13 thoughts on “HERITAGE FOUNDATION: “How Modern Liberals Think””
I watched the first ten minutes of this thing. So tell me — is there some point at which a Catholic priest shows up and does an exorcism on this guy, or does he continue on in the same way for the full 45 minutes?
Where he shines I think is in his explanation on the false idealism of modern liberalism, particularly the notion that because America (could be anything but almost always is something that really should be safeguarded and cherished) is not perfect, it must be source and cause of all imperfection. He (correctly) takes care not to equate all Democrats with modern liberals, but is a bit sloppy but equating cultural and moral conservativism with Republicans, but, not claiming to be a philosopher as much as cultural observer, this can be overlooked.
A topic he broaches but does not directly address is that modern liberals can’t think beyond their moral pronouncements, as if the correct moral posture (in their eyes anyway) trumps any further discussion about the cultural ramifications of their ideas once the ideas are implemented. Moving from the left to the right, this blindness (and it is a huge blind spot) is very evident to him. (This is also one reason why liberalism has such difficulty recognizing evil.)
Some of his ideas and observations are very good. Your crack about an exorcism is an example of how liberals dismiss ideas not to their liking rather than engage and disprove them.
Fr. Hans writes: “Some of his ideas and observations are very good. Your crack about an exorcism is an example of how liberals dismiss ideas not to their liking rather than engage and disprove them.”
Well . . . . a few minutes into the talk he says that liberals are wrong on every issue. Not some issues, not most issues, but EVERY issue. He then speculates on whether this is because liberals are evil or stupid.
For reasons unknown to me, conservatives can’t get enough of liberal-bashing. I have come to believe that liberal-bashing works for conservatives as a kind of wierd pornography. Like porn, they’re addicted to it. They can’t get enough. Like porn, it often involves domination and sadism. Porn and liberal-bashing both don’t make any sense, because they’re all about stimulation rather than rationality. In the same way that you don’t care if the plot of a porno movie makes sense, you don’t care if the anti-liberal rant makes sense, because it’s not about making sense. As with many porno movies liberal bashing involves dehumanizing and demeaning people. In a porno movie you’re a “slut” or a “whore” or a “bitch.” In liberal-bashing you’re evil, stupid, or a traitor. And in both porn and liberal bashing you end up getting used for someone else’s sadistic pleasure.
But conservatives can’t get enough of this stuff. They love it. They live for it. The AM frequencies are filled with it, but it’s not enough. Rush, Ann, and the appropriately-named Michael Savage aren’t enough. Now this Evan Slime, or whatever his name is has to hold forth on evil and stupid liberals for 45 minutes. But that won’t be enough either.
You say this guy has some good ideas, and maybe he does. But liberal bashing isn’t an idea, and if the dude wants to lead off with that then someone else can wait around for the “good ideas.”
Oh, and I particularly liked his defense of the war in Iraq. Yeah, what were the stupid liberals thinking when they opposed that!
I don’t know, maybe this stuff just passes over you because you’re used to it, but this continual foaming at the mouth over liberals is bizarre, to the point that there is something pathological about it. Conservatives slide into it so easily they are not even aware of how weird it is.
Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.
..Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.
The only good news for conservatives:
Yet the Democrats’ growing advantage in party identification is tempered by the fact that the Democratic Party’s overall standing with the public is no better than it was when President Bush was first inaugurated in 2001.
Independents are moving over to the Democrats but it’s more about unhappiness with Republicans, than any new attraction the Democrats have to offer.
Clearly George Bush has hurt the conservartive movement. However as one blogger noted:
Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party’s success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.
If conservatives don’t start addressing the kitchen table issues that most Americans care about, like health care and wage stagnation, instead of focusing entirely on gay marriage and abortion their movement is going to fade into insignifigance.
Guys, calm down. Try this fundamental distinction on for size: not all Democrats are liberals; not all conservatives are Republican.
Dean, Democratic gains, if they occur in any appreciable amounts (not at all guaranteed, IMO), are due to Republican failures, not any inherent stability in the Democratic party or confidence in Democratic ideas, a point the poll makes clear. Don’t start tooting the horns just yet.
Jim, look at the venue. It’s the Heritage Foundation. You expect critique of liberal ideas from them just as I expect critique of conservative ideas from, say, the Salon website. But I, or any other conservative I know of, don’t refute the ideas with cries of “liberal bashing.” “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” a well known conservative Democrat used to say.
And again, characterizations like “foaming at the mouth” or the speaker needs an “exorcism” just makes liberals look foolish. You wonder why liberal ideas don’t get much traction? One reason is because people see through the invective. The second reason is that many ideas are weak and indefensible. If you would listen to speaker a bit more and try to comprehend what he is saying, you would get a better grasp on the nature of the weaknesses and see that your dismissal of the critique is not informed.
Back to politics: Can either of you name any new idea offered from the liberal side since the Democrats regained Congress? I can’t. It’s the old stuff all over again led by the dinosaurs that came of age in the 1960’s. What else explains the rise of a neophyte like Obama? All we get is a fruity apocalypticism with loopy predictions like Florida will be half covered with water (something like that) in 50 years. We are supposed to take this seriously?
You guys have to lighten up. Have a little fun with this stuff.
