My goodness, the intellectual vanity of liberals is boundless . You know, in my experience, people who constantly brag about how pretty they are tend to be insecure over the fact they aren’t that pretty. People who relentlessly tout how smart they are tend to be less smart than they think they are. And political movements which obsessively harp on how devoted to reason they are, tend to be overcompensating. For generations, the cliché on liberalism has been that it thinks with its heart, not its head. Comb through any book of political quotations and you find pages of homilies to this entirely reasonable observation. You know, a man who is not a liberal at age of 20 has no heart; a man who isn’t a conservative at 40 has no head (there are countless versions of this, I know depending on whether you cite Clemenceau or Disraeli, this guy or that guy). Emerson commented that “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” And so on. But now we’re supposed to believe that in the dead of the long dark night of Bush, the whole “bleeding heart liberal” cliché never had any basis in reality?
Do we really think that Democratic politicians appeal to reason above all? Is this a serious thing Franke-Ruta, Tomasky et al are honestly and seriously putting out there for discussion or are they merely offering feel-good pabulum to the troops? A very, very, very brief recap: Bill Clinton was elected on the promise that he would “feel” the electorate’s pain. His wife — the author of the eminently unreasonable “politics of meaning” — argued she was qualified to be senator of a state she had no experience in because she was the most “concerned.” Al Gore, who has some kind of ode to reason on its way to bookstores now, ran as a man of populist rage in 2000, demonized the opposition as corporate lackeys, quasi racists and idiots. I don’t recall him invoking a lot of Aristotelian logic. Oh, and his book Earth in the Balance was hardly worshipful of reason (but we can discuss that more when his new book is out). Give me a break.
Update: Vodka Pundit has a play on the 20-liberal, 40-conservative thing.