The Fantasy Life of American Liberals
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
The Fantasy Life of American Liberals Three generations of left-wing idiocy are enough. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER THE ELECTION RETURNS are in, and the high priest of American liberalism has spoken....
...I did a search and found only three polls that even asked about anger...
...The next puzzle was Ronald Reagan, the "amiable dunce" (clark clifford's famously obtuse characterization) who somehow brought down the Soviet empire...
...And when this sleight of hand, this transmutation of evil into good, is accomplished not by a philosophical genius like Nozick but by yet another amiable dunce in the presidency, liberals become unhinged...
...George Bush, extremist...
...Ike was a fool who (in captain Renault's immortal phrase) blundered his way into Berlin, smiled his way into the presidency—and then whiled it away playing golf...
...His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession...
...This theme reached its comic apogee in Barbra Streisand's now famous, gloriously misspelled antiwar memo to Dick Gephardt, in which she explained that the reason Bush was dragging the nation to war with Iraq was to serve the "oil industry, the chemical companies, the logging industry...
...The voters are therefore not the total idiots Moyers makes them out to be...
...His genial smile concealed not just stupidity but evil intentions...
...Such ideas cannot possibly be admitted...
...But as a prototypical pale-oliberal, he offers the traditional explanation for the umpteenth defeat of liberalism at the polls: the beguiling smile...
...In all three, 70-80 percent of white male respondents denied being angry...
...Once again this is explained by the Manchurian Candidate theory, Bush, the simpleton, being the puppet of a vast, dark, right-wing cabal...
...So his hard-right ideas won't be put into practice anytime soon...
...Twenty years later, the liberal nightmare returns in the form of George W. Bush, another exemplar of the trinity of Republican success: geniality, empty-headedness, and evil...
...In a country where the great assault, such as it is, on "choice" consists of parental notification of teenage abortions, in a country where most people don't particularly enjoy having their wealth "transferred," where they support reasonable environmental regulation and believe in some separation between church and state, how could this conjunction of "piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money"—Moyers's summary of Republicanism— command such public support...
...The GOP, you see, "wears a sunny mask, which conceals a reality that is far more ideological, far more extreme, than most Americans realize...
...Ah, the genial smile...
...It began with their inability to fathom how Americans could prefer Eisenhower to Stevenson...
...Odd...
...Hence, a legend was born, the legend of the "angry white male...
...It was not George Bush's genial smile that got the most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, not only to elect a conservative Mormon businessman as governor but to overwhelmingly approve the abolition of bilingual education, that totem of liberal social engineering...
...They are simply seduced, done in by the genial smile...
...The smile...
...And not only will George Bush, right-wing radical, now attempt to impose a theocracy, he is preparing, among other depredations, "to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives . . . to transfer wealth from working people to the rich . . . [and] to eviscerate the environment...
...Why...
...With him, there is a similar difficulty reconciling the apparent antitheticals: empty-headedness and evil...
...Moyers doesn't explain, it being perhaps imprudent to openly express contempt for a public whose tax money supports his show...
...When Robert Nozick died earlier this year, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his New York Times obituary, "The implications of 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' are strongly libertarian and proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification...
...Judging by their wild and crazy reaction to their defeat on November 5, one can only conclude that this election has left liberal elites further out of touch with reality than at any time in recent memory...
...Hence the rage at Bush, the contempt for the electorate, and the spinning of deeply disturbed and highly entertaining conspiracy theories...
...Liberalism needs no philosophical justification because it only wants to do good...
...No, not his evil intentions—he being too dimwit-ted even to merit moral opprobrium—but the evil intentions of those manipulating him behind the scenes...
...There have been three successful Republican presidents in the modern era (i.e., since the New Deal), all of whose successes confounded the liberal elites...
...It was a triumph of experience over hope, the very definition of conservatism...
...It's time for the Thorazine...
...Le Pen is a political outsider...
...Le Pen's are in a position to put those views into practice...
...In America, the fascists have achieved power, riding the smile of their front man "boy king," too dense perhaps even to know the interests he serves...
...On to Baghdad—for the timber...
...It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts...
...bert works for the New York Times and thus does not have the same dilemma...
...This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy...
...How to explain history going so wrong...
...the 2002 election they could only attribute to a kind of cosmic false consciousness...
...In fact, that term had no empirical basis whatsoever...
...Bob HerCharles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In contrast, the Democrats' victory two years earlier was sweetly dubbed "Year of the Woman...
...Yet the voters seem to have known precisely what they were doing...
...The 2000 election they could attribute to simple theft...
...Except that things are worse in America because Le Pen lost and Bush won...
...If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture," warned Bill Moyers in his post-election PBS commentary...
...This is a running theme, indeed an obsession, of Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote during the French election that the neofascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen was a mirror image of American Republicanism...
...As a former psychiatrist, I can confidently predict that logic and empirical evidence will have no therapeutic effect...
...The last time the Republicans enjoyed unexpected political victory, the Gingrich revolution of 1994, the liberal consensus was dumbfounded...
...In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr...
...This is truly bizarre...
...The other alleged parts of his agenda—the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine")—are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat...
...It was a Hollywood conceit that Being There, the Peter Sellers film about a retarded recluse who is taken for a mystical genius and becomes president, was a metaphor for Reagan...
...Because it is an article of liberal faith that conservatism is not just wrong but stone coldhearted to the core...
...Conservatives are grateful to find a thinker who can spin logic well enough to cover their tracks, providing "philosophical justification" for their rape and pillage...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