Fr. Hans writes: “Jim, look at the venue. It’s the Heritage foundation. You expect critique of liberal ideas from them just as I expect critique of conservative ideas from, say, the Salon website.”
I have absolutely no problem with a critique of liberals ideas. I do have a problem with blanket, scorched earth, take-no-prisoners slanderous criticism of liberals in general. If this kind of stuff is just par for the course for Heritage, then I would have to conclude that it is an extremist organization. I have never read anything comparable on Salon.
Fr. Hans: “But I, or any other conservative I know of, don’t refute the ideas with crys of “liberal bashing.” If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen a well known conservative Democrat used to say.”
But the personal attacks against liberals in general only serve to poison the discussion. When someone says that liberals are wrong on EVERY issue, I don’t know what to do with that. It is such a blatantly false statement that the person uttering it either is lying, or lives on a different planet. In either case, what is the basis for discussion?
Fr Hans: “And again, characterizations like “foaming at the mouth” or the speaker needs an “exorcism” just makes liberals look foolish. You wonder why liberal ideas don’t get much traction? One reason is because people see through the invective.”
Invective? Invective?? Your dude speculates on whether I am evil or stupid, and I have invective?
Fr. Hans: “The second reason is that many ideas are weak and indefensible. If you would listen to speaker a bit more and try to comprehend what he is saying, you would get a better grasp on the nature of the weaknesses and see that your dismissal of the critique is not informed.”
This is like a black man going to a Klan rally and hearing about how all blacks are dirty and lazy, and is that because they are evil or stupid. After hearing that the black man leaves the rally and you come up to him and say “you should have stayed around longer so as to better comprehend what the speaker was saying.”
Fr. Hans: “Can either of you name any new idea offered from the liberal side since the Democrats regained Congress? I can’t.”
Well, let’s see. There’s Ron Wyden’s plan for healthcare reform that doesn’t involve “socialized medicine.” There’s the idea that we shouldn’t stay in Iraq indefinitely and instead refocus on the real war on terror, which with the Bush administration is a truly radical idea. There’s a couple to start with.
So what exactly are the exciting Republican ideas? You guys have been completely running things for the last few years. It would be nice to hear what you think those ideas were.
[quote]This is like a black man going to a Klan rally and hearing about how all blacks are dirty and lazy, and is that because they are evil or stupid.[/quote]
Flawed analogy. The video talks about ideas, yet you compare it to a Klan rally because it critiques ideas you value. If this bombastic demonizing of opposition is how you normally consider ideas you disagree with, Sayet may be onto something when he says modern Liberalism lacks discriminate thought.
Jim, seriously, don’t take this stuff so personally. All this is part of the give and take of culture and politics. It’s interesting stuff. Some of it is overstated. Some of it is accurate. That’s it.
Look, the speaker (a comic, not a career politician, not a professional pundit) outlined what he sees is the flaw at the heart of the liberal experiment. This flaw can be expressed in a handful of ways from C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” to Jean-Francois Revel’s “The Totalitarian Temptation”, that is, from religion to culture to politics.
It doesn’t follow though that all Democrats are liberals or all Republican’s conservative. You aren’t personally responsible for every crackpot idea that might come down the line.
Still, having said all that, there is no question that cultural deconstruction is a liberal enterprise. Abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, you know the drill. Does this mean that, say, Republicans don’t get abortions? Nope, not at all. The deconstruction runs deep and the corruption affects everyone.
But the speaker’s focus, in broad terms, is liberal vs. conservative, and even though he clouds the issue by conflating conservatism with the Republican party in places, some of his observations between the two are very accurate. Liberalism (again, not all Democrats) has a difficult time comprehending what needs to be preserved and safeguarded. How else do we explain an ideology that characterizes the destruction of unborn children as social progress, or that America is the locus of evil in the world, or that the marriage of two men is morally equivalent to the marriage of one man and one woman, etc. etc. etc.?
Or, as the speaker pointed out, how do we explain the liberal precept that no criticism of aggressive cultural deconstruction is allowed by persons who themselves are not perfect? This precept functions as a moral absolute in liberal thinking that creates the blindness to the destructive consequences of liberal ideas by closing off any criticism of them. The speaker described how, when he realized that liberals believed it to the point of acting on it, or more precisely not acting against those forces — cultural and political — that sought to destroy the things that are worth protecting, it provoked him to leave the liberal side.
Again, criticism of liberal ideology is not defacto support of the Republican party. This is the arena of ideas, not policy. Distinctions need to be applied across the board. On the Democratic side for example, the rise of Democrats for Life is a welcome repudiation of the liberal anti-life agenda and its members ought to be applauded for their moral courage. The Republicans could do more to criticize the mainstreaming of pornography by mainstream business interests like Comcast and ATT, for example. (Here the anti-business liberal ideologue copulates with with the anti-liberal businessman as the moral corruption spreads through the culture.)
Still, the fact remains that the present leadership of the Democratic party is in thrall to the liberal ideology, not all certainly (running as conservatives is how the Democrats gained power in the last election) but enough. As such, they, depending on your view, are still saddled with the destructive legacy of 1960’s liberalism, or have been chosen to further the liberal agenda. Again, it’s clear that the dinosaurs believe the latter. That’s a major reason why the debate between cultural liberalism vs. cultural conservatism reflexively defaults to a debate about Democrats vs. Republicans and makes the speaker’s points hard to hear.
