Understanding The Left

IT’S A week in which leading Democrats have determined to demonstrate that in spite of the pressing nature of the Social Security crisis and the Medicare crisis the most important use of their time is to send letters to the head of Clear Communications to complain about Rush Limbaugh. And for a United States Senator to threaten to censure someone who isn’t a member of the Senate.

Did he or didn’t he? Call honest Democrats “phoney soldiers?” Did he or didn’t he call Brian McGough, the poster boy of VoteVets.org anti-Rush TV commercial, a “suicide bomber?”

You have to wonder, what does it take for Democrats and Media Matters to so wilfully take peoples’ comments out of context and use them as political bludgeons?

The answer comes from the review of a book by a British lefty who made the journey from the left to the right. Matthew Parris writes about Andrew Anthony’s The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence.

In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest

But Parris notes that even though Anthony has traveled to the right he still belongs in the culture of the left.

I followed his progress across the ideological spectrum and saw him start doing, from the anti-Left, exactly what he used to do from the Left — labelling people, labelling groups, labelling ideas, ferreting out absolutist and blood-curdling claims made by individuals on the other side and brandishing quotes (the way the Israelis and the Palestinians do) with a triumphant ‘you-see-what-kind-of-bastards-we’re-dealing-with[.]’

I guess he is talking about the politics of personal destruction.

There is another way, Parris points out. It is not a satisfying black-and-white Manichean certainty, but something more tangled and shaded.

And the lefties at Media Matters could learn a thing or two as well—even from Rush Limbaugh, who conducts his show with a jaunty optimism even on conservatism’s darkest days.

The power of Limbaugh’s voice is that he does not play the blood-curdling game of brandishing quotes. He does not use the angry sneer. He just brings out the quotes and laughs at the opposition.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0