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.

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.

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.

Walter Russell Mead discusses the failure of the political program of the Progressive haute bourgeois elite to leave room in its urban paradises for the unskilled poor to make a living (except by bussing tables).

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.

Sci Fi author John C. Wright shares the same view of the bona fides and qualifications of members of the contemporary Left as I do myself.

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.

Israeli Strategic Studies professor Barry Rubin recently visited the United States and experienced with the freshness of an outsider’s perspective the intensity of the indoctrination which has become a constant feature of American life.

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.

Mark Steyn puts the former head of the IMF’s little hotel indiscretion into its proper cultural (and sociological) context.

Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

Well, OK. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne – or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken.

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it – or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn! …

The arrest of a mediocre international civil servant in the first-class cabin of his jet isn’t just a sex story: It’s a glimpse of the widening gulf between the government class and their subjects in a post-prosperity West. Neither Geithner nor Strauss-Kahn have ever created a dime of wealth in their lives. They have devoted their careers to “public service,” and thus are in the happy position of rarely if ever having to write a personal check. At the Sofitel in New York, DSK was in a $3,000-per-night suite. Was the IMF picking up the tab? If so, you the plucky U.S. taxpayer paid around 550 bucks of that, whereas Strauss-Kahn’s fellow Frenchmen put up less than $150. So if, as Le Nouvel Observateur suggests, France and America really do belong in entirely different civilizations, the French one ought to start looking for a new patron for the heroic DSK’s lifestyle.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Socialist

John Hinderaker admires the life-style of leading European socialists, which in the case of IMF chief DSK included $3000 per night single hotel rooms, “an arrangement with Air France that allow[ing] him to get on any flight and sit in first class,” suits from the same tailor favored by President Obama.

After all, when you working on behalf of the poor and the dispossesed, when you are the representative of the worthiest of all possible causes, only the best is good enough for you.

The ruthlessness and appetitiveness of leftwing political leaders is commonly observed. Not surprisingly, a real percentage, DSK, Bill Clinton, have, in the course of their political careers, made a habit of extending the customary socialist perspective on people’s rights and property to womens’ bodies. Why should anyone be surprised at the same philosophy expressing itself in more than one form?

Walter Russell Mead, writing in the American Interest, though a classic representative of the liberal elite, is increasingly uneasy about his own class’s characterstic contempt for their fellow citizens, attitudes of self-entitlement, anti-patriotism, and aversion of self-doubt.

To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public. American elites are genuinely and sincerely convinced that the American masses don’t understand the world, don’t realize that American exceptionalism is a mental disease, want infinite government benefits while paying zero tax, and cling to their Bibles and their guns despite all the peer reviewed social science literature that demonstrates the danger and the worthlessness of both. …

But by historical standards, the average American is actually ahead of his or her ancestors. Today’s average Americans are smarter, more sophisticated, better educated, less racist and more tolerant than ever before. Immigrants face less prejudice in the United States than ever before in our history. Religious, ethnic and sexual minorities are more free to live their own lives more openly with less fear than ever before. There is more respect for science and learning, more openness to the arts and more interest in the viewpoints of other countries and cultures among Americans at large than in any past generation.

The American people aren’t perfect yet and never will be — but by the standards that matter to the Establishment, this is the best prepared, most open minded and most socially liberal generation in history. …

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. …

Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically inept and morally confused parody of itself. Probably the best depiction of our elite in popular culture is the petulantly narcissistic Prince Charming in Shrek 2; our educational institutions are like the Fairy Godmother, weaving shoddy, cheap, feel-good illusions into a gossamer tissue of flattering lies. …

Some of the problem is intellectual. For almost a century now, American intellectual culture has been dominated by the values and legacy of the progressive movement. Science and technology would guide impartial experts and civil servants to create a better and better society. For most of the American elite today, progress means ‘progressive’; the way to make the world better is through more nanny state government programs administered by more, and more highly qualified, lifetime civil servants. Anybody who doubts this is a reactionary and an ignoramus. This isn’t just a rational conviction with much of our elite; it is a bone deep instinct. Unfortunately, the progressive tradition no longer has the answers we need, but our leadership class by and large cannot think in any other terms.

The old ideas don’t work anymore, but the elite hates the thought of change.

Past generations of the American elite were always a little bit nervous about their situation; it is morally difficult for an elite based on birth, ethnicity or wealth to justify itself in a country with the universalist, democratic values of the United States. The tendency of American life is always to erode the power and prestige of elites; populism is the direction in which America likes to travel. Past generations of elites were conflicted about their status and struggled against a sense that it was somehow un-American to set yourself up as better than other people.

