Free Republic

It’s tempting to call “democracy” meaningless in today’s parlance. Except it has a meaning: the opposite of what its dictionary entry says. “Democracy” now means not the rule or sovereignty of the people but the fiat of elites and “experts.” When the people can be persuaded, duped, or bullied into ratifying expert insistence, so much the better. That extra pretense of legitimacy helps quiet and discredit dissent. When they can’t, no matter. The “right thing” will be done, come what may, and that too is “democratic” under the new meaning. The cloyingly disingenuous phrase “our democracy” really means “their oligarchy.”...

If you want to see the worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like upstate New York or inland California—in states they control. The fondest hope among the blue bourgeoise lies with the demographic eclipse of their red-state foes. Some clearly hope that the less-educated “dying white America,“ already suffering shorter lifespans, in part due to alcoholism and opioid abuse, is destined to fade from the scene. Then the blue lords can take over a country with which they can identify without embarrassment. If you want to see worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like...

America’s largest cities are increasingly divided into three classes: the affluent, the poor, and the nomadic class of young people who generally come to the city for a relatively brief period and then leave. New York, the aspirational city of my grandparents, now has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, with Los Angeles and San Francisco not far behind. In 1980 Manhattan, New York’s wealthiest borough, ranked 17th among U.S. counties for social inequality; by 2007 Bloomberg’s “luxury city” was first, with the top fifth earning 52 times the income...

Sally Field was widely ridiculed some years ago for gushing in her Oscar acceptance speech that: “You like me, you really like me.” Post-election analysis is split about the reasons President Bush won re-election. Immediate reaction focused upon exit polls that seemed to show moral values as the deciding issue; later commentary has rejected that conclusion as the result of a poorly drawn question. I don't know why Bush won, as people voted the way they did for any number of reasons. But one thing can safely be said about the election. To paraphrase Sally, the chattering classes hate people...

So John Kerry lost the election not because most of the nation rejected his approach to Iraq or health care or taxes. Rather, he lost because President Bush succeeded in energizing the Bible-thumping homophobic masses averse to redefining marriage. Or so goes the story line emerging from Blue America media outlets. It's been extrapolated from exit polling on the primacy of "moral values," and from the fact that referendums to ban gay marriage passed easily in the 11 states where they were on the ballot. But we think these returns tell a different story, and it's one that liberals who...

Like an anthropologist touring deepest, darkest Africa, the writer David Brooks has courageously trekked to Middle America, studied the natives there, and reported back to readers of The Atlantic Monthly, one of the nation’s toniest opinion magazines. He reports that out here in Red America (as the last election maps dubbed George Bush country) we’re dumber, poorer, fatter, and less well dressed than those in Blue America (the parts of the country that voted for Al Gore). At least, his data shows, our wives have more orgasms. Brooks didn’t do his investigating in actual fly-over country—not as far as I’m...