Topic: Liberal Fascism
There are studies purporting to show that liberals, as a group, are more intelligent than conservatives. Leaving aside the general dubiety of the social sciences, from whence such studies emanate, one wonders why anybody bothered to conduct them at all. There is, after all, a much simpler way of settling the question: just take a look around.
Down in Washington DC a man by the name of Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval Office. He’s been president for almost six years now and the best that one can say of him is that he’s been a pretty mediocre chief executive. So why is he there? Because in 2007-08 our liberal elites swooned over the guy. Remember what they said about him? Here’s a sample: “Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh. Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves.” That was Wonkmeister Ezra Klein, late of the Washington Post, emoting over candidate Obama. Saccharine as it is, I could have quoted far worse. Supposedly intelligent people, graduates of prestige universities trailing strings of post-nominal initials after their names, academics, journalists, pundits and politicians canonized Barack Obama as a kind of secular saint (an judgment with which The One himself did not disagree). No one was cooler, smarter—no one had a better grasp of the issues—no one had evertouched the soul of America in a finer way!
Then it turned out that Barack Obama was a narcissistic, rather lazy half-stepper who, when he found that oracular pronouncements could not halt the oceans’ rise or cut $2,500 annually from the average American family’s healthcare bill, lost interest in the nuts and bolts of governing. So how did all those highly intelligent liberal elites get it so wrong? How was it that they saw in the sharpness of Obama’s trouser creases the signs and portents of greatness?
It’s tempting to conclude that they’re all as dumb as a box of rocks and undoubtedly some are. But Ezra Klein (quoted above) is probably more typical of the breed: a smart guy who’s so impressed with his high IQ that it clouds his judgment. The besetting sin of such people is intellectual vanity: they’re all too easily convinced that their intelligence validates their preferences. In 2007-08, the liberal elite knew what it preferred: the first black president. And they were all too willing to reinforce Obama’s already formidable self-regard.
And of course, there’s the additional problem that the orthodoxies of liberalism often require intelligent people to behave like fools. To be liberal (or if you prefer, progressive) is to believe in things that simply aren’t so, e.g. that there’s no essential difference between men and women. So Barack Obama benefited from an already well-established mental habit. His vacuous rhetoric—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”—they received as if it was Part Two of the Sermon on the Mount. I think of this and smile every time I see a forlorn OBAMA 2008 bumper sticker.
Liberals say they’re smarter than conservatives and have the studies to prove it. What they don’t have is a real-world track record to back up that claim. Instead they have, among other unfortunate things, the failed presidency of Barack Obama.