The increasingly meritocratic elite of today has no such qualms. The average Harvard Business School and Yale Law School graduate today feels that privilege has been earned. Didn’t he or she score higher on the LSATs than anyone else? Didn’t he or she previously pass the rigorous scrutiny of the undergraduate admissions process in a free and fair process to get into a top college? Haven’t they been certified as the best of the best by impartial experts?

A guilty elite may be healthier for society than a self-righteous one.

Read the whole thing.

David Brooks

Dan Calabrese explains why David Brooks thinks NPR must be federally funded.

I sort of like having David Brooks around. He serves as a living demonstration of a lot of troubling things. By the standards of the New York Times and much of official Washington, Brooks is supposed to be some sort of conservative. And that probably tells you everything you need to know about officialdom.

So when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked Brooks the other day to make his case for why we should continue to give federal funding to public broadcasting, what could the elitist Mr. Brooks say? He couldn’t say there aren’t enough other choices, since there are thousands of them. He couldn’t defend NPR and PBS against the elitist charge, although, as an elitist himself, he probably has a hard time seeing the problem with that.

So he said this:

“Here’s the case: You know we have a common culture. If we’re going to assimilate people, if we’re going to be one nation – it helps to have a common culture. There’s some things that do join us. And government has some role in help creating those things, in funding the things that join us. The Smithsonian museums do some of that. I think public broadcasting with shows like ‘The American Experience,’ they give us all something to clue into our history. They join us as a people. They assimilate immigrants and it’s worth a very small amount, and you should see my paychecks – a very small amount that we pay to this.”

Got that? It doesn’t matter that you can get upwards of 1,000 different channels on cable or satellite, or that you can get hundreds of radio stations on XM/Siruis – not to mention your local broadcast stations. Apparently those hundreds and hundreds of offerings don’t effectively “assimilate” you into the “common culture” of America, as defined and approved by snobs like David Brooks.

To really get a sense of where he’s coming from, you need to read more David Brooks, but since you would rather scratch a chalkboard, I’ll sum it up for you. Brooks believes the major division in society today is not rich vs. poor, nor is it liberal vs. conservative, but rather the educated vs. the uneducated. Guess which group David Brooks likes!

So you, the great unwashed, watching wrestling, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Operation Repo or the very worst thing of all, Fox News Channel, David Brooks has a problem with you. See, we have a “common culture,” and it consists of things David Brooks approves of. Stuff you find in the Smithsonian. Stuff you hear at the opera.

Read the whole thing.

It’s fun laughing at David Brooks’ pompous egotism, but his argument is really just more liberal establishment fantasy. NPR does not assimilate anybody. The availability of some Vivaldi on some FM NPR channel makes nobody switch over on the dial from Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh.

Federal NPR funding is simply a bien pensant gesture expressing our would-be ruling class’s cultural piety and affirming their authority to call the shots. The redneck gas station mechanic in Nebraska may be immune to conversion to membership in a culture that applauds exhibitions of Gay Portraiture at the Smithsonian and that likes to listen to Baroque music in the morning, but he can, by Jingo! be made to pay taxes to support the preferences of his betters.

Evan Sayet, writing at Front Page, discovers that his liberal interlocutor in a coffee house conversation hates Sarah Palin with a white hot passion, but (surprise, surprise!) on being pressed is unable to identify exactly what Palin political positions she opposes. It must not be positions, he concludes, that drive liberals round the bend. It has to be who she is, her life story.

what is it about Ms. Palin’s life story that generates this blind loathing? The answer is that, at every turn, Ms. Palin’s story debunks the myths of victimization and self-centeredness that is at the heart of the modern liberal ideology.

First, Ms. Palin is married with children. The Democrat Party’s treasured storyline is that women with children – especially those who take care of them themselves – are oppressed, victimized and doomed to a life without personal fulfillment. Ms. Palin’s life proves them wrong and the Democrats hate her for this. If Ms. Palin were a Democrat she would have offed the last child before he was born so that she could have more “me” time to pursue her own wants and pleasures. There is clearly something very “wrong” with this woman who allowed her “special needs” child to live. They hate her for that.

One of the most obvious demographic differences between the Left and the Right is that people without children – those too self-centered and jealous of others stealing “their” attention, angry and hate-filled “feminists,” radical homosexuals and school children too young to have started a family — are just about guaranteed to pull the lever for anyone with a “D” next to their names. Those married with children are just as assured to pull the lever for someone from the Right.

And Sarah Palin ran a small business. Democrats don’t run businesses. In fact, Democrats don’t do anything. If you eliminated from the voting roll everyone who did nothing other than talk – the academic, the newscaster, the actor, the politician – and those who game the system, collecting welfare and years of unemployment benefits and “workman’s compensation” and food stamps, how many people would be left voting Democrat?

