most Democrats, their political party is about a cultural identity. That identity is heavily based on not being one of those people—i.e., Republicans or conservatives. As far as I can tell, there are three inviolate principles in the modern Democratic Party:

Any form of consensual sexual behavior is to be accepted—if not celebrated. With that central belief comes the policies of abortion on demand for any woman at any age free, free contraceptives in schools, and gay marriage, and the insistence that Bill Clinton’s lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky didn’t matter because it was about sex. Complaining about explicit sexual content in pop culture reaching an audience that isn’t ready for it—e.g., Tipper Gore in the 1980s—is the sign of the square and the prude. As no less an expert political philosopher than Meghan McCain told us, “the GOP doesn’t understand sex” and has “an unhealthy attitude about sex and desire.” (Republicans are supposedly repressed and sexless, even though they generally have more children.)

America is a deeply racist country, even though you have to look far and wide to find anyone who openly expresses the belief that one race is superior to another. Everybody recoils when Imus says something snide and obnoxious about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team. Racism is never found in the central tenet of affirmative action, that minorities must be judged by a lower standard, or in the until-recently all-white lineup of MSNBC, or in the claims that Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain are Uncle Toms, or in the career of Robert Byrd. The fundamental belief of the Democratic party is that racism remains a serious problem in America today, and that the problem is found entirely in the GOP.

Credentials are to be respected, and any scoffing or skepticism at, say, the Ivy League is a sign of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, jealousy, and insecurity. Those who go there are indeed the best and the brightest; undergraduate and graduate degrees from those schools are key indicators of one’s intelligence, good judgment, and overall character. The success of dropouts Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are strange anomalies, and no serious reevaluation of the higher-education system is needed. As Rush Limbaugh observed, Bill Clinton said he wanted a cabinet that “looked like America” and declared he had achieved it after assembling a group that consisted almost entirely of Ivy League-educated lawyers.

Everything else is negotiable. For a while, it appeared that Democrats were organizing themselves around the principle that almost every dispute with every other nation and group can be resolved through “tough, smart diplomacy.” But now President Obama has started killing foreigners left and right, and not too many Democrats complain at all. Obama even used a drone to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Alwaki, with nary a peep. Don’t get me wrong, Alwaki had it coming, but this is precisely the sort of don’t-bother-me-with-legal-details-I’m-fighting-a-war philosophy that Democrats spent seven years denouncing.

You think the Democratic party cares about wealth? Come on. In their minds, George Soros spending his money to help out his political views is noble, but the Koch Brothers are evil incarnate. Higher taxes are good, but no one will complain if Tim Geithner or Charlie Rangel cut corners on paying them. One might be tempted to argue that the righteousness of unions represent an inviolate principle to Democrats, but in New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo is trimming here and there and living to tell the tale.

No, the party really is about identity politics now—us vs. them. And everybody knows which side they’re on.

James Taranto deconstructs the Occupy protest movement and concludes that the movement’s lack of rational goals and legitimate grievances is symptomatic of the position of the left in general. The left wants attention, the left wants to make a noise, but the left hasn’t actually got anything to say. Taranto asks: “[W]ith the exception of same-sex marriage, can you think of a single new idea that has come out of the left since Lyndon Johnson was president?”

“They paused to scream at the walls of a Citibank branch.”

To our mind, that sentence more than anything we’ve read encapsulates the spirit of Obamaville. It originally appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle story about an incident in which “dozens of college students” invaded a Bank of America Branch, “pitching a tent and chanting ‘shame, shame’ until they were arrested.” (The original Web version of the story is available here.)

What do we want? Uh . . .

On the way to B of A, they paused at Citi to scream at the walls. These are college students, acting like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum. What does that tell you about their critical thinking skills—and about the standards of American higher education? The likes of the New York Times expect us to take such incoherent spasms of rage seriously as a political “movement.” What does that tell us about the standards of the liberal media?

