Jonah: There’s an awful lot going on in that Edsall article for TNR (no free link), which you mentioned yesterday. My main impression is that Edsall is an old-fashioned liberal Democrat who, deep down, really hates Republicans and conservatives. But I already knew that about him, from having read his articles in the Wash Post and reading his book on race years ago. He’s a smart and often insightful guy, but he never can get past his basic antipathy for the Right.

With respect to this article, two things in particular stuck in my craw. First, Edsall identifies a speech from the 1960s as a kind of founding text of conservatism. The speech describes “sentiments that have since become integral to Republican rhetoric.” These include lines about the importance of God and the prosperity of a free people. Basic notions, right? A talk by Goldwater, or maybe Reagan? Nope. Edsall attributes them to George Wallace. As if conservatives owe a debt to Wallace–the racist bogeyman–for pointing out that traditional religious faith is worth fighting for and that money is better left in the hands of taxpayers than spent by the government. Folks, that’s a smear.

Second, there’s this doozy:

Conservatives are generally more habituated than liberals to top-down command structures in the institutions they value most–the corporation, the church, the military, and the family. They are comfortable and familiar with the process of winning, whether it is crushing a competitor, converting souls, or engaging in actual battle. They are accustomed to assuming the dominant role with all that entails. They have fewer qualms about inflicting serious damage on an adversary. They are willing to suffer losses in order to achieve larger victory. And they are more aggressive and more determined to impose their will.

Wow. Where to begin? When I think of “top-down command structures,” I think of socialist economies–you know, “command economies.” Also, the notion of federalism–a conservative principle of governance if there ever was one–is hardly top-down. Are churches really “top-down command structures”? Maybe Catholicism (my faith) is, but the world of Protestantism–in America, it’s about three times as large as Catholicism–strikes me as remarkable in its diffusion of power and authority. Next, Edsall equates “crushing a competitor” and “converting souls”; that’s just bizarre. By now, our author is in full armchair-psychology mode. I kept waiting for him to pull out that old chestnut about “status anxiety”–back in the 1950s and 1960s, liberals tried to describe conservatives as borderline neurotics who weren’t comfortable in the modern world. Edsall doesn’t quite get there, but he does describe us as really, really angry people. It seems to me that the anger is all his.