"I can't wait for November."
Perhaps it's because of my libertarian political views, but I rarely expect others to agree with me. (At the outset, at least!) And yet I somehow manage to get through life without calling everyone who disagrees with me a bigot. This is a feat way too difficult for most people in the mainstream media and political elite. Charles Krauthammer has a devastating critique of the pervasive charge:
Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
The end to his column is brutal:
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
I was traveling outside of DC this week and ran into more than a few folks who wanted to talk about this lazy accusation of bigotry. Rather, they didn't want to talk about it. It was just proof to them of how completely useless everyone inside the beltway (literally or figuratively) thinks.
At Midway Airport, a man told me "I can not wait until November." A few other people, not previously part of the conversation, immediately chimed in to excitedly offer the same sentiment. And then they went on with their other business. I'm beginning to wonder just what this November will look like.
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Re: "I can't wait for November."
For more, read James Taranto's read of Krauthammer in the WSJ:
Aug '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
Charles Krauthammer is a national treasure. I'm calling him The Hammer from now on.
I'm so glad you brought this up, Mollie. November will be a bloodbath, and a repudiation of 'Liberalism' - a misnomer if ever there was one; nothing liberal about them at all. It's actually 'Repressivism', and it's based on falsehoods.
Only problem is, Republicans will be hard-pressed to reverse things, unless there's some kind of surge of national will. There's never been a better time to pray. Our problems are way beyond ordinary solutions.
Abraham Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress in 1862 had these choice words:
"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation..."
May '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
I hate to say it, but this blanket contempt and condemnation for a large group of people is... well... genuine "bigotry". Although Scruton's term, "oikophobia" (referenced in the Taranto quote above), is a delicious word that I cannot wait to use in conversation, I'm not sure its apt. The statements I hear from DC and the media tell me that these folks are not at all familiar with the people they are labeling. Their depiction of Tea Party supporters or GZM opponents are just too far off base.
What they are condemning is their prejudiced mental image of people they do not deign to meet or even listen to.
Jul '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
River
You had me at "bloodbath".
Say it again.
Pleeeze.
Aug '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
Oikophobia--It's a great word, except that no one knows what it means unless you tell them.
But the meaning is apt. Progressivism is more comprehensible as a psychological syndrome than as a coherent political philosophy. In one's formative years, one may find oneself taking an iconoclastic position on something-or-other, and discover how thrilling it is. It makes the ordinary people out in the street seem like such boobs and ignoramuses, and makes oneself feel oh so much more perceptive and sophisticated. For many people, this feeling is so intoxicating that it becomes addictive, and they soon discover that it is easy enough to regenerate this feeling by taking "oikophobic" positions. It becomes a way of life.
People with such ego needs won't take positions that absolutely nobody else will take, but as long as some significant fraction of the population are in their corner, they can feel like members of an enlightened elite.
Hence the willingness to defend Islam, the most illiberal religion in the world, while denouncing Christianity; or favoring homosexuality over heterosexuality; our military enemies over our own side; racial minorities over whites. People are starting to smell the pathology.
Jul '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
The left has seeded so many left wingers in the organs and arteries of government that the loss of Congress will have less effect than people think. They have already shown that they hold the constraints of the Constitution -- a dated document that failed to keep up with the times -- in contempt. And now the people in rejecting Obama have shown themselves unfit for self rule. I don't see the left relinquishing power easily.
Aug '10
Re: "I can't wait for November."
Bloodbath!