Note 7. Guest writes:
…Sayet may be onto something when he says modern Liberalism lacks discriminate thought.
Modern liberalism does lack discriminate thought. It substitutes moral posturing for critical thinking.
Guest writes: “The video talks about ideas, yet you compare it to a Klan rally because it critiques ideas you value.”
Well, I just listened to the whole piece, and I didn’t notice that he criticized any idea that I value.
Guest: “If this bombastic demonizing of opposition is how you normally consider ideas you disagree with, Sayet may be onto something when he says modern Liberalism lacks discriminate thought.”
So I’m doing bombastic demonizing? Here’s what Sayet says, based on notes that I took during his talk:
1) Liberals “really do” hate America.
2) Democrats are wrong on “every” issue.
3) Modern liberals side with evil every time.
4) Liberals reject facts, logic, and eliminate rational thought.
5) For the liberal elite, rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry.
So what he does is to cherry pick and recycle various people and facts. So he talks about Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the entertainment business, and so on. Out of this selective mishmash emerges his image of the “modern liberal.” The problem is that you can use that technique to prove anything. Let me give you an example.
He mentions the movie “Munich” in a critical way — that it shows that freedom isn’t worth defending, or that there is no difference between the Israelis and terrorists, or something like that. But he doesn’t mention that Spielberg also made “Saving Private Ryan,” which some say is the greatest war movie ever made. Spielberg was also an executive producer of “Band of Brothers,” the critically acclaimed HBO 10-part series on a company of soldiers in the 101st Airborne division.
So why mention the one movie, but not the others? Because the others would destroy his point. This is not an oversight; it’s intentional. These guys know exactly what they are doing, which is perpetrating a kind of fraud on the listener through a very selective filtering of facts and quotations.
Sayet says little about the war in Iraq, except to opine that we went to war in Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people. The implication he draws from that is that those who opposed the war chose evil over good, Saddam over America, torture and rape rooms over liberation. The only problem is that it’s a completely false picture of how we went to war, and why many people opposed it. He fails to mention that there was overwhelming support by both Democrats and Republicans for the war in Afghanistan. (Oops, I guess the Democrats were right on one issue after all . . .) Again, these omissions are completely intentional and are all part of the fraud that this guy is spreading.
Concerning the Abu Ghraib scandal, he says it was nothing more than acts of a few guards, that no one was killed and no one seriously injured. He doesn’t really care about Abu Ghraib. His point is that the liberal media followed no journalistic standards in pursuing this story.
Here, the conservative who denounces liberals for their indifference to the facts does not himself have the facts. The death of one detainee has already been ruled a homicide by the military. Other detainees were given electric shocks, beatings (even beatings on already injured limbs), sexually abused, sodomized, and so on. He never mentions anything about the root causes of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. I don’t know if these omissions were intentional; perhaps here he just didn’t know what he was talking about.
Sayet just spouts all this stuff. “Democrats are always wrong.” No argument, no evidence, no facts, no logic, no reasoning. “Abu Ghraib, no big deal.” No facts, no argument, no moral reasoning, even as he derides liberals for being without facts, logic, and moral reasoning.
Fr. Hans: “The speaker described how, when he realized that liberals believed it to the point of acting on it, or more precisely not acting against those forces — cultural and political — that sought to destroy the things that are worth protecting, it provoked him to leave the liberal side.”
For him, 9/11 was the defining event. But neglects to mention that Democrats were overwhelmingly in support of the war in Afghanistan, that they voted for the Patriot Act, that immediately after 9/11 Democratic criticism of the president was virtually non-existent. Again, this fellow’s whole argument depends on a very narrow selection of facts.
Father: Here is a critique of the the modern welfare state that reinforces a lot of what you have been saying. It creates disincentives to marriage, and disadvatages for children – I agree with this also.
Incentives matter. If society rewards uneducated young women for becoming single parents, they will adopt that as their career. That is precisely what British politicians have done…
Before the welfare state, both members of a couple needed one another – and, if possible, the extended family – because caring for children is incompatible with simultaneously earning an adequate income for a family. That has not changed. The difference is only that taxpayers now provide that income.
“By the end of the century,” Ms Morgan writes, “73 per cent of lone parents were receiving family credit [to bolster wages] or income support; 57 per cent were receiving housing benefit and 62 per cent council tax benefit. The figures for couples with children were 11 per cent, 8 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.” …
The economic penalties for trying to create and sustain a stable and committed couple are, for those on moderate incomes, substantial. But the economic incentives for “faking it” are impressive.
We shouldn’t leave single parents and their destitude, but recognzing that marriage is a much more socially and individually advantageous condition for both adults and children governmemt should encourage and not discourage it.
The pro-marriage comments following the excerpt are great too.
Jim – Re: Iraq
Sayet says little about the war in Iraq, except to opine that we went to war in Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people.
And from an earlier post:
There’s the idea that we shouldn’t stay in Iraq indefinitely and instead refocus on the real war on terror, which with the Bush administration is a truly radical idea.
Fair enough. Our enemies’ quotes are a much more convincing argument than Sayet’s.
