-By Warner Todd Huston
Ben Smith of Politico noticed that two “influential writers broadly in sympathy with Obama” recently floated the notion that as the nation turns rightward and isn’t voting with the extreme left, why we’ve all become “irrational.”
In the New Yorker, George Packer wrote that we’ve become a mob of unreason. “Nine years later,” he writes, “the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don’t stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob…”
Packer imagines that our “mob” mentality and “unreason” is why that wonderful, most smartest of all presidents in th’ whole wide universe is “less and less able to speak to and for our times.” We are deaf to Sir Smartness because we are all too stupid to understand, don’t you see?
Smith also notes that the intellectually inconsistent Andrew Sullivan is basically saying the same thing as Packer said.
…yet now, especially, that unreason seems to have taken an almost pathological turn. It is as if America is intent on destroying itself, its civil society, its fiscal future, and its next generation in an endless fit of mutual recrimination, neurotic nationalism, and religious division.
Smith goes on to say that he feels that the you-people-are-idiots style of commentary will be seen increasingly on the left as the full force of Nov. 2 is revealed.
Now, Smith claims that anyone who spends time covering politics feels that way but I’d beg to differ. On the right we may think that Democrats are regularly “irrational” but we don’t assume the whole country is irrational when a majority votes against our own closely held conservative ideals. What we usually feel is that they aren’t educated well enough to understand why they are voting badly, which is not necessarily the same thing as “irrational.”
Even further, we ascribe a leftward shift by voters as a result of the lies that Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media perpetrate upon them. Often we don’t even blame the voters but we blame those misleading the voters.
While the difference may seem subtle it is instructive. You see, while we may think people are ignorant of enough facts to make an informed decision, we don’t assume the whole country is unhinged. We respect the individual way too much for that and we love our country too much even when it seems to be going down the wrong path.
On the other hand the far left, like Packer and Sullivan, automatically leap to assuming that the whole country is suffering for some sort of mental deficiency when it turns from their rule. Just because we’ve wised up enough to vote against the far left’s Euro-centric ideas we are all mouth breathing, knuckle dragging idiots as far as lefties are concerned. This is how much the left despises average Americans.
Still, I agree with Smith. Get ready to see more Sullivans and Packers in the Old Media establishment begin to ascribe the rightward swing to some form of mental disorder among the American public.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.