Sunday, September 20, 2009

The NYT Gets It (Almost) Right

Found this column from David Brooks in the Friday edition of the NYT fishwrap; read it all, but key grafs follow:

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...And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa”...
***


When a columnist in the grossly-collectivist former "paper of record" acknowledges that the irreconcilable schisms have placed this country "on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy", you know just how late it really is.

Audentes fortuna iuvat.

2 comments:

  1. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa”...

    Really? For generations the northern bastions of liberalism have considered most of the rest of the country nothing more than uneducated, toothless, knuckle-dragging, inbred, racist neanderthals.

    They are scared now, and they should be. We've proven that the core of Congress, the DOJ, Treasury, and the financial sector is corrupt beyond belief.

    Their only hope at this point
    (the Media) is to minimalise and marginalize us. Lately their actions prove that they are no longer irresponsible observers of this but are arguably complicit.

    A reckoning is in order.

    For starters, I'd love to watch someone remove that condescending smirk off of Chuck Schumers face. I know that it won't be me (but hopefully somebody very much like me), I just hope I'm around to see it.

    And I pray that it isn't too late to do it all peacefully.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well if they really annoy us we can shut of their power water and food.

    ReplyDelete