Nice article; thanks to a commenter.
Excerpt:
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Palin's campaigning as a devout, plain-spoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists, and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
2 comments:
So the claim is that conservatives like regular/average people just the way they are more than liberals do?
What utter BS that article is as a statement about liberals, although I'm sure it was very meaningful to the author.
There's one quote from an active politician, and that quote is bashing Sarah Palin.
The bulk of the account of what liberals think is people like Mansfield and Buckley putting words in the mouths of liberals.
Here's the list of "liberals" saying derogatory things about certain aspects of American culture:
Bill Maher
"UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed."
Woodrow Wilson
prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow
film producer, interviewed on the Upper West Side by the New York Times the day after the 2004 election
Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic
Susan Sontag
Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Louis Farrakhan
It's artists, entertainers, and critics. They may be liberals, but they're not typical of liberals (see Gelman or Fiorina for example) Let's lay them on some hypothetical spectrum of extremity like a universal DW-NOMINATE and pick some conservative analogues. Those folks LOVE regular people and their tastes -- NOT!!
I don't see how an article that contains this sentence could be considered a "nice" article unless "nice" means lacking empirical credibility:
"The modern Democratic Party may be the first where the mortar is a shared sensibility. The cool kids disdain the dorks, and find it infuriating and baffling that they ever lose a class election to them."
Yeah. When I think back to the cool kids, they sure weren't the future liberals. They weren't the gay, the artsy, the immigrants, the working poor, the poor, the people who didn't fit conventional gender roles (feminists, etc), the immigrants, the African-Americans, etc.
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