“The most serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” – Bin Laden
“[Iraq] is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.” – al-Zawahiri
Charles Krauthammer wrote an article about ‘refocusing the GWOT just today:
[quote]Here’s what Sayet says, based on notes that I took during his talk:[/quote]
But he does differentiate between the liberal and the modern Liberal, which he implies throughout and specifically says at the end in Q&A. The argument he presents isn’t that all liberals are stupid and evil, but that a very illiberal movement has arisen out of the liberal movement. We can argue the semantics of Sayet’s use of the word liberal/Liberal, but this point remains. This movement has its roots in the writings of Marcuse and Gramsci (and *not* Tocqueville), where the goal is not freedom for all, but privledge for a only few client groups: blacks, women, homosexuals, criminals, etc. These are Marcuse’s words…not mine. Freedom is not a big priority for him.
As for the Munich example, Spieldberg is not the object of Sayet’s argument. Rather, the target is the nihilistic themes of Munich, which were rewarded with an Oscar nomination. Compare that to the themes of Casblanca, which produced during another war. The argument he makes and the movies he uses to illustrate it aren’t going to be ever present in every movie made or nominated. Otherwise, he wouldn’t need to argue the point. In fact, it proves there is a difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘Liberal’. But themes that erode traditional ideas and beliefs are present in entertainment, and we see them becoming more common. Mystic River, Saw, Seinfeld, Syriana, the Simpsons, Married with Children, Dogma, Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Fight Club all actively undermine traditional ideas of family, religion, and patriotism to show you that traditional honored values are not that great, and in fact, nothing but a bad joke. Dostoyevski wrote a lot about this type of stuff. First, to remake a people, you have to cut their roots and make them forget who they are. Only then can you make ‘Imagine’ more than a song, which is Sayet’s point.
Of course, just because we might have ‘nothing to kill or die for’ doesn’t mean others don’t. That’s the most present danger that Liberals (capital ‘L’, not liberals) introduce.
Guest writes: “Fair enough. Our enemies’ quotes are a much more convincing argument than Sayet’s. . . . Charles Krauthammer wrote an article about ‘refocusing the GWOT just today.”
While there are fighters associated with Al Qaeda, the vast majority of insurgents in Iraq are indigenous and members of one of the many Iraqi militias. Al Qaeda is largely a Sunni movement, and so there is little to no chance that they could sieze power in Iraq.
Concerning the current strategy in Iraq, I don’t want to get into a big debate. I’ll just say that Petraeus has a good strategy in mind, but there are three problems with it. First, it comes four years too late. Second, it is basically a long-term strategy that could take five, ten, or more years to play out, and I don’t think anyone believes we can stay there that long without the country gearing up for a long-term war and implementing a draft. And the clock for that starts NOW, not four years ago. And third, there aren’t enough troops in country to make it work.
Now maybe I’m right or maybe I’m wrong. But the above concerns have nothing to do with “hating America,” or always supporing evil. They are very practical concerns, the same kind of concerns raised by the professional military prior to our involvement in Iraq.
Guest: “As for the Munich example, Spieldberg is not the object of Sayet’s argument. Rather, the target is the nihilistic themes of Munich, which were rewarded with an Oscar nomination. Compare that to the themes of Casblanca, which produced during another war.”
And compare Casablanca to All Quiet on the Western Front, also rewarded with an Oscar, produced between wars in 1930. It is definetly an anti-war film. In fact when the film was shown in Germany “Nazi rabble rousers stormed screenings of the film in Germany, often releasing rats or stink bombs into the theaters, as the wounds of defeat in the First World War still ran deep. This led to the film ultimately being banned by the Nazi party.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020629/trivia Militarists always hate movies that are anti-war.
Guest: “The argument he makes and the movies he uses to illustrate it aren’t going to be ever present in every movie made or nominated.”
Sure, but the problem I have is when the argument is made by carefully selecting items that support the argument while ignoring the rest. Yes, there are anti-war movies or that are ambivalent about war. But for every anti-war movie, there are probably several movies celebrating martial values and physical courage.
Guest: “But themes that erode traditional ideas and beliefs are present in entertainment, and we see them becoming more common. Mystic River, Saw, Seinfeld, Syriana, the Simpsons, Married with Children, Dogma, Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Fight Club all actively undermine traditional ideas of family, religion, and patriotism to show you that traditional honored values are not that great, and in fact, nothing but a bad joke.”
Some of those I’ve seen, and some I haven’t. I think perhaps you are more in touch with “liberal” entertainment than I am. Of the ones I have seen, I don’t interpret these as an attack on traditional values or as being ammunition in the culture war.
For example, the movie Office Space ridicules managers, consultants, work slogans, employees, employee get-togethers, “cubicles,” and generally anything having to do with work. So is it an “attack” on the workplace? Is it part of the liberal intent to denigrate and devalue work? Certainly someone could interpret it that way. Is It’s a Wonderful Life an attack on free-market capitalism as personified by old man Potter? Is the 1955 Night of the Hunter an attack on religion? Is Elmer Fudd an attack on hunters?
See, I think what’s happening is that a number of people on the right, especially the religious right, see things in terms of either being in support of or and attack on traditional values. In conversations with these folks, I have feeling like I’m in a foreign country, in which the only currency available for transactions is ideological.
