Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many
working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and
"antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His
implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for
resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."
Will goes on to say that liberal elitists have been swallowed hook-line-and-sinker four marxist principles about false consciousness, which make this liberal elite as out of touch with the "real" democrats. Not only out-of-touch, but haboring a "doctrine of condescension." The fact that it's marxist seems to be the main reason that it's wrong to Will.
A similar attitude is given by Mark Bauerlin here. Here's the center of his argument: that this elitism and ego-centricism of the liberal professors weakens the debate in universities:
The dangers of aligning liberalism with higher thought are obvious. When a
Duke University philosophy professor implied last February that
conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of
academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he was
joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course syllabi or
search the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few volumes of
traditionalist argument amid the thickets of leftist critique, they wonder
whether students ever enjoy a fruitful encounter with conservative thought.
It's a cheap shot, but it works when "elite" is considered a pejorative term. Hillary Clinton is swinging wildly at Obama now, repeating the "elitist, out-of-touch" refrain at every campaign stop. It works when "Marxist" is a pejorative term. (odd, now, in the middle of a recession caused by Milton Friedman-esque freemarket and deregulation polices which allowed for the unethical and unsustainable mortage crisis, which, infuriatingly, the average taxpayer is now paying for with a bailout of Bear Stearns.
Why don't liberals fight back in a similar way? Why aren't liberals marking conservatives as callous, indifferent to the realities of poverty? Why aren't they telling stories of individual people out of work and screwed by the past 8 years of Republican indifference? Reagan won huge points by telling the story of the welfare mom who kept having babies to get more welfare checks. Why not trumpet the opposing stories of the uber rich? Is it because that most Americans would really like to change places with the uber rich?