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

An announced visit to New York by former Polish President, and leader of the Solidarity movement, Lech Wałęsa to stand with, and endorse, the Occupy Wall Street protests was slated to be a major coup for the International left. A hero of the anti-Communist labor movement which liberated Poland from the Soviet Empire endorsing OWS would prove, once and for all, that the demonstrations represented a legitimate, mainstream expression of protest, and that they were not simply astroturf, a fraudulent, artificially contrived, and unrepresentative collection of assemblies of bums, bohemians, and gullible students out for a good time, representing nothing in particular and with no rational agenda, arranged by the hard-core radical left to wave the red flag prominently as a form of agitation at a time in which the left’s grip on political power can be perceived imminently to be slipping away.

Matt Yglesias, in fact, was quick to have a go at hiding the commies behind the anti-Communist hero Wałęsa in his apologia for Occupy Wall Street in The New Republic.

The notion that Occupy Wall Street is a fundamentally radical anti-capitalist movement is completely without foundation. Not only is it odd for TNR to take a harder anti-communist line than, say, Lech Walesa, but this view misunderstands the basic nature of a fluid and rapidly growing movement. The participation of some radicals in the initial organization of the Zuccotti Park protest shouldn’t distract from the fact that the movement has grown by attracting a diverse set of adherents united primarily by an appropriate sense of grievance.

“See?” says Yglesias, “If Lech Wałęsa is willing to stand with them, those protestors cannot possibly be anti-capitalist radicals, agitating for a Marxist revolution.”

But, sorry, Matt, what the American left failed to reckon with, when it tried pulling journalistic strings in Europe to secure a visit and endorsement from Wałęsa is the fact that a significant Polish community exists in the United States, particularly in Chicago, and educated, articulate, and responsible Poles live here, who have family, academic, and political ties to their Fatherland. Ethnic communities with roots in former communist dictatorships and captive nations. not surprisingly, loathe Communism. Poles feel about Marxism and the Left exactly the same way Cubans do. Communists? They hate those guys.

So, what do you know? It just so happened that, hearing reports of that proposed OWS endorsement, an Illinois businessman and political activist with Polish roots named Adam Andrzejewski made it a point to get in touch with people in the Old Country in contact with Wałęsa, to share with him some home truths about just who is who and what is what about those Occupy* protests.

Andrzejewski himself explains what happened at Big Government.

When Walesa’s comments hit the AP wire last week, my team immediately reached out to our Polish contacts. We made the point that the political themes of Occupy Wall Street may have started out with some of the principles that we share, but OWS themes were rapidly being morphed into anti-freedom and anti-liberty messages. At the core is the want for a big, powerful central government to dominate the lives of individual citizens.

Using biggovernment.com plus other news sources, rapidly we painted an accurate picture of the groups training, leading, and organizing the “movement.” The movement is organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests. OWS folks are politically to the left of President Barack Obama.

At the Lech Walesa Institute Foundation in Warsaw, they were thankful to receive this information.

Based on our discussion and intervention, President Walesa is not going to get involved with the OWS. He is not comfortable with the “organizations” behind the movement. It was not a difficult discussion.

The lifetime of good work exercised by President Walesa has lifted people around the world fighting tyranny. Through the Lech Walesa Institute Foundation in Warsaw, Walesa has supported freedom and liberty around the world. As a man primarily responsible for vanquishing communism in Poland, Walesa has a personal bent toward helping the underdog and the downtrodden.

This spring, when President Obama visited Poland, President Walesa refused to meet with him.

So, no, Mr. Yglesias, you guys did not succeed in bamboozling an aging anti-Communist hero into serving as a useful idiot, and, yes, your protest movement is “fundamentally a radical anti-capitalist” piece of communist agitprop. You lose.

Doug Schoen, Bill Clinton’s former pollster, in the Wall Street Journal, investigated just who is participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest and what they really represent.

[T]he Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%).

An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008. Now 51% disapprove of the president while 44% approve, and only 48% say they will vote to re-elect him in 2012, while at least a quarter won’t vote.

Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren’t represented by any political party.

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost. By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but 58% oppose raising taxes for everybody, with only 36% in favor. And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%).

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation.

And, what do you know? These people are not the economically distressed and the unemployed. They are your rancid communists, the lunatic fringe of the activist left, the people yearning for socialist revolution and Marxist totalitarianism, people left of Barack Obama.

Read the whole thing.

Joseph Fouche first quotes Lex’s reaction to the Occupy* protests:

My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has been shamefully dumbed down.