Traditional values, as far as I can tell, are more or less defined as those present in the country during WWII. So anything less than an enthusiastic embrace of warfare is seen as an attack on traditional values. An embrace of warfare — even an ill-conceived and poorly executed war — is seen as a defense of traditional values. Presentations of non-traditional families are seen as attacks. Anything sex-related that was not prominent in the 1940s is an attack. And so on. (Is it an attack on traditional values for a man to appear in public without a suit, necktie, and hat? It may be.)
I watched the first ten minutes of this thing. So tell me — is there some point at which a Catholic priest shows up and does an exorcism on this guy, or does he continue on in the same way for the full 45 minutes?
Where he shines I think is in his explanation on the false idealism of modern liberalism, particularly the notion that because America (could be anything but almost always is something that really should be safeguarded and cherished) is not perfect, it must be source and cause of all imperfection. He (correctly) takes care not to equate all Democrats with modern liberals, but is a bit sloppy but equating cultural and moral conservativism with Republicans, but, not claiming to be a philosopher as much as cultural observer, this can be overlooked.
A topic he broaches but does not directly address is that modern liberals can’t think beyond their moral pronouncements, as if the correct moral posture (in their eyes anyway) trumps any further discussion about the cultural ramifications of their ideas once the ideas are implemented. Moving from the left to the right, this blindness (and it is a huge blind spot) is very evident to him. (This is also one reason why liberalism has such difficulty recognizing evil.)
Some of his ideas and observations are very good. Your crack about an exorcism is an example of how liberals dismiss ideas not to their liking rather than engage and disprove them.
Fr. Hans writes: “Some of his ideas and observations are very good. Your crack about an exorcism is an example of how liberals dismiss ideas not to their liking rather than engage and disprove them.”
Well . . . . a few minutes into the talk he says that liberals are wrong on every issue. Not some issues, not most issues, but EVERY issue. He then speculates on whether this is because liberals are evil or stupid.
For reasons unknown to me, conservatives can’t get enough of liberal-bashing. I have come to believe that liberal-bashing works for conservatives as a kind of wierd pornography. Like porn, they’re addicted to it. They can’t get enough. Like porn, it often involves domination and sadism. Porn and liberal-bashing both don’t make any sense, because they’re all about stimulation rather than rationality. In the same way that you don’t care if the plot of a porno movie makes sense, you don’t care if the anti-liberal rant makes sense, because it’s not about making sense. As with many porno movies liberal bashing involves dehumanizing and demeaning people. In a porno movie you’re a “slut” or a “whore” or a “bitch.” In liberal-bashing you’re evil, stupid, or a traitor. And in both porn and liberal bashing you end up getting used for someone else’s sadistic pleasure.
But conservatives can’t get enough of this stuff. They love it. They live for it. The AM frequencies are filled with it, but it’s not enough. Rush, Ann, and the appropriately-named Michael Savage aren’t enough. Now this Evan Slime, or whatever his name is has to hold forth on evil and stupid liberals for 45 minutes. But that won’t be enough either.
You say this guy has some good ideas, and maybe he does. But liberal bashing isn’t an idea, and if the dude wants to lead off with that then someone else can wait around for the “good ideas.”
Oh, and I particularly liked his defense of the war in Iraq. Yeah, what were the stupid liberals thinking when they opposed that!
I don’t know, maybe this stuff just passes over you because you’re used to it, but this continual foaming at the mouth over liberals is bizarre, to the point that there is something pathological about it. Conservatives slide into it so easily they are not even aware of how weird it is.
If I were a conservative the latest findings by the Pew Research Center would give me pause. On March 22nd Pew released a report entitled: Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, Political Landscape More Favorable To Democrats
The report finds:
The only good news for conservatives:
Independents are moving over to the Democrats but it’s more about unhappiness with Republicans, than any new attraction the Democrats have to offer.
Clearly George Bush has hurt the conservartive movement. However as one blogger noted:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/27/eumerica/
If conservatives don’t start addressing the kitchen table issues that most Americans care about, like health care and wage stagnation, instead of focusing entirely on gay marriage and abortion their movement is going to fade into insignifigance.
Guys, calm down. Try this fundamental distinction on for size: not all Democrats are liberals; not all conservatives are Republican.
Dean, Democratic gains, if they occur in any appreciable amounts (not at all guaranteed, IMO), are due to Republican failures, not any inherent stability in the Democratic party or confidence in Democratic ideas, a point the poll makes clear. Don’t start tooting the horns just yet.
Jim, look at the venue. It’s the Heritage Foundation. You expect critique of liberal ideas from them just as I expect critique of conservative ideas from, say, the Salon website. But I, or any other conservative I know of, don’t refute the ideas with cries of “liberal bashing.” “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” a well known conservative Democrat used to say.
And again, characterizations like “foaming at the mouth” or the speaker needs an “exorcism” just makes liberals look foolish. You wonder why liberal ideas don’t get much traction? One reason is because people see through the invective. The second reason is that many ideas are weak and indefensible. If you would listen to speaker a bit more and try to comprehend what he is saying, you would get a better grasp on the nature of the weaknesses and see that your dismissal of the critique is not informed.
