At Teh Korner Jonah Goldberg commences yet once more, ye fartles, with the traditional invocation of his Muse, Derpsichore.
A friend sent me a link to Cass Sunstein’s absolutely ridiculous column last week, but I didn’t have a chance to get to it.
Presumably this delay results from the sad fact that both hands were yet again lodged in Pringles cans of completely different flavors, making typing a Challenge.
And now The Weekly Standard and Walter Russell Mead have beaten me to the punch.
If there's one adjective commonly applied to Walter Russell Mead, it is "spry." Boring, boring... ok, here we go.
The notion that liberals were sympathetic to extreme left-wing views (of Marxist, Soviet, or national-socialist origin) hardly hangs on charges made by Whittaker Chambers. The Road to Serfdom made essentially this charge five years earlier, as did countless writers on what is sometimes called “the Old Right.” The charge wasn’t always that liberal fellow-travelers had a secret agenda. Hayek’s argument was more sophisticated than that, even in The Road to Serfdom (his least sophisticated book, if you ask me). Rather, part of the charge was that liberals were blind to the dangers of their own thinking. The very mainstream liberal urge to plan peoples’ lives for them (which Sunstein fully represents in his writing) is ill-equipped to stop at the edge of tyranny.
Hayek's "argument," while tripe, is surely relatively sophisticated, at least as concerns anyone so hopelessly befarted as to ask Jonah Goldberg what is and what ain't "sophisticated." Maybe Jonah's edition wasn't printed on jerky, so he had to add "sauce."
Because it's not that the Cass Sunstein article isn't fluff; it is!
It is that the enduring, and by now much-beloved American liberal innovation of the period, Social Security... is not tyranny.
I mean, it just isn't.So, like, as far as observable, consensual reality goes... liberal retirement and healthcare plans clearly don't much resemble Soviet totalitarianism, and it is bugshit crazy to suggest otherwise...?
American Liberalism may just be -- as the experience of nearly a century attests -- about making Americans' lives better, and not at all about totalitarianism!
SHAZAM!
And maybe we have a democracy where people LIKE liberal programs, and you have to trick them into voting against them! But that never works! Because TOTALITARIANISM!
Jonah...?
It’s also odd that Sunstein has to go back more than a half century to gripe about this sort of thing, when every day leading Democrats, liberal writers — and the agitproppy network MSNBC — insist that the conservative agenda boils down to restoring Jim Crow, “white supremacy” (as Chris Matthews says on an almost-weekly basis), and even slavery.
Jonah? Sweetie? Honey-boo? If you don't like the racism charge, don't support voter repression.
Beyond that...
As I’ve been saying a lot lately, behind every double standard is a single standard. It’s not that liberals hate name-calling, it’s that they hate the idea that they can’t have a monopoly on the practice.
Heh. Sad racist anti-democracy fucknose is sad.