Reading all this with just a little partisan bias, I’d say that he then blames left-wing Baby Boomers for both the intellectual vacuity of their young epigones and for the country’s inability to reform its policies and effectively address the current crisis.

They say they want a revolution. To have a revolution, you must have a secular social catechism that accumulates the sort of strategic effects that will trigger a fatal split in our current set of societal elites. In the crisis so far, we’ve only seen dusty formulas trotted out by ancient and creaky Boomers yearning re-fight the glorious battles of youth.

Again.

And again.

Here’s an unintended side-effect of extended human lifespans: ideological stasis. To butcher Max Planck: a political notion does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Boomers, given unnaturally long biological life by historical developments they barely comprehend, give unnaturally long life to their foolishly destructive notions. Society may stagnate in some areas while progressing in others with unforeseen effects. This may make the process of sorting out of what’s needed to grapple with our current predicament prolonged, painful, and prone to triggering frustration and outbreaks of corrective violence.

Go tell the Boomers that, in the words of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

So, drop dead, liberal Boomers!

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Besides, he knows that billionaires are getting a lot of money, just out of greed, and he’s learned on-line that “they pay twenty five cents in taxes for every dollar we’re taxed.” Except this young man undoubtedly doesn’t pay income taxes. But what does that matter, you can say whatever you want, he has his couple of sound bites and he wants free tuition.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

From Maksim.

Lawrence Myers explains the dynamic that makes people become grievance-afflicted members of the crowds demonstrating against the financial industry.

Unhappy people become Liberals. People seek out those that are similar. Birds of a feather flock together. An unhappy person looks around and sees two groups: happy people, and unhappy people. Rather than take a page out of the former group, enter the herd and ask for (and likely receive) help and guidance on how to become happy, the person is more likely to choose the path of least resistance — of instant acceptance. “Come to Mumsy, darling, you’re one of us.” And once in the herd, it becomes very, very difficult to leave it.

The Liberal, of course, will deny this pathology. No, they say, they are only trying to make things fair. Liberals are consumed with fixing the world. By eliminating what is unfair, by eliminating the evil banks and the greedy corporations, all the little people will receive what is rightfully theirs! (Subconsciously, then, nobody will be more successful than they are.) So twisted with hate, and so convinced of their own inefficacy, they cannot even rely on themselves to overthrow The Other. They hand over their own power to a third party — the government — to do their dirty work in the form of the confiscatory process of increased taxation and regulation.

Liberals, however, have got it turned around. They seek to heal the world before healing themselves first. They see this as somehow noble, great sacrifice. Well, it’s easy to make a sacrifice when you regard yourself as valueless. Beyond this, however, every major religion, and the mythology across almost every culture, instructs man to take care of himself first, and then attempt to heal the world.

Should you be attending? Quick diagnostic chart.

Eratosthenes marvels at the way left-wing ideology makes the metrosexuals start talking tough.

What does it say about a so-called “man,” when he possesses certainty & conviction only when he discusses the deconstruction of some unknown stranger’s right to earn and own property? And on all other subjects he reverts, with all the reliability of gravity, right back to the dreaded emasculated tone of the American Castrati? What do we know about someone who is certain about the world in which he lives, only when he seeks to destroy things, along with people who built those things and might build other things?

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Who is out there demonstrating against the American financial system?

J.D. Samson, a representative Boho artist, explains just how badly the capitalist system has failed her.

Like so many teenagers, I believed in the “American Dream,” that I could move to New York from the Midwest and become an artist. I would achieve both fame and success, and I would never have to think about money. The first half was true. I made art and lived activism, and I achieved amazing amounts of success that I feel incredibly proud of. The second half, not so much. I have been able to live well, eat well, invest in my arts and make my own schedule, but I forgot to save money and think about my future.

This summer I tried to rent an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The process sent me into an emotional crisis and awakened me into a whole new realization of our economy, the music industry at large and, more specifically, what it means to be a queer artist in 2011.

