The world turned upside down
Though I would have thought they had little in common, my parents and the parents of Victor Davis Hanson both inculcated remarkably similar lessons in liberalism and liberality in their kids. The lessons still apply, but viewed in their light it appears as though the world has turned upside down: "When I was young...":
The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the “Jews” now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States. Israel, still democratic and still attacked by autocracies, is now hated rather than respected, not for what it has done, but for what it is. The world snored, for example, this week when suicide bombers were foiled in their attempts at getting at a chemical weapons dump so that they might once more gas Jews. Neither Kofi Annan nor Desmond Tutu, for all their recent media appearances, said a word when Palestinians apologized for murdering a jogger in Jerusalem on the mistaken impression that the poor Arab was a “Jew.”(Courtesy of Little Green Footballs.)When I turn on the TV and see some wild-eyed crazy-like public figure ranting, it is not a John Bircher frothing about pure drinking water and statesmen of dual loyalties, but prominent Democratic politicians like an Al Gore or Howard Dean screaming to the point of exhaustion, alluding to the end of America as we have known it, and citing a “betrayal” of the United States. Secret meetings, stealthy friendships, and contorted past relationships—the purported exegesis of all this intrigue and plotting now comes out on NPR and in the New York Review of Books, not garish 1950 pulp newspapers printed in pink.
When I listen to those who talk of race first rather than last, and identify themselves and others by their skin color, it is almost always by those on the Left, and usually by those who have something to gain by claiming first loyalty to a race or tribe rather than to a common humanity. And when I hear America criticized for being too wasteful in its largess, too naive in its foreign policy, too extended abroad, too simplistic in its support of democracy, it is now always from a Democratic Senator or liberal professor, almost never from the old America Firster or pull-in-our horns Isolationist.
What has happened to the liberal world I grew up in? Perhaps the visceral hatred for George Bush, the appearance of a President who did not win the popular vote, who is openly Christian, who has a drawl, and who talks in absolutes explain some of these paradoxes. Maybe.
But I think there is a deeper pathology involved. The leadership of the American Left is no longer a product of the mill, farm, or shop—and no longer strives for a 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and vigilance about a totalitarian Soviet Union. Here in California, Workers' Compensation fraud, not its absence, has nearly ruined the state; rampant illegal immigration cloaked in cynicism, exploitation, and racial chauvinism, not assimilation and integration of different peoples, is threatening the body politic. Corruption, waste, and fraud of a Democratic governor, not too low income and sales taxes, have bankrupted the state. Massive Medical fraud, not neglect and insensitivity, threaten ample health care to the poor.
Most Democrats we saw this year—Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Kerry, Terry McAuliffe, and John Edwards—either grew up in aristocratic bounty or are themselves multimillionaires. Does this matter?—only in the sense of sincerity and consistency. When Republican grandees talk of the glories of the free market you know what you get; when very liberal grandees talk of its evils, you have only the assurance that what they advocate and whom they champion most certainly will have little to do with the lives they themselves will live. And the message is no longer one of guaranteed equality of opportunity but of forced equality of results—as long as we accept that such a utopia applies for everyone else outside the world of corporate Ketchup money, astronomical trial lawyer fees, inherited Kennedy capital, Park-Avenue bond security, Sun Valley, and prep-school privilege.
I don't know quite how they did it, but the Democrats' candidate looks as at home snowboarding at a ritzy ski resort as George Bush does at a NASCAR rally. And when I hear anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, warning about Jews in government, fury about foreign aid, visceral hatred and rude exclamations, sinister conspiracy theories, and racial separatism it usually has come far more often from someone on the Left than Right and from one educated and affluent rather than poor and ignorant.
The world I grew up in really is long gone.
