SF Chronicle Chides Pathetic Democrats
They’re so pathetic that even the SF Chronicle is ripping them. And they’re making a fair amount of sense, at least in the first couple paragraphs:
Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left. I know, of course, that the term “left” does not have the same meaning and ramifications here that it does in France. And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic “left” in the United States, in the European sense. But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.
And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side. To the contrary, through the looking glass of the American “left” lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic.
I found a curious lifelessness in all parts of the American left:
- the 60-year-old Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era;
- the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics, but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine president as the quasi-equivalent of the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals;
- the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the “enemy,” staring in disbelief when I say I’ve spent quite some time exploring them;
- the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the “enemy,” staring in disbelief when I say I’ve spent quite some time exploring them;
- ex-candidate John Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: “If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know”;
- the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: “to raise more money”;
- and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals, I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability in all of them, when they are confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called American Empire (the denunciation of which, sadly, is all that remains when they have nothing left to say).
Those opening paragraphs paint a pretty bleak picture on the state of fresh and compelling ideas within the “Party of No” as Gloria Boerger called it shortly after the 2004 presidential election.
Day after day, we see Democrats live in the past, where liberal reporters think that every perceived scandal is Watergate, every war will become a Vietnam-like quagmire and every reporter dreams of being the new Woodward or Bernstein. The truth is that Bob Woodward is far more knowledgeable on far more subjects than an entire group of reporters today.
This past week, we saw the Washington/White House press corps throw a hissy fit because a single day story wasn’t dropped into their laps. Talk about lazy and capricious. Today’s White House press corps thinks that reporting is getting some soundbite quotes from a liberal and a couple soundbite quotes from a conservative, whether the issue is the War in Iraq or the federal budget or the economy. Forget about telling the readers about the underlying real story.
But I digress.
The Washington liberal class isn’t the group of ‘down-in-the-trenches’, working man on the street party that it used to be, either. Today’s liberal senators are way-out-of-touch whiners like Hillary, Teddy, Kerry, etc., who couldn’t connect with a working person if their life depended on it.
Other than Bill Clinton and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrats haven’t been able to win a battle of ideas with Republicans in ages. There’s no evidence that that’s changing anytime soon, either.
In a sense, it’s sad to think of the Democratic Party that had great visionaries morph into the ‘Party of Yesterday’. JFK and MLK would be sad indeed.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing
February 20th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Liberals won’t come up with new ideas because they can’t. They are too busy denigrating what has worked in the past, and protesting what they see as their God-given right to superiority now.
The “neocon” movement is simply an extension of the fight to keep traditional values, from political to social to ethical, not much more, not much less. The panic about the “neocons” taking us back to knuckledragger days is a red herring meant simply to keep the average American from realizing the libs want to plunge us full into socialism.
It is up to us “knuckledraggers” to keep that from happening. The fight is worth it. Don’t let the left usurp the language to make us the devils they pretend not to be. Your children will thank you for it.