I spent days trolling around Williamsburg, looking at shitty apartments with cockroaches lining the doorways, fighting neighbors, rats in the ceiling, bedbugs infesting the linoleum floors, fifth-floor walk-ups and cat-pee-soaked carpets. The rent was exorbitant, availability was scarce, and I was turned down by two different landlords for being “freelance.” To be honest, I don’t blame them. Not only am I freelance, but I’m lesbian freelance. Double whammy. What was the reason they turned me down? Because it was easier to rent to a rich, trust-fund, straight-guy banker who wants to live in the coolest borough in the world? Because when he met me he saw a tattooed gender outlaw who makes “queer electronic punk music” and isn’t sure when the next check is going to come in? Yeah, I don’t blame him. He doesn’t give a shit about how kids email me all the time thanking me for keeping them from committing suicide. It’s not part of his capitalist business practice.

I surround myself with amazing and talented people, people who have made it in every sense of those words. They buy apartments, invest in their futures successfully, have children, save money. How do they do it? How can I keep up with them?

So I have to ask myself: where did I go wrong? And I can only guess that the answer lies in a combinations of three things: 1) my family is not rich, 2) I am a queer woman, and 3) I am trying so desperately to keep up with my peers that I am living beyond my means. ...

I’m so lucky to have gained so much from my life and my amazing career, but I’m ready to feel secure. I’m ready to build my future and save money so that I can have a family, so that I can enjoy making art and not trying to create a product out of it, so that I can spend more time being present and less time being a workaholic, frantically searching for the profitable answer. And if I need to, I’m ready to get a job, go to work in the morning, get a paycheck once a week, go to the dentist, get a check-up, bottom out to a boss and appreciate music without being worried that I can’t keep up.

We live in a society where people equate success with money. They see me on the pages of Vogue. They see me playing to an adoring crowd. They see me flying to gigs all across the world. And I’m not sure what people imagine, but I’m struggling, too. Over the past couple of weeks, I have realized how many other artists and musicians are in my position, people who are proud of their success but feel unable to continue, based on financial strain. Artists such as Spank Rock, Das Racist and the Drums have featured lyrics on their new records about struggling financially. My band MEN put out a record in February with similar tones. I know the economy is failing, but I think it is important to remember that it is failing for everyone. Even the people you think might have money. So here we go. Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.
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Frances Fox Piven (a government-salaried university professor) addresses the crowd.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Maureen Dowd compares the prospective 2012 electoral contest between Rick Perry and normal American Republicans and Barack Obama and the coastal pseudo-intellectual elites to the rivalrous friendship of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) in John Ford’s 1962 film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

In the film, rugged rancher and man of violence John Wayne befriends the tenderfoot, man of peace, attorney James Stewart and defends him against the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). When the code of manhood obliges Stewart to stand up to Marvin in a gunfight. Wayne, well of aware of Stewart’s incompetence, casually plugs Marvin with his rifle from ambush at the crucial moment in the gun duel.

John Wayne chivalrously lets Stewart receive the credit for ending Liberty Valance’s local reign of terror, which carries Stewart onward into a political career ending in the US Senate. He even stands aside and allows the lawyer (who owes him his life) to marry the girl he loves.

John Ford means his film to depict his own vision of tragic Historicism, in which manly bravery and larger-than-life frontier individualism is inevitably swept away by Progress and the advance of Civilization. John Wayne’s character is obviously the better man, but he is not the man of the future. He steps aside for Stewart because he recognizes it himself.

The John Wayne character isn’t only more competent than the Jimmy Stewart character, he is wiser and nobler.

The secondary tragedy of the movie is revealed when the Stewart character who has returned in old age, covered with success and honors and still married to the girl, to the frontier town which was the original scene of events for the Wayne character’s funeral.

Jimmy Stewart tries telling the whole story of the shooting of Liberty Valance to a young reporter, and revealing that his whole career has been built on another man’s deed, and the newspaper’s editor declines to print it. “When the legend becomes fact,” the editor says, “print the legend.”

There is no expiation in confession for Stewart. His life has been built upon a lie, and he supplanted a better man in his wife’s affections, and he knows it.

Dowd simplifies John Ford’s narrative into the conflict between the Eastern egghead and the anti-intellectual.

At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.

Dowd goes on to examine, and find unworthy, Rick Perry’s college grades.

