Tuesday, September 08, 2009

I'm in Love!

Actually, that's not true, since my wife "The Good Democrat" would be very disapproving. But nonetheless, I love Camille Paglia's assessment of the current political situation. She is and was an Obama supporter, but her criticisms are spot on. Some of my favorite lines:
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
and:
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Read the whole thing.

2 comments:

Auntie Lib said...

You beat me to this one. It's a great column. (Have you ever noticed how much smarter Democrats are when they agree with us? :-P)

Steve said...

I think that it's the ones who have figured out that the Kool-Aid is inadequate. But the chances of intelligence catching on and becoming widespread is just about nil.