Back to politics: Can either of you name any new idea offered from the liberal side since the Democrats regained Congress? I can’t. It’s the old stuff all over again led by the dinosaurs that came of age in the 1960’s. What else explains the rise of a neophyte like Obama? All we get is a fruity apocalypticism with loopy predictions like Florida will be half covered with water (something like that) in 50 years. We are supposed to take this seriously?
You guys have to lighten up. Have a little fun with this stuff.
Fr. Hans writes: “Jim, look at the venue. It’s the Heritage foundation. You expect critique of liberal ideas from them just as I expect critique of conservative ideas from, say, the Salon website.”
I have absolutely no problem with a critique of liberals ideas. I do have a problem with blanket, scorched earth, take-no-prisoners slanderous criticism of liberals in general. If this kind of stuff is just par for the course for Heritage, then I would have to conclude that it is an extremist organization. I have never read anything comparable on Salon.
Fr. Hans: “But I, or any other conservative I know of, don’t refute the ideas with crys of “liberal bashing.” If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen a well known conservative Democrat used to say.”
But the personal attacks against liberals in general only serve to poison the discussion. When someone says that liberals are wrong on EVERY issue, I don’t know what to do with that. It is such a blatantly false statement that the person uttering it either is lying, or lives on a different planet. In either case, what is the basis for discussion?
Fr Hans: “And again, characterizations like “foaming at the mouth” or the speaker needs an “exorcism” just makes liberals look foolish. You wonder why liberal ideas don’t get much traction? One reason is because people see through the invective.”
Invective? Invective?? Your dude speculates on whether I am evil or stupid, and I have invective?
Fr. Hans: “The second reason is that many ideas are weak and indefensible. If you would listen to speaker a bit more and try to comprehend what he is saying, you would get a better grasp on the nature of the weaknesses and see that your dismissal of the critique is not informed.”
This is like a black man going to a Klan rally and hearing about how all blacks are dirty and lazy, and is that because they are evil or stupid. After hearing that the black man leaves the rally and you come up to him and say “you should have stayed around longer so as to better comprehend what the speaker was saying.”
Fr. Hans: “Can either of you name any new idea offered from the liberal side since the Democrats regained Congress? I can’t.”
Well, let’s see. There’s Ron Wyden’s plan for healthcare reform that doesn’t involve “socialized medicine.” There’s the idea that we shouldn’t stay in Iraq indefinitely and instead refocus on the real war on terror, which with the Bush administration is a truly radical idea. There’s a couple to start with.
So what exactly are the exciting Republican ideas? You guys have been completely running things for the last few years. It would be nice to hear what you think those ideas were.
[quote]This is like a black man going to a Klan rally and hearing about how all blacks are dirty and lazy, and is that because they are evil or stupid.[/quote]
Flawed analogy. The video talks about ideas, yet you compare it to a Klan rally because it critiques ideas you value. If this bombastic demonizing of opposition is how you normally consider ideas you disagree with, Sayet may be onto something when he says modern Liberalism lacks discriminate thought.
Jim, seriously, don’t take this stuff so personally. All this is part of the give and take of culture and politics. It’s interesting stuff. Some of it is overstated. Some of it is accurate. That’s it.
Look, the speaker (a comic, not a career politician, not a professional pundit) outlined what he sees is the flaw at the heart of the liberal experiment. This flaw can be expressed in a handful of ways from C.S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” to Jean-Francois Revel’s “The Totalitarian Temptation”, that is, from religion to culture to politics.
It doesn’t follow though that all Democrats are liberals or all Republican’s conservative. You aren’t personally responsible for every crackpot idea that might come down the line.
Still, having said all that, there is no question that cultural deconstruction is a liberal enterprise. Abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, you know the drill. Does this mean that, say, Republicans don’t get abortions? Nope, not at all. The deconstruction runs deep and the corruption affects everyone.
But the speaker’s focus, in broad terms, is liberal vs. conservative, and even though he clouds the issue by conflating conservatism with the Republican party in places, some of his observations between the two are very accurate. Liberalism (again, not all Democrats) has a difficult time comprehending what needs to be preserved and safeguarded. How else do we explain an ideology that characterizes the destruction of unborn children as social progress, or that America is the locus of evil in the world, or that the marriage of two men is morally equivalent to the marriage of one man and one woman, etc. etc. etc.?
Or, as the speaker pointed out, how do we explain the liberal precept that no criticism of aggressive cultural deconstruction is allowed by persons who themselves are not perfect? This precept functions as a moral absolute in liberal thinking that creates the blindness to the destructive consequences of liberal ideas by closing off any criticism of them. The speaker described how, when he realized that liberals believed it to the point of acting on it, or more precisely not acting against those forces — cultural and political — that sought to destroy the things that are worth protecting, it provoked him to leave the liberal side.
Again, criticism of liberal ideology is not defacto support of the Republican party. This is the arena of ideas, not policy. Distinctions need to be applied across the board. On the Democratic side for example, the rise of Democrats for Life is a welcome repudiation of the liberal anti-life agenda and its members ought to be applauded for their moral courage. The Republicans could do more to criticize the mainstreaming of pornography by mainstream business interests like Comcast and ATT, for example. (Here the anti-business liberal ideologue copulates with with the anti-liberal businessman as the moral corruption spreads through the culture.)
