[jalisco555]

Liberals have lost their ability to debate well. Their thought-leaders live in a world surrounded by people who agree with them. Any challenge to their world-view quickly reduces them to spluttering indignation. Intellectually bankrupt, they can do no more than throw pies and call their opponents idiots.

[goldstategop]

And they toss sexual profanity at Ann Coulter as if that passes for reasoned thought!

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[sawdust]

I generally agree with this, but there is a TINY sliver of a point in Frank's screed. The point is that a lot (most?) self-professed GOP conservative politions give a lot of lip service to the demands of us social conservatives; in turn we vote for these politicians, and then, once elected, they seem to either forget our demands entirely or at best make only a token effort to enact them. These politicans (and this includes Dubya himself) better realize that we social conservatives are the ones who took the GOP to the dance, and they darn well better show us plenty of attention!!

[Mamzelle]

Frank's lack of specific proposals underscores a common critique: that Democrats on the national level don't stand for anything. Yet he also reminds us that Democrats do stand for something quite far-reaching: the certitude of their own virtue in a wicked world.

[P.O.E.]

I was just thinking the other day, how easy it is to see hypocrisy all around me. Keeps me from pondering and repenting.

Of course, casting stones is big business these days.

[Marauder]

a key Democrat talking point: Why do so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic self-interest and support Republicans?

That this is a "key point" illustrates just how out of touch liberals are. They cannot grasp the fact that business creates jobs, and that to ensure continued success and prosperity, a business owner must treat his employees fairly.

[JCEccles]

"Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans," Frank writes. "Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for CEOs, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society."

An interesting choice of examples. In each case the person is criticized for giving up security in exchange for radical freedom and self-expression.

There likely were antebellum plantation owners who were perplexed when slaves ran away from three sqaures a day and a roof, albeit humble, over their heads, too.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of
wisdom, and observed him--his name I need not mention; he was a politician
whom I selected for examination--and the result was as follows: When I
began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really
wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and
thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was
not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity
was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying
to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of
us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--
for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think
that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the
advantage of him.

-Plato, Apology

[No.6]

"Liberals have lost their ability to debate well. Their thought-leaders live in a world surrounded by people who agree with them. Any challenge to their world-view quickly reduces them to spluttering indignation. Intellectually bankrupt, they can do no more than throw pies and call their opponents idiots."

Yea, but they've been like this since at least the 30s, and only now are people fed up with it. Or rather, perhaps people are only now fed up with it because they GAVE the liberals the chance to enact their utopia and don't like the result.

The article author is right: liberals don't see this as a rejection of their method, but as a sign that they didn't get to enact *enough* of their agenda. Why, if X of something makes something worse, 2X of it would magically make it all better, is a mystery understood only by the self-anointed liberal elite, and not by anyone who lives in the real world. :)

[sauropod]

"What's the Matter With Kansas?" is a lazy, self-satisfied work. It is also an important one. It shows how deep an intellectual hole liberals have dug for themselves. Its success suggests how hard it will be for them to crawl out from it.

Y'know, I've recently read two other books that do this: "Lone Patriot" by Jane Kramer and "the cheating culture" by David Callahan.

Mizz Kramer purposely mischaracterizes some in the land rights movement (in particular Chuck Cushman, whom I've met). She links him (and I believe even identifies him) as a militiaman. This is dishonest on her part. She also makes no bones about being a liberal and refuses to analyze objectively her subject matter (the "Patriot" movement).

Mr. Callahan starts out with an interesting premise but soils himself when he complains about David Brock and the Paula Jones story, but refuses to say anything about how Brock went over to the dark side (now head of Media Matters) and is in the business of smearing people (like Jeff Gannon and others). Mr. Callahan's book was published in 2004, so him not knowing what Brock now has become is no excuse.

Both of these books give the 'Rats and the Liberals a free pass. Both of these books are intellectually lazy, self-satisfied screeds that totally gut any chance of convincing a reader not of their ideological ilk of their position.

Reading them was kind of like watching a car wreck. Awful to watch but you can't turn away from the horror.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Even worse, though, is the fact that they don't know that they don't debate well.

[x]

"Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans," Frank writes. "Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for CEOs, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society."

Unfortunately for Frank's argument, the big turn away from the Democrats started in the 1970s and 1980s when unions were still riding high in the US. Liberals and Democrats turned to a radical social and cultural agenda that alienated plenty of working people. The Democratic Party came increasingly to be seen as the mouthpiece of a small part of the population, and the majority turned against it.

America is a free country, and people aren't locked into a "working class" identity. They're more apt to move up, move on, or think for themselves. Where people are less mobile, where there aren't alternatives, and where one is defined as working class before all else, the Democrats are stronger. In many of those mill towns the factories have moved out, so the people have become more and more dependent on the government for support.

Liberals tell people that the past is gone. It's time to move on and leave traditional values behind. But Frank plays on longings for an old world that's also vanished: the agrarian prairie filled with self-reliant small farmers, the old main street with its small, independent, shopkeepers, or the midcentury industrial America with strong unions and feelings of class solidarity.

If liberals were honest about wanting to retain that world Frank might have a good argument. But when Democrats have been in power they've done little to preserve those old ways and much to destroy them. They want that old world even less than large corporations do. It's not about that older America, but about who has power in the here and now, not about keeping an older decentralized and self-reliant America but about who officiates at the funeral.

What people are doing in voting Republican is trying to bring some of those older beliefs and moral values into the present. What they rightly fear, is that liberals would take even that away from them.

[jonno]

bump