{"id":1031,"date":"2006-03-14T00:20:33","date_gmt":"2006-03-14T00:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:38","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:38","slug":"some_roadblocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1031","title":{"rendered":"Some Roadblocks On The Path to Democratic Hegemony"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 04, I wound up in an interesting inter-blog fight<\/a> with the commenting community over at Little Green Footballs. I\u2019d said:<\/p>\n

I’ve met Charles, and he’s a liberal who was shocked by 9\/11 into reading Arab media, and shocked by what he saw there. I really do think he’s provided a service in opening that up to wider discussion, and I think he’s damaged the service that he does by allowing his comments to be as bile-filled as they are.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

551 comments ensued, some of them thoughtful, lots of them not. I\u2019ve held a pretty consistent view that the tone of Charles\u2019 comments damage the message he\u2019s trying to get out, and that the place where Charles\u2019 commenters tend to be (we\u2019re at war with Islam now) is the end point I\u2019m trying hard to avoid getting to.<\/p>\n

Kevin Drum<\/a> is another blogger I\u2019ve met and am personally fond of, and someone I have a great deal of respect for. Sadly, his comments are as bad \u2013 or I really think, worse, than Charles\u2019.<\/p>\n

Why worse, you ask?Well, first, because we\u2019re not talking about a random website started by a musician\/web designer (who became an aspiring media mogul later on) and a bunch of people who have gravitated to him; instead, we\u2019re talking about the web presence \u2013 in fact, the home page of the web presence \u2013 of one of the leading partisan magazines in the country. Don\u2019t believe me? Ask them<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Who Reads The Washington Monthly?<\/b><\/p>\n

\nTime says our magazine is “must reading at the White House and on Capitol Hill,” and and The Washington Post says our magazine is “setting off the Beltway buzzmeter.” Even the conservative Weekly Standard calls us “smart.” If you subscribe, you’ll join people like Tom Brokaw, Dick Cheney, Tom Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein, Ellen Goodman, and thousands of others who want the inside stories weeks or months before they appear in the mainstream media. That’s why James Carville says, “If you only get one magazine subscription this year, buy The Washington Monthly. If you’re getting another, buy two.” <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This week, guest blogger Steve Waldman riffed off of an interesting question<\/a> about the antipathy liberals seem to have for the religious \u2013 actually an important question to anyone who\u2019s serious about seeing liberal values get greater political traction \u2013 and things go just nuts. A few examples:<\/p>\n

McAristotle:
\nYou need a SacRete enema, dude, is what you need.
\nBob
\nPosted by: rmck1 on March 13, 2006 at 2:53 AM | PERMALINK<\/a><\/p>\n

\nFunny thing is, I could care less what Mr. Waldman writes or says. I go to church every day, I confess my sins every day. But what I really want out of life is to find some man who can take my entire arm up his ass. I want him to feel my armpit hair making his perineum raw. That is all I want from my Christian life.
\nPosted by: dms on March 13, 2006 at 3:29 AM | PERMALINK<\/a><\/p>\n

\nHuh. A firestorm of commentary for the latest post, already 218!
\nHaving grown up in the South, I have to say that there’s nothing elitist or really even that intellectual about a distaste for evangelism. In the South, \/if you are a thinking, rational person\/, you think, no, *know* yourself to be surrounded by people that believe in flat earth and relative Gravity (heavier things fall faster) and literal Biblical inerrancy. Pinheads. Many Southerners are nice people, many of them are walking talking \/real\/ humble Christians. BUT. A greater proportion of them live an unexamined life. The classic Southern credo is: “The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it”. Facts and those that present them are often seen as credulous tools of Satan or some such.
\nBut there is *nothing* that makes an aversion towards this or an hostility for it elitist or intellectual. We should exile all of these benighted souls to a walled compound where the reality of their illusions could build up so that the insanity of it would become apparent….oh right, they’ve walled themselves already…in the South and South Dakota…….isn’t it wonderful how the South is a Garden of Eden of brotherly love, racial harmony, loving family life with no child going hungry or uneducated, no women is abused?
\nYeah, I’m hostile to evangelism. I’ve seen it, I grew up with it, and it’s not Christian, it’s not moral and it’s stump dumb and proud of it.
\nPosted by: Stewart Dean on March 13, 2006 at 9:46 AM | PERMALINK<\/a><\/p>\n

\nAnother liberal-baiting, self-congratulating, troll’s rant on the front page. Fucking precious.
\nPosted by: Doc on March 13, 2006 at 11:13 AM | PERMALINK<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it goes on (I dipped into the discussion, and I don\u2019t think they like me very much there)<\/p>\n

Look, there are a certain number of fruitbats whose political allegiances probably pretty much follow an inverted Gaussian curve (lots on the ends, few in the middle). The newsworthy points raised here are two:<\/p>\n

First, it explains why it is that as unhappy with Bush as the voting populace may be, the Democrats can\u2019t put 06 into the bank. Because when average voters see this kind of thing \u2013 as they saw it when the Deaniacs invaded Iowa \u2013 they go \u201cHoly Crap!<\/i>\u201d and vote for someone else.<\/p>\n

Second, and this is a bigger concern for me \u2013 that the Democratic position is self-limiting, because it repels everyone who\u2019s not a True Believer. As one of the commenters noted:<\/p>\n

16pct of the Kerry vote is nearly 8pct of the electoral vote. Try winning without it. We’re tired of God-baiting, people like steve waldman here are a clear and present danger to our republic. they use the language of our enemies to try and obtain power withing our party. They try to split the religious among us from the non-religious. They try Exploit both halves against each-other so that they can rules us both. People like this are not interested in helping us, they are interested in power and dividing us to obtain that power. Be wary, there is no magic bullet. Democrats aren’t hostile to faith, we’re hostile to people who think they own the light and the truth in this world. Waldman is one of those, if we do not bow and give them their way on everything they threaten to make us second class citizens. Following people like this will leave this country shattered and broken.
\nPosted by: SoulLight on March 13, 2006 at 9:01 AM |
\nPERMALINK<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This isn\u2019t exactly an inviting stance to someone who doesn\u2019t already agree.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the LGF community mindset \u2013 in which the presumption is that we\u2019re at war, and the only question is how fast the rest of the country will realize it \u2013 is more contagious, and to an extent more dangerous.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s contagious because every time the Islamists do something evil, some small percent of the people in the West go \u201cfuck it\u201d and start calculating blast patterns over Mecca.<\/p>\n

That means that unless my peers on the left can get their act together \u2013 which is, given where we\u2019re starting from, a damn tall order \u2013 at some point the folks standing on Charles\u2019 side of the room are going to be a big enough constituency to start driving the political decisionmaking. You think the world doesn\u2019t like us much now? Wait \u2018till later\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal hangs out at his friend Kevin Drum’s place and gets worried.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}