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Liberals must come down off our high horses
By Chuck Williams
It took me nearly one-third of my life to come to a simple conclusion: Liberals are elitists.
Now, maybe that's not such a big deal to some, but to me it has become quite bothersome. It's pretty clear to me now that average hard-working Americans, be they red-staters or blue-staters, can smell the stench of elitist, intellectual posturing by so-called liberals and progressives.
One of the reasons why this bothers me is because I fear that it will cause us to continue to lose presidential elections.
The second thing that bothers me is that I may be one of those elitists. After all, I couldn't wait to tell the world that I had earned a Ph.D. I smile a bit on the inside every time my students and/or coworkers refer to me as "Dr. Williams."
I'm not so sure when it became important for people to know that I knew more than they did. What I do know is that it does not serve me well with average folk; this is at the core of the problem for liberals, and, given that we make up the base of the Democratic Party, it's also at the core of why we keep losing presidential elections.
To me, politics is about one thing: winning elections. Sure, policy and activism are wrapped up in there, too, but at the end of the day, you want to win - period!
I think I see your problem, bub. It's a problem that afflicts the Democrats. Y'see, when politix is about winning elections, that means that the things like ideas and principles and service aren't present. They can't even take second place, since politix is only about one thing, not many.
There's much to be said for the principle of compromise. It keeps us from reaching political extremes, because we have to cover enough ground to include people whose ideas aren't all that different from ours to make up a majority. If politix is only about winning elections that means compromise reaches its illogical extreme. Nothing guides the actual administration, there aren't any real goals. Once you're in office, the next step is to start getting ready for the next election, not actually doing anything. |
My opinions about all this have been influenced by working for the Democratic National Committee, regionally, and volunteering for various local elections. What I've realized is that you have two camps within the Democratic Party. You have folks who think too much, and folks who work very hard to ensure that our candidates are elected. Don't look now, but the nerds are attempting to take over the frat house. The problem with that is, they can't help us win elections. They simply stand around sipping green tea and talking about how great it would be if everyone read Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. It's no wonder folks have begun to call us effete. We sit around, legs crossed, sporting Birkenstocks, and looking down on people who don't read as much as we do.
| Those nerds are the policy guys, and their vaporings are what passes for ideas among libs. So you're talking about a two-pronged attack on the republics, one being the unprincipled and the other being the loons. |
And, when you really get down to the nitty-gritty, you realize that somehow we feel that all that carrying on makes us better human beings than everyone else. That our values and morals are better than others. This is what really annoys folks about us. What I've also realized is that this is a character flaw, and, that this does more to divide America than any of Patrick Buchanan's hate-filled rhetoric.
| I don't think Patrick Buchanan's hate-filled rhetoric divides the nation. Most people dismiss his patter as a vanity campaign for... ummm... something. Not for president anymore, since for all the hoots of "Go, Pat, Go!" something like 3.2 percent of the voting public bothered wasting a ballot on him. I'm a lot more concerned with liberals' hate-filled rhetoric lately, since it's actually more overtly hate-filled than is Patrick J.'s. On the other hand, I'm not real worried about the nation being divided, since that's why we've got two political parties instead of one. They break down to a liberal lunatic party that's obsessed with winning elections on the one side, and a conservative party of ineffective suits that pretty much wins elections by default but is afraid to govern. A bare majority has been going with the ineffective suits for the past few years, because they've been trading ideas while the libs have been jumping up and down and rolling their eyes and looking for causes further and further out in lefty field. I suppose that can change at any point, especially since the only thing that matters in politix is winning elections, but I hope it doesn't. |
Folks who don't read six national newspapers a day hold as much value and worth to our society as those who do. These folks raise families, work very hard for a living, and spend time thinking about ways to better their quality of life. They know what will serve their best interests, and they know what will not.
If the liberal elite would stop writing and chatting so much about how this country should be, they would learn more about how it is. We need to come out of the library from time to time and actually put our ears to the ground. We will find that the blue-staters are looking for leaders who will represent them, even if they don't have college degrees or sip imported beers.
At one point, that was the Democratic Party; today it is not. People were right to leave us. We gave them nothing to hold on to. We are no longer the party of inclusion; it only looks that way on billboards and campaign advertisements. If we do not address this issue soon, we will need more than a Florida recount to make this party relevant again.
Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-06-01 |