Let’s put it this way, if having had a job – having done something that required either physical labor or risking one’s own money – were a prerequisite to work in the White House, Barack Obama would have to fire 94 percent of his top advisers. That’s a real number. Ninety four percent of Obama’s top advisers have never done anything like run a small store, paint a bridge, wire a house for electricity or anything else other than flap their lips.

This is the genesis of the notion that Palin is “stupid.” Liberals are convinced that there’s something “the matter” with people who have jobs. This is what they mean by “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” Kansas being a place where people work – Hollywood, Cambridge Massachusetts, the TV studios in Manhattan are places were people talk. To the liberal, anyone who has a job must be stupid, after all, not everyone is as good a talker as they are, but surely everyone can find one excuse or another to sit at home and collect welfare.

In fact, to the modern liberal, anyone who has a job is not just stupid, he (or she) is dangerous. These people “cling” to their guns and their religion because they toil for their reward. These people are constantly on the verge of violence, whether it’s an attack like the one they caused in Tucson (according to the leftist script) or just by going home and beating their children. Consider the lyrics of “the working man’s troubadour” by Bruce Springsteen:

Early in the morning/factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes.
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning line
That’s the work, the workin’, that’s the workin’ life.

End of the day/Factory whistle cries
Man walks through them gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get it tonight.
(Why?) Cause that’s the work, the workin’ that’s that workin’ life!

Sarah Palin is stupid and dangerous because, well, to those who have made their millions by doing nothing other than talking, that’s the work, the workin’ that’s the workin’ life. Just in case you think that’s just one example of Springsteen’s take on anyone who has a job, consider the horrors of his “daddy” who “worked his whole life, for nothing but the pain.” In this song, “Adam Raised a Cain,” daddy, of course, beats his children, “now he walks these empty rooms searching for something to blame.” And, in fact, it gets worse because, clearly, a child who is beaten is going to continue that cycle of violence and beat his child (“you inherit the sins/you inherit the flames”). So, even to the most sympathetic leftist like Springsteen, not one, not two, but three generations are destroyed all because “daddy” had to go to work.

And they hate Sarah Palin because she joined the PTA and made things better. No, no, that’s not supposed to happen. Schools (read: the teachers’ union) need more money, only more money will solve the problems in the schools. Sarah Palin must be destroyed!

And, finally, they hate Sarah Palin because she was a successful mayor and governor. The Democrat Party narrative is that the American people are too stupid to successfully govern themselves and need Harvard and Yale elitists to dictate to them how they should live their lives. If a graduate of the University of Idaho can successfully run the biggest state in the union, then so can a kid who graduated from Texas A & M or even a kid with a degree from Eureka College.

I think he’s on to something.

Read the whole thing.

San Francisco Gay Pride parade float

Our lords and masters of the national elite may have been defeated in the election last November, but they are still our rulers.

Just to drive home the point of who is in charge in this country, the liberal establishment took the lame duck congress it controls and delivered its own special Christmas present to a prized constituency. Now those second-class citizens who fail to attend elite institutions, who live outside the coastal cities and suburbs which call the shots, who bitterly cling to God and guns and are stupid enough to serve in the US military for chump change will have to accept as their equals (and often, undoubtedly, their superiors in rank and command) persons who choose to define themselves on the basis of an inclination to engage in certain kinds of unconventional (intrinsically non-reproductive) sexual activities.

Liberals don’t themselves actually serve in the military anymore. Liberals usually do not even support the military operations in which members of the armed forces risk their lives. Liberals frequently make strong efforts to undermine and delegitimitize the causes for which Americans serving in the military are fighting. Liberals routinely provide aid and comfort to the enemy opposing US forces in the field. Liberals undermine domestic support for our military’s efforts, destroy our national morale, and work tirelessly to bring about our Armed Forces’ failure and withdrawal. Liberals devote their energy to voiding and rendering useless all the American military’s efforts and sacrifices. But the liberals get to tell the American military with whom they will have to shower, beside whom they will have to sleep, who will be serving beside them, and on whom they will have to depend in action.

A certain amount of social friction and the occasional incident of abuse of authority to obtain affection is obviously an insignificant price for the American Armed Forces to pay to permit those wiser and better than themselves to deliver social equality to the oppressed and despised. Besides, along with the burden of providing a new field for the social engineering of a better future for all of mankind comes very possibly a rise to new social acceptability for the American military. Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is quoted today predicting that, along with transgendered roommates and more interesting activities in the showers, military personnel can look forward to a “new era” in the relationship between American universities and “the uniforms that guard them while they sleep.”

Isn’t that just ducky? They may allow recruiters back on Ivy League campuses, just so long as drag queens can join the Marine Corps.