By Emmett Tyrrell
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Though it pains me to say it, I have made my final
judgment about the left. They do not like conservatives very much. In fact,
they come to an immediate boil when we enter their admittedly quite limited
range of perception. It all began back in the 1960s when radical thought gained
a footing with American liberals. Back in those days liberals relished America,
the mixed economy (as they called capitalism), our system of government, and
they were free of the bees in their bonnets that eventually drove them to
collective suicide: feminism, socialism, identity politics, and all the little
stuff: consumerism, the sky is falling, something about organic foods. Taken
one thing with another, it finally consumed liberalism, moving me last year to
administer the last rites to the whole gaudy set of bugaboos and to pronounce
liberalism dead in a sad little book, The Death of Liberalism.
Now liberalism's heirs compose the left. From the
radicalism of the 1960s, the left emerged, grew powerful in the Democratic
Party, and replaced the corpses of liberalism to become the reigning orthodoxy
of the Democratic Party. As recently as 2006, Machiavels like Rahm Emanuel
tried to reinvigorate the party by running moderates and traditional liberals
as candidates in congressional races. But his achievement was completely undone
by the Republican sweep of 2010, and by 2012, the left, led by their leader,
the improbable president, Barack Obama, finally completely took over the
Democratic Party. These people are not like the liberals, who, while
condescending to conservatives, did not hate us. These left-wingers really do
hate us. That is why in the Congress not much in the way of compromise can be
achieved. Sometime back, I dined on Capitol Hill with a senator who had been
around some three decades. He said it with telling precision, "Up here the
two sides almost never meet." The left hates us.
I personally discovered this back in the Clinton days. A
friend probably of the moderate left came banging into my gym to announce,
"Well, if Clinton had sex with a young intern you were right. He should be
impeached." My friend held to this view for about a month whereupon he
came again into the gym and announced, "But we can't possibly side with
Ken Starr." In the months ahead the Clintons diabolized Starr so
successfully that the Democrats and their allies in the media came to disrelish
anyone favoring the Boy President's impeachment. Clinton survived. Even Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a moderate liberal if there ever was one, voted
against impeaching good old lovable Bill, after having said on national
television that to lie under oath was cause for impeachment.
By manipulating moderate liberals' passions, the left has
come to this happy pass; they dominate the Democratic Party and they hate us. I
know we are very likable people. We do many good works. We are kind to children
and to household pets, but the left hates us. That is the way it is today. The
left rarely has any dealings with conservatives whatsoever.
On a growing list of issues, from guns to affirmative
action to whatever militant gays want, the very mention of our side of the
issue brings the left to a boil. Talk radio brings the left to a boil. Rush
Limbaugh or Mark Levin can sally forth into comedic genius. I laugh. You laugh.
Even a moderate laughs. Yet the left-wingers see no humor at all and they have
even tried to limit talk radio's First Amendment rights. Such extreme measures
would have been unthinkable when Hubert Humphrey was in his prime, say in 1968.
Yet in 1968, Hubert would never have had to confront talk
radio. He would never have had to confront the Washington Times, the Wall
Street Journal, Fox News or many of the other organs of conservatism. The conservative
movement back then was but a small percentage of the population. It was easily
dubbed the "extreme wing" of the Republican Party. Back then we said
jokingly that we conservatives could all meet in a telephone booth. Today there
are few telephone booths, but you get the idea. Conservatism accounts for some
42 percent of the vote. No wonder the Left is angry.
Yet I have watched the left for years. I watched them
spread through the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s they finally took over the
Democratic Party. They were always irritable. In fact, I wonder what came
first, the irritable disposition or the crazy ideological desiderata. At any
rate here we are in 2013, and boy do they hate us.
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