How Dare You?

Posted on | October 3, 2010 | 29 Comments

One of the trademark reflexes of organized liberalism is the tendency of its adherents to respond to critics in outraged tones of self-righteous indignation: “How dare you . . .?”

Thus, when it was suggested during the Bush presidency that liberals seemed more concerned with defeating Republicans than defeating terrorists, the response was: How dare you question our patriotism?

Now that Obama is president, and has pursued policies that tend toward the government taking over major industries — auto production, health care, mortgage lending, etc. — critics must watch their words, lest they be met with the liberal response: How dare you call us socialists?

Oh, but we have no need to call names, except to point out by which names your supporters call themselves:

The problems of liberalism in this regard go back many decades, of course. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, John Stewart Service, Henry Wallace: Such well-known examples