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In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 I dealt with the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This final diary deals with the underwhelming conlusion of Alexander's column.
First, Alexander insists:
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it.
But, since I've demolished his arguments about each of the four narratives, not so much. Remember, he's never even tried to produce any evidence that any of the narratives he's gone on about are held as widely or inflexibly as he argues--or more importantly that liberals claim they apply to all conservatives.
Next, he tries to have it both ways, pretending to back off a bit just before jumping in for the kill, and accusing President Obama himself of being an avid purveyor of the four pernicious narratives. Remember, one of those four narratives was characterizing conservatives as using racist appeals--and the example Alexander used to prove this hadn't changed a bit in decades was Jimmy Carter calling out the hysterical attacks on Obama, after which Obama himself rejected Carter. Needless to say, logical consistency is not one of Alexander's strong points. But it's about to get even worse:
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By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.
"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?"
That's "rejecting their motives"? Well, given what the GOP has done the past 13 months, I guess it is. A stuck pig squeals, as they say down South. My apologies to Mr. Alexander. He finally got one right... but not for the reason he thinks. Obama rejected motives based on political posturing, and since those were the only motives they had, he actually did reject their motives, just as Alexander claimed. Score one for Alexander. But talk about winning ugly...
He's quick to make up for it, though. You'll be happy to know that 60 years of McCarthyism, accusations of treason, mass murder, godlessness, hatred for America, etc., never happened. It was like one of the TV series where you suddenly discover the last season-heck, maybe the whole dang series, was all just a dream. Because conservatives never systematically attack liberals:
Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues).
So, Ann Coulter never had a bestseller. Liberal Fascism was just a joke Jonah Goldberg thought up while out drinking with friends one night. None Dare call It Treason (7 million copies sold), Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by some obscure law guy--mere figments of liberals' overheated imaginations:
A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.
Really? Glenn Beck marginal? Just like Rush Limbaugh, I guess!
In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders -- from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between -- have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.
I know! Alexander is really Stephen Colbert!
To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.
Here he goes now, into what he imagines is his real trump suit:
Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades -- until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited -- until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.
Alexander is under the deluded impression that abolishing AFDC eliminated poverty. He is wrong.
Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.
As I've already explained in my last installment, the bolded sentence isn't really saying much. Conservatives are traditionally anti-intellectual, and they only got busy intellectually because they finally realized that it was a political necessity. But that doesn't mean that their "detailed analysis and commentary" is necessarily any good. In fact, if it were any good, wouldn't it be giving us something more inspiring and insightful in the way of leadership than George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin?
Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend.
Duh! Which is why legislation is routinely overhauled in light of subsequent experience.
Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.
And free-market economists have long told us that nothing can go wrong, can go wrong, can go wrong. The irony here is that Alexander is relying on the same sorts of universalist absolutes that Burkean conservatives once used to scorn, and that he condemns as constantly coming from liberals. I can just hear Jack Abramoff right now: Public choice theory made me do it!
And thus he ends:
Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.
But, of course, that's not what anyone is advocating. And if Alexander stopped condescending and actually listened to what liberals were saying, he'd know better.
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