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 The
Liberal Bubble
Elite delusions...
[Thomas
Lifson] 12/22/05
To a remarkable
degree, America’s liberal elites have constructed for themselves
a comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment.
The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce
their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and
stories making their points, college professors tell them they
are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies
to prove them correct.
It has been
a disaster for them.
American liberals
are able to live their lives untroubled by what they regard
as serious contrary opinion. The capture of the media,
academic, and institutional high ground enables them to dismiss
their conservative opponents as ill-informed, crude, bigoted,
and evil. The memes are by now familiar. Rush Limbaugh and
the other radio talkers “preach hate.” Evangelicals are “religious
fanatics” comparable to the Islamo-fascists in their desire
to impose “theocracy.” Catholics observant of the teachings
of their church are “hypocrites” and their priests
possible “pedophiles.” Jewish conservatives are
members of the “neocon” cult, a suspicious lot schooled in
the esoteric works of Leo Strauss.
Contributor
Thomas Lifson
Thomas
Lifson is a management consultant in Berkeley,
California, specializing in US-Japanese management
issues. A self-styled recovering academic,
he graduated from Kenyon College with a degree
in political science, and received a masters
degree in East Asian studies from Harvard,
an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where
he was a Baker Scholar, and a doctorate in
sociology from Harvard. He subsequently taught
all three fields on the faculty at Harvard,
and also taught economics at Columbia University’s
Graduate School of International Affairs. He
is a partner in the award-winning winery Sunset
Cellars, in Alameda, California. Mr. Lifson
is proprietor of the website American
Thinker. [go to Lifson index]
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Liberal elites
tend to cluster themselves in the biggest cities, coastal blue
states, and if marooned in a red state, liberal enclaves like
Austin, Texas, Missoula, Montana, Lawrence, Kansas, and Moscow,
Idaho. Ensconced in their turf, they feel free to utter
causal epithets directed at the President, Republicans,
or conservatives in general, as if no person worthy of respect
would dare to disagree.
As a result,
liberal discourse has become an in-group code, perfectly understandable
and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected
from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in
the ranks of the in-group. Rather than focusing on facts, logic,
and persuasion, liberals find it easier to employ labeling
(“That’s racist!”) and airy dismissal of contrary
views to sway their audience, and because their authority figures
in the media and academia accept this behavior, they assume
it is persuasive to the rest of us.
Even worse
(for them), the self-reinforcement they experience in their
geographical, academic and media strongholds encourages
more and more extreme expression of their worldview. Within
the in-group, such strong expression of group norms earns prestige.
But to the rest of society it becomes stranger and stranger,
until it becomes repellant.
A perfect example
is the recent “Bloody
Santa” display in front of a Manhattan townhouse. The creators
offered a high-minded excuse that they were protesting the
commercialization of Christmas. Their stunt certainly drew
plenty of media attention, and the creators of the display
no doubt were the toast of their own social circle, and will
dine out on the incident for years.
But parents
of children horrified by the sight may not be quite so enamored
of this particulat example of “transgressive art.” And
the arguments of liberal pundits like Nicholas Kristof of the New
York Times that there is no such thing as a war on Christmas
looks more than faintly ridiculous in the face of such visible
evidence to the contrary on the same island housing his office.
Last week’s
catchword in the mainstream media’s ongoing campaign against
President Bush was “bubble.” Newsweek pictured the
Commander in Chief helplessly trapped inside a transparent
sphere, and other journos and commentators joined the chorus,
chanting that Bush is out of touch, speaking only to friendly
groups and relying on a tight circle of advisors where no diversity
of opinion is tolerated.
While every
President faces the danger of splendid isolation, and President
Bush does indeed rely on the advice of a long-trusted inner
group, there is more than a small dose of projection in this
picture, coming from practitioners of in-group journalism.
The liberal bubble, encompassing more than 90% of the education
industry and all but a handful of big city newspapers and all
three broadcast networks, dwarfs anything a conservative White
House located in liberal-dominated Washington, DC could construct
for itself.
John McIntyre
of Real Clear Politics notes this
same phenomenon:
Perhaps the
intensity of their left wing base and the overwhelmingly
liberal press corps produces a disorientation among Democratic
politicians and prevents a more realistic analysis of where
the country’s true pulse lies on these issues.
Rather than
experiencing their isolation from the rest of us as “disorientation” a
state which connotes confusion and uncertainty most liberals
experience their differences with the rest of society as a
sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best,
they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to
catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding.
Conservatives,
on the other hand, have been fighting an uphill battle against
a dominant liberal establishment culture for over half a century.
We are accustomed to the need to marshal facts, carefully develop
logical arguments, and realize that we have no reservoirs of
generalized intellectual prestige, such as accumulated Pulitzers
or Nobels (except for economics), to fall back upon.
Conservative
intellectuals living in blue enclaves have had to develop the
sensitivities and dual consciousness characteristic of many
marginalized groups. It is not enough to speak what one thinks,
one must also think ahead and anticipate the reactions of others
who see things differently. This is a taxing discipline, intellectually
and emotionally, but it also produces superior results in terms
of winning over the undecided or the wavering.
The liberal
establishment in the media remains strong, but it is a vestigial
strength, weakening every year with the rise of talk radio,
Fox News, and the blogosphere. Because the liberal media’s
circulation and viewership still dwarfs that of the conservative
alternatives, they can sell a vague image or storyline as
long as the public isn’t paying close attention.
The biggest
problem the inhabitants of the liberal bubble face now is that
the War on Terror is a compelling story, one that affects vital
interests like survival. Nobody wants to spend all day, every
day worrying about survival, so there is room for vague images
to gain a foothold, especially when there is at least some
evidence to support it. Missteps like Abu Ghraib can
be blown out of proportion to indict an entire military and
administration.
But in the
end, those outside the bubble notice other data points: election
turnout, the prosecution of Abu Ghraib miscreants, and the
overwhelming decency and superb behavior of our armed forces.
And timely reminders of the stakes involved come up with regularity,
often with tragic consequences for the victims of bombings
and other terror tactics.
When the President
launches a counter-offensive, focusing the public on the counter-arguments,
the results are nearly immediate and dramatic.
The liberal
bubble is a seductive delusion, one to which many liberal are
addicted. Repeated failures to persuade the public to vote
into power those politicians who agree with their political
principles will not persuade many to venture outside the glossy
confines. As result, expect the liberal spiral downward to
increasingly resemble a vortex, leading to oblivion. -one-
copyright
2005 Thomas Lifson
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