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.