Still, the fact remains that the present leadership of the Democratic party is in thrall to the liberal ideology, not all certainly (running as conservatives is how the Democrats gained power in the last election) but enough. As such, they, depending on your view, are still saddled with the destructive legacy of 1960’s liberalism, or have been chosen to further the liberal agenda. Again, it’s clear that the dinosaurs believe the latter. That’s a major reason why the debate between cultural liberalism vs. cultural conservatism reflexively defaults to a debate about Democrats vs. Republicans and makes the speaker’s points hard to hear.
Note 7. Guest writes:
Modern liberalism does lack discriminate thought. It substitutes moral posturing for critical thinking.
Guest writes: “The video talks about ideas, yet you compare it to a Klan rally because it critiques ideas you value.”
Well, I just listened to the whole piece, and I didn’t notice that he criticized any idea that I value.
Guest: “If this bombastic demonizing of opposition is how you normally consider ideas you disagree with, Sayet may be onto something when he says modern Liberalism lacks discriminate thought.”
So I’m doing bombastic demonizing? Here’s what Sayet says, based on notes that I took during his talk:
1) Liberals “really do” hate America.
2) Democrats are wrong on “every” issue.
3) Modern liberals side with evil every time.
4) Liberals reject facts, logic, and eliminate rational thought.
5) For the liberal elite, rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry.
So what he does is to cherry pick and recycle various people and facts. So he talks about Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the entertainment business, and so on. Out of this selective mishmash emerges his image of the “modern liberal.” The problem is that you can use that technique to prove anything. Let me give you an example.
He mentions the movie “Munich” in a critical way — that it shows that freedom isn’t worth defending, or that there is no difference between the Israelis and terrorists, or something like that. But he doesn’t mention that Spielberg also made “Saving Private Ryan,” which some say is the greatest war movie ever made. Spielberg was also an executive producer of “Band of Brothers,” the critically acclaimed HBO 10-part series on a company of soldiers in the 101st Airborne division.
So why mention the one movie, but not the others? Because the others would destroy his point. This is not an oversight; it’s intentional. These guys know exactly what they are doing, which is perpetrating a kind of fraud on the listener through a very selective filtering of facts and quotations.
Sayet says little about the war in Iraq, except to opine that we went to war in Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people. The implication he draws from that is that those who opposed the war chose evil over good, Saddam over America, torture and rape rooms over liberation. The only problem is that it’s a completely false picture of how we went to war, and why many people opposed it. He fails to mention that there was overwhelming support by both Democrats and Republicans for the war in Afghanistan. (Oops, I guess the Democrats were right on one issue after all . . .) Again, these omissions are completely intentional and are all part of the fraud that this guy is spreading.
Concerning the Abu Ghraib scandal, he says it was nothing more than acts of a few guards, that no one was killed and no one seriously injured. He doesn’t really care about Abu Ghraib. His point is that the liberal media followed no journalistic standards in pursuing this story.
Here, the conservative who denounces liberals for their indifference to the facts does not himself have the facts. The death of one detainee has already been ruled a homicide by the military. Other detainees were given electric shocks, beatings (even beatings on already injured limbs), sexually abused, sodomized, and so on. He never mentions anything about the root causes of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. I don’t know if these omissions were intentional; perhaps here he just didn’t know what he was talking about.
Sayet just spouts all this stuff. “Democrats are always wrong.” No argument, no evidence, no facts, no logic, no reasoning. “Abu Ghraib, no big deal.” No facts, no argument, no moral reasoning, even as he derides liberals for being without facts, logic, and moral reasoning.
Fr. Hans: “The speaker described how, when he realized that liberals believed it to the point of acting on it, or more precisely not acting against those forces — cultural and political — that sought to destroy the things that are worth protecting, it provoked him to leave the liberal side.”
For him, 9/11 was the defining event. But neglects to mention that Democrats were overwhelmingly in support of the war in Afghanistan, that they voted for the Patriot Act, that immediately after 9/11 Democratic criticism of the president was virtually non-existent. Again, this fellow’s whole argument depends on a very narrow selection of facts.
Father: Here is a critique of the the modern welfare state that reinforces a lot of what you have been saying. It creates disincentives to marriage, and disadvatages for children – I agree with this also.
Martin Wolf: The War on the Traditional Family
We shouldn’t leave single parents and their destitude, but recognzing that marriage is a much more socially and individually advantageous condition for both adults and children governmemt should encourage and not discourage it.
The pro-marriage comments following the excerpt are great too.
Jim – Re: Iraq
And from an earlier post:
Fair enough. Our enemies’ quotes are a much more convincing argument than Sayet’s.
“The most serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” – Bin Laden
“[Iraq] is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.” – al-Zawahiri
Charles Krauthammer wrote an article about ‘refocusing the GWOT just today:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/03/afghanistan_is_not_an_argument.html
[quote]Here’s what Sayet says, based on notes that I took during his talk:[/quote]
But he does differentiate between the liberal and the modern Liberal, which he implies throughout and specifically says at the end in Q&A. The argument he presents isn’t that all liberals are stupid and evil, but that a very illiberal movement has arisen out of the liberal movement. We can argue the semantics of Sayet’s use of the word liberal/Liberal, but this point remains. This movement has its roots in the writings of Marcuse and Gramsci (and *not* Tocqueville), where the goal is not freedom for all, but privledge for a only few client groups: blacks, women, homosexuals, criminals, etc. These are Marcuse’s words…not mine. Freedom is not a big priority for him.
