Since when has San Francisco been run by Mayor Burgermeister Meisterburger?
George Will sums it up:
The point of progressivism is that the people must progress up from their backwardness. They cannot do so unless they are pulled toward the light by a government composed of the enlightened - experts coolly devoted to facts and science.
The progressive agenda is actually legitimated by the incomprehension and anger it elicits: If the people do not resent and resist what is being done on their behalf, what is being done is not properly ambitious. If it is comprehensible to its intended beneficiaries, it is the work of insufficiently advanced thinkers...
...Responding to [these kinds of ideas], George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.
"These ideas," Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."
You do not have to agree with the above criticisms, but there is no doubt they are a substantial, measured and rational response to the political vision offered by the political left in this country. Sure, for most people this unease may be only felt in an inchoate manner, a sense of unease and dissatisfaction with the path the Democrats have followed the last two years, but there is little doubt about the message voters sent to Washington and their state houses on Tuesday. They want something else.
The reaction from the left has been a combination of denial, hissy-fits, and crap like this:
Republican voters are dreadful unlettered hillbillies who poo in their trucker caps and only have sex with chickens because the goats move too fast
Gee, where can I learn more about this sophisticated and exciting political world-view? Is a full frontal lobotomy necessary or only recommended?
But, really, Will is right. The political left today does seem to operate and think of themselves as a "vanguard party" and the greatest mass of people they believe are unwashed and child-like peasants who need to be taught by Democrats not to screw the livestock and how to feed their children. It's a creed that increasingly makes disdainful moralizing pronouncements about "average" Americans so severe they would make a Puritan blush, and then they are shocked, SHOCKED I SAY!, when people don't want to vote for them.
It's no mystery to me.
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