Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Trouble with "Liberals"

I put the word Liberals in quotes because it is no longer an accurate description of the people it once described. Today's liberals are reactionaries.

It has become more and more difficult to engage in discussion with them because their arguments are fundamentally dishonest.

A column by Mark Steyn (www.steynonline.com) and comments on it by John Hinderacker (www.powerlineblog.com) explain the basics of the problem.

"Steyn: There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security....

Hinderacker: That is exactly right, I think. It is the luxury of knowing they are bull******** that allows American liberals to claim that their freedoms are going up in smoke and that dissent is being suppressed, when in fact, "dissent" is socially mandated in polite society from Manhattan to Marin County.

I would add this parallel: any survey of Europeans you look at will say that they think the United States is the biggest danger to world peace, worse than North Korea or the Islamofascists. But they don't mean it. If they did, they would be clamoring for their own countries to re-arm. But the very people who claim to believe that the U.S. is bent on world domination are the same ones who don't want their own governments to spend a dollar on defense. They are entirely content to let us keep the peace. Which means that what they tell pollsters about threats to world peace, like what liberals say about threats to their civil liberties, is, to put it politely, disingenuous."

There is the problem. The reactionaries (progressives?) are all over television, radio, the blogs, campus rallies and everywhere else yelling about the suppression of dissent. Is there any greater contradiction than that?

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