As for the Munich example, Spieldberg is not the object of Sayet’s argument. Rather, the target is the nihilistic themes of Munich, which were rewarded with an Oscar nomination. Compare that to the themes of Casblanca, which produced during another war. The argument he makes and the movies he uses to illustrate it aren’t going to be ever present in every movie made or nominated. Otherwise, he wouldn’t need to argue the point. In fact, it proves there is a difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘Liberal’. But themes that erode traditional ideas and beliefs are present in entertainment, and we see them becoming more common. Mystic River, Saw, Seinfeld, Syriana, the Simpsons, Married with Children, Dogma, Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Fight Club all actively undermine traditional ideas of family, religion, and patriotism to show you that traditional honored values are not that great, and in fact, nothing but a bad joke. Dostoyevski wrote a lot about this type of stuff. First, to remake a people, you have to cut their roots and make them forget who they are. Only then can you make ‘Imagine’ more than a song, which is Sayet’s point.
Of course, just because we might have ‘nothing to kill or die for’ doesn’t mean others don’t. That’s the most present danger that Liberals (capital ‘L’, not liberals) introduce.
Guest writes: “Fair enough. Our enemies’ quotes are a much more convincing argument than Sayet’s. . . . Charles Krauthammer wrote an article about ‘refocusing the GWOT just today.”
While there are fighters associated with Al Qaeda, the vast majority of insurgents in Iraq are indigenous and members of one of the many Iraqi militias. Al Qaeda is largely a Sunni movement, and so there is little to no chance that they could sieze power in Iraq.
Concerning the current strategy in Iraq, I don’t want to get into a big debate. I’ll just say that Petraeus has a good strategy in mind, but there are three problems with it. First, it comes four years too late. Second, it is basically a long-term strategy that could take five, ten, or more years to play out, and I don’t think anyone believes we can stay there that long without the country gearing up for a long-term war and implementing a draft. And the clock for that starts NOW, not four years ago. And third, there aren’t enough troops in country to make it work.
Now maybe I’m right or maybe I’m wrong. But the above concerns have nothing to do with “hating America,” or always supporing evil. They are very practical concerns, the same kind of concerns raised by the professional military prior to our involvement in Iraq.
Guest: “As for the Munich example, Spieldberg is not the object of Sayet’s argument. Rather, the target is the nihilistic themes of Munich, which were rewarded with an Oscar nomination. Compare that to the themes of Casblanca, which produced during another war.”
And compare Casablanca to All Quiet on the Western Front, also rewarded with an Oscar, produced between wars in 1930. It is definetly an anti-war film. In fact when the film was shown in Germany “Nazi rabble rousers stormed screenings of the film in Germany, often releasing rats or stink bombs into the theaters, as the wounds of defeat in the First World War still ran deep. This led to the film ultimately being banned by the Nazi party.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020629/trivia Militarists always hate movies that are anti-war.
Guest: “The argument he makes and the movies he uses to illustrate it aren’t going to be ever present in every movie made or nominated.”
Sure, but the problem I have is when the argument is made by carefully selecting items that support the argument while ignoring the rest. Yes, there are anti-war movies or that are ambivalent about war. But for every anti-war movie, there are probably several movies celebrating martial values and physical courage.
Guest: “But themes that erode traditional ideas and beliefs are present in entertainment, and we see them becoming more common. Mystic River, Saw, Seinfeld, Syriana, the Simpsons, Married with Children, Dogma, Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Fight Club all actively undermine traditional ideas of family, religion, and patriotism to show you that traditional honored values are not that great, and in fact, nothing but a bad joke.”
Some of those I’ve seen, and some I haven’t. I think perhaps you are more in touch with “liberal” entertainment than I am. Of the ones I have seen, I don’t interpret these as an attack on traditional values or as being ammunition in the culture war.
For example, the movie Office Space ridicules managers, consultants, work slogans, employees, employee get-togethers, “cubicles,” and generally anything having to do with work. So is it an “attack” on the workplace? Is it part of the liberal intent to denigrate and devalue work? Certainly someone could interpret it that way. Is It’s a Wonderful Life an attack on free-market capitalism as personified by old man Potter? Is the 1955 Night of the Hunter an attack on religion? Is Elmer Fudd an attack on hunters?
See, I think what’s happening is that a number of people on the right, especially the religious right, see things in terms of either being in support of or and attack on traditional values. In conversations with these folks, I have feeling like I’m in a foreign country, in which the only currency available for transactions is ideological.
Traditional values, as far as I can tell, are more or less defined as those present in the country during WWII. So anything less than an enthusiastic embrace of warfare is seen as an attack on traditional values. An embrace of warfare — even an ill-conceived and poorly executed war — is seen as a defense of traditional values. Presentations of non-traditional families are seen as attacks. Anything sex-related that was not prominent in the 1940s is an attack. And so on. (Is it an attack on traditional values for a man to appear in public without a suit, necktie, and hat? It may be.)