Studying to be a veterinarian, he stumbled on chemistry and made a D one semester and an F in another. “Four semesters of organic chemistry made a pilot out of me,” said Perry, who went on to join the Air Force.

What a pity it is that the Egghead Barack Obama has never seen fit to release any of his college or law school grades for comparison.

The self-flattering interpretation of the political conflict between democrats and Republicans, between Maureen Dowd and the rest of the community of fashion and ordinary Americans, and potentially in 2012 between Barack Obama and Rick Perry as the conflict between the forces of book learning and the uninformed is doubtless gratifying to New York Times’ readers, but personally I think the claim of members in good standing of our establishment culture to represent learning and intellectuality has a lot of problems.

The kind of learning that most of these people boast isn’t book learning at all. It’s merely Cliff Notes summary familiarity with names and what they’re famous for.

Our establishment elite does not draw its understanding and conclusions from a reservoir of learning in the traditional Western canon. Our establishment is commonly hostile to that canon, deprecatory of its value and significance, and characteristically Philistine. Establishment judgments and conclusions come much more commonly from a consensus produced by newspaper editorials and articles in journals of opinion.

Our community of fashion is not intellectually inquisitive or critical. On the contrary, it is herd-like and conformist. And it is profoundly intellectually reactionary, being totally and entirely committed to defending late 19th century ideas revolving around Utopian ameliorism effectuated via the rule of scientific experts operating under a rubric of collectivist statism.

People who are gullible enough to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, people who have failed to notice Socialism’s failures, people who still think that Keynesian economics will get you out of a recession are not smart. They are dumb.

The democrat party and the American community of fashion are comprised not of Eggheads, but of pseudo-intellectuals and muttonheads.

Mark Steyn rants understandably enough at the Saturnalia of Snivelling on the part of our wiser and better fellow countrymen belonging to the urban arts and political communities occasioned by the 10th Anniversary of the Islamic Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the 10-year hole is something we did to ourselves – and, in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half-an-hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

Donald Trump is basically an idiot, but he is not a pretentious ass, so even he could see that what real leadership would have done in response to the 9/11 attacks’ destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center Towers. Real leadership would have commenced immediately on rebuilding exactly the same buildings at the identical site and location, and would have grasped the symbolic importance of putting them back up as quickly as possible, only one story taller.

Real leadership obviously didn’t, and doesn’t, exist in New York City and New York State, only obfuscating, obstructing, hot air and sanctimony and conformity producing anti-leadership. Ten years have gone by, and replacement buildings are not up yet. They have instead created an amazing anti-monument to ruin and destruction with two deep water-filled holes occupying the actual former locations of the towers. I think one deep, useless, water-filled hole must be taken to symbolize the void where the intelligence of the city, state, and regional leadership ought to have been, and the second void must represent their missing masculine qualities, the absent courage, flair, and instinctive spirit of defiance of the same: one hole symbolizes their lack of brains, the other their lack of balls.

We’ve recently heard a lot of condescending accusations that Republican candidates who refuse to accept Warmism are anti-scientific, just as we heard an awful lot during the battle over Obamacare how backward anyone was who did not understand that universal government-provided healthcare was an essential feature of any modern advanced society.

Dan Greenfield explored the issue of just who the reactionaries harboring hostility toward science and Modernity really are in an excellent essay written early last year.

The narrative that liberal pundits have constructed and continually replayed over the last year is one in which progress minded and enlightened liberals are working to reform America into a modern society, while being stymied by a bunch of knuckle dragging reactionary conservatives who are anti-Science and want to drag America back into the dark ages. There’s only one problem with this narrative, it’s actually a mirror image of reality.

When it comes to holding on to reactionary ideas or maintaining an ideological worldview built on a reflexive hostility to modernity; nobody can top the modern leftist or his tamer liberal cousin. If you took away leader worship, fear of technology, the state as the solution to all problems, the supremacy of the group over the individual and the belief that the “enlightened” should rule over the common masses for their own good and control every aspect of their lives—there would be nothing left of the modern liberal. Literally nothing at all.

