From a reader:

If you can, dig up an essay by Joe Epstein that appeared in the New York Times magazine lo these many years ago–sometime in the early 80s I think. It must still be out there somewhere. The subject was what Joe called virtucrats, and in it he summed up the tendency of people on the left (not all by any means, but a depressingly large subset) to indulge in this kind of impenetrably self-righteous, amazingly circular thinking. Unhappily it has come to infect people on the right as well, mostly because of the influence of talk radio with its endless oversimplifications and its cults of celebrity, but it is still primarily a cultural characteristic of the left. As I recall at the distance of a quarter of a century, one of the things Joe pegged was the tendency to use straw men (as Tomasky does in his review of your book)–that tactic of fending off an argument by inventing a substitute for it in grotesquely exaggerated form (“well! I suppose you’re FOR starving children to death and leaving women to die in back alleys”, etc etc), then leaping for the jugular with a morally superior demolition of a point you never actually made. The whole process allows one to avoid having to grapple with a new idea, at the same time soothing one’s own sense of almost biblical righteousness. It is a facon d’etre rather than a philosophy–this is why it’s effectively impossible to have an honest debate with a virtucrat, even a well-educated and reasonably bright one like Tomasky.