Lately, we’ve been seeing something that I’m sure many of us had despaired of seeing in our intellectual lifetimes; the left starting to become frightened of the excesses of its own extremism.
Not so fast, says Charles C.W. Cooke; it’s not intellectual honesty, much less human decency, that is driving this brief fadlet:
Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.
They’re worried that they’re eating their own.
Thermidor always arrives.
They are eating their own, but they are all past their freshness date. No wonder they’re feeling ill.
“liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.”
They already have. The GOP controls more state legislatures and governorships, and the federal house and senate. Liberals have a lame-duck president and the federal bureaucracies. A lame duck president and especially the federal bureaucracies have significant power to affect public policy but it is not democratic power. It is the opposite of democrat power. Federal bureaucrats and Obama can do what they wish unrestrained by the voters. Even Democrats believe that is their strength, not their weakness.
It doesn’t look good for Citizen Chambertin, does it? But I do not think Marguerite is safe in the arms of “Citizen Rateau” yet, sad to say.
“If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.”
Schlosser is giving the voting public ENTIRELY too much credit here.
Although, that might just be my Minnesota-centric view. We are the outlier of voting common sense.