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December 8, 2005
Liberal Envy
onah Goldberg weighs in with another perceptive take on the Left. Once again, the Left focuses on appearance and avoids dealing with substance:
Liberals have been suffering from conservative envy for several years now. Oh, they don't envy us our evil ways, our penchant for extreme cruelty or the fact that we smell like cabbage. They envy us our toys and success.
The liberal Center for American Progress was founded explicitly to be the Left's answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The lefty radio network, "Air America," was launched to copy the success of Rush Limbaugh & Co. Today, deep-pocketed liberals are scrambling to copy conservative foundations, even though liberal foundations have always had more money.
Most conservatives I know snicker at all this. It's not that talk radio, think tanks, and foundations haven't been essential to the rise of American conservatism in the last five decades. They have been (see my colleague John Miller's excellent new book, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, for a window into that effort).
But liberals are emphasizing hardware because they don't want to question the validity of their very outdated software.
And he goes on to explain how the Left mistakes politial tactics with political principles. A brilliant distinction:
If liberals really want to emulate conservative successes, I have some advice for them: Get into some big, honking arguments — not with conservatives, but with each other. The history of the conservative movement's successes has been the history of intellectual donnybrooks, between libertarians and traditionalists, hawks and isolationists, so-called neocons and so-called paleocons, less-filling versus tastes great. Liberals would be smart to copy that and stop worrying how to mimic our direct mail strategies.
Liberals have a tendency to mistake political tactics for political principles, and vice versa. Exhibit A is the Left's fascination with "unity." Unity is often useful in politics, but it's often a handicap if you haven't figured out what to be unified about. Just as the Socratic method leads to wisdom, big fights not only illuminate big ideas, but they force people to become invested in them. Unfortunately, liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.
And he drives his point home with a classic example;
That's really telling. The Right tends toward arguing political philosophy, the Left argues political tactics, with an eye only on Power.A good illustration of the fundamental difference between Left and Right can be found in two books edited by Peter Berkowitz for the Hoover Institution, Varieties of Conservatism in America and Varieties of Progressivism in America. Each contains thoughtful essays by leading conservatives and liberals. But while the conservatives defend different ideological philosophical schools — neoconservatism, traditionalism, etc. — the liberals argue almost exclusively about which tactics Democrats should embrace to win the White House.
That in a nutshell explains why you hear such continuing nonsense from Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, and MoveOn.Org.
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Posted by witnit at December 8, 2005 10:37 AM
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