The modern liberal is wedded to a thoroughly reactionary worldview in which he worships the institutions he control and is full of paranoia and suspicion of those he does not. He disdains the common man and longs for enlightened leaders to uplift him and to transform his country into a messianic vision of a kingdom of heaven in which no one ever goes hungry and everyone is perfectly equalized—a pseudo-religious vision of government as religion that is wholly primitive in its conflation of theology and civics.

Every time a liberal pundit self-righteously trots out the stereotype of the ignorant science bashing conservative who just won’t accept the science of the environmentalist movement, he needs to be reminded that the entire environmentalist movement is founded on a fear of the products of science, namely technology and modern civilization. ...

When its flashy clothes are stripped away, liberalism stands revealed as a fear of modernity. There is nothing progressive about liberalism, it is the ideology of a political, cultural and economic elite that reviles everything modern, that longs for a mystical right of kings and well ordered oligarchies, denounces technology as the tool of the pollution devil, distrusts all science that is not in the service of its ideology and is threatened by any sort of debate or opposition.

Today liberalism is the second most backward, most paranoid, most reactionary and totalitarian ideology in the West after Islamism. Both are based on the fear of the modern, the fear of the liberated individual, technology and the nation state. Their great dream is the same, a vast mystical world-state ruled over by the enlightened and providing an inhumanly perfect justice for all. Both believe that the only solution for mankind is to go backward, to crawl instead of walk, to fear instead of know and to obey rather than think. That is Liberalism and Islamism in a nutshell, two reactionary ideologies walking together into the dark ages.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

If anyone had any doubts that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is essentially just a medical term for a confirmed habit of whining and malingering, this news item from Britain’s Guardian describing activists’ attacks on doctors questioning or investigating CFS demonstrates the existence of the sort of political constituency which genuine illnesses just do not have.

The full extent of the campaign of intimidation, attacks and death threats made against scientists by activists who claim researchers are suppressing the real cause of chronic fatigue syndrome is revealed today by the Observer. According to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.

One researcher told the Observer that a woman protester who had turned up at one of his lectures was found to be carrying a knife. Another scientist had to abandon a collaboration with American doctors after being told she risked being shot, while another was punched in the street. All said they had received death threats and vitriolic abuse.

In addition, activists – who attack scientists who suggest the syndrome has any kind of psychological association – have bombarded researchers with freedom of information requests, made rounds of complaints to university ethical committees about scientists’ behaviour, and sent letters falsely alleging that individual scientists are in the pay of drug and insurance companies.

“I published a study which these extremists did not like and was subjected to a staggering volley of horrible abuse,” said Professor Myra McClure, head of infectious diseases at Imperial College London. “One man wrote he was having pleasure imagining that he was watching me drown. He sent that every day for months.”

Chronic fatigue syndrome – also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – is common and debilitating. A recent BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) feature suggested that as many as one in 250 people in the UK suffers from it. Patients are sometimes unable to move and become bedridden, occasionally having to be fed through a tube. For more than 20 years, scientists have struggled to find the cause, with some pointing to physiological reasons, in particular viral infections, while others have argued that psychological problems are involved.

It is the latter group that has become the subject of extremists’ attacks. The antagonists hate any suggestion of a psychological component and insist it is due to external causes, in particular viruses. In the case of McClure, her “crime” was to publish a paper indicating that early studies linking the syndrome to the virus XMRV were wrong and the result of laboratory contamination. So furious was the reaction that she had to withdraw from a US collaboration because she was warned she might be shot.

A similar hate campaign was triggered by a study published in the Lancet earlier this year. It suggested that a psychological technique known as cognitive behavioural therapy could help some sufferers. This produced furious attacks on the scientists involved, including Michael Sharpe, professor of psychological medicine at Oxford University. He had already been stalked by one woman who was subsequently found to be carrying a knife at one of his lectures.

“The tragedy is that this tiny group of activists are driving young scientists from working in the field,” said Sharpe. “In the end, these campaigns are only going to harm patients.”

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, explains where all the incivility is coming from.

“Terrorist,” “racist,” “uncivil,” “insane,” the list goes on—in this context, these words have no real meaning. They are mere epithets. The Obama presidency has reduced the liberal left to an apoplectic rage. His Ivy League credentials, superior attitude, pseudointellectual mien and facile adherence to lefty ideology make him the perfect personification of the liberal elite. Thus far at least, he has been an utter failure both at winning public support and at managing the affairs of the nation.

Obama’s failure is the failure of the liberal elite, and that is why their ressentiment has reached such intensity. Their ideas, such as they are, are being put to a real-world test and found severely wanting. As a result, their authority is collapsing. And if there is one thing they know deep in their bones, it is that they are entitled to that authority. They lash out, desperately and pathetically, because they have nothing to offer but fear and anger.

The American left is actually kind of lucky that Barack Obama has not been equally ideologically consistent and reliable on foreign policy… (link)

Rand Simberg adds:

It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.

I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.

Angelo M. Codevilla, in the American Spectator, describes the great division in American society between the rulers and the ruled, explains how someone like Barack Obama can make a career as a professional Alinskyite agitator while remaining a member in good standing of the establishment elite, and addresses the dilemma of the oppressed “country class:” how does a Burkean class, conservative in temperament and habits, finding itself revolutionized over a substantial period of time make its own revolution?

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters—speaking the “in” language—serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government. ...

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers—by such as the Times’s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks—are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization—including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude. ...

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan ), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity—being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment’s parts. ...

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. ...

Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges—civic as well as economic—to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government—meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. ...

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices—even to buy in the first place—modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others.

Read the whole thing.

The bien-pensant gentry politics that dominates political discussion in respectable circles has lost touch with the realities of American life and no longer really comprehends the issues at stake. To some degree this impoverished policy conversation reflects the declining financial and intellectual firepower of the private sector labor movement — itself a consequence of the automation driven transformation of American and world manufacturing. The “clean” wing of progressive politics has almost entirely driven the “smokestack” wing out of business, so that liberal policy discussions tend to revolve around quality of life issues primarily of interest to the upper middle class. ...

“Progressive” policy now increasingly means policy that benefits genteel upper middle class liberals and public sector government workers; the resulting mix of complex and poorly applied regulations, high costs and high taxes throttles the only kind of job creation that could offer most inner city residents a feasible step up.

Read the whole thing.

There is a pattern in leftist thinking I have seen often enough to disturb me, but not often enough to declare it by any means universal.

They act like dumb people who desperately want to be thought bright; they act like immoral people looking for some easy way to clothe themselves in the mantle of morality, but not a morality that makes any demands or imposes any duties.

One way a dumb person makes himself look smart, is by talking about pseudo-science as if it were real science: hence they read Rachel Carson and Paul Erlich and Margaret Mead, notorious frauds, and consider it scientific to conclude that banning DDT preserves birds. Either they do not know about or do not care about deaths from malaria in Africa. They consider it scientific to conclude that the world will enter a period of mass starvation and death by 1980, with England and India perishing. That this date passed twenty years ago with no sign of the Malthusian chaos makes no dent in their credulity. ...

Bright people who are actually bright exhibit two characteristics: their thoughts are unconventional, and they react with curiosity to ideas that offer legitimate challenge to their own. Dim people who are pretending to be bright impersonate the behavior without understanding it. Instead of being unconventional, they adopt a pre-written script of the shopworn fashionable ideas, which they praise for being a bold and controversial challenge to the dullness of Bourgeoisie parochialism and hypocrisy. That this is itself hypocrisy of the most transparent stripe escapes their notice. ...

The reason, friends, why the Left reacts with such blinding malice when challenged, is, of course, deep down they know they are putting on an act. They are no more qualified to teach, to lecture, to preach, to pontificate, than a Jerry Lewis character who stumbles into a lectern by mistake. They are not qualified to hold an intellectually serious conversation, because the core of their world is based on a presumption of intellectual superiority—a profoundly unserious pose. They know its fragility, and hence the vehemence of their reactions.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Reading Tim Pawlenty’s paean to double plus supply-side-ism yesterday made me wonder, once again, why conservatives think we liberals are opposed to it. I mean, if it actually worked, why would we be? It’s politically popular, and by their accounts it would generate trillions of dollars in extra revenue that we could use to finance our beloved lefty social programs. What’s not to like?

The only answer I can come up with is that conservatives are now completely invested in their theory that we liberals loathe rich people so much that we don’t care. We all want to screw the wealthy so badly that we’re willing to forego the elections we’d win and the mountains of revenue we’d gain if we lowered their taxes. We hate them that much.

This is an interesting example of mocking a proposition without actually denying it.

Barack Obama is an excellent representative of the same political philosophy held by Kevin Drum and he is renowned for explicitly advocating increased taxation for purposes of “fairness” even if higher rates resulted in lower growth and less revenue being collected. He said exactly that, and by so doing defined himself, in one of the most famous of his campaign debates.

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So, are we conservatives being unfair? Would left-wingers like Kevin Drum and Barack Obama ever really support tax cuts for wealthier Americans if that was what it took to grow the economy and provide government with the funding the left desires to spend?

The answer is No. Left-wingers will never accept the reality that growth can only be achieved by lower taxes. The notion that allowing the rich to keep more grows the economy and benefits all is unacceptable. The left has ridiculed and dismissed this commonsensical proposition as “trickle-down economics.”

Leftism is fundamentally based on envy and societal division, and its route to power relies on agitating the passions of the masses, on mobilizing them on the basis of their animosity toward those better off than themselves. A theory of economics that proposes that failing to punish the rich will make everyone better off fundamentally contradicts leftism’s basic methods and ideology.

The psychology of the left is one of bitter resentment and hatred of anyone better off than oneself. The true leftist would rather everyone were worse off, as long as no one was permitted to be better off than anyone else.

This is the classic peasant mentality, which is the subject of a thousand bitter Eastern European jokes.

“An angel appears to a poor peasant, and informs him that God has taken pity on his sufferings and has sent a messenger to relieve his hardships. The peasant, he is told, may make one wish, and the angel will grant his desire. There is, however, a catch. The angel informs the peasant that, whatever he wishes for, his neighbor will receive also, and that neighbor will be given twice as much. The peasant reflects a moment, and tells the angel: ‘Pluck out one of my eyes.’”

What’s most scary in America today may be the deficit and it may be government policies, but for me the scariest thing is the way that traditional American pragmatism, an open-minded search for truth, the reliability of the media and of academia, has virtually disappeared in many cases.

I’m talking here about the media, academia, and the highly publicized public debate, not what all of the people are thinking. Clearly, a lot of people aren’t buying the conventional wisdom. But the important point is that it is the conventional wisdom, the main ideas held by the elite and government, what young people are being taught, and probably pretty much everything half of the population is hearing. I was in California, Iowa, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and other places.

While this certainly doesn’t apply to all schools, the indoctrination that I’ve seen in one elementary school shocked me. If you really hear what eleven-year-olds are saying to each other you’d be amazed: accusing each other of being racists at the drop of a hat; thinking man-made global warming is a threat to their personal survival into adulthood; viewing America as evil.

If that happens in an educational system — especially in universities — indoctrination means that the more “educated” someone is, the more “stupid” they become.

The decline of professional ethics — journalists are supposed to be accurate and fair despite their personal views; professors should seek truth wherever that leads them, be open-minded, and represent accurately sources and evidence — is staggering. Large numbers of ideas are practically barred from the mass media; silly concepts are put forward that have huge holes in them but are protected from scrutiny or criticism. Some people or movements are always ridiculed; others are always exalted.

There are hundreds of examples of how this works and I see it every day. ...

No matter how bad the economic situation, leadership, or policies might be, a country can recover if the people and elite are able to define the real problems and the real solutions. If the connection with reality is lost, all hope is gone. That is one of the Middle East’s central problems. Increasingly, it seems to be Europe and America’s problem, too.

The way cults work is to isolate people from reality and bombard them with a single viewpoint. The victim is cut off from other influences by being told that they are evil and thus to be disregarded. In some ways, that is what’s been happening to America in recent years.

One weakness of this structure is that the arguments it makes and the claims puts forward are so ridiculous that if exposed to articulate and reasoned responses — often, even for a mere sixty-second period — it quickly collapses logically. Its strength is that it has such strong defenses against such exposure.

Another weakness is that the use of institutions for politically motivated exploitation must remain invisible. If someone understands that universities, mass media, and other trusted institutions have been distorted out of their historical, democratic, and American norms then that’s the beginning of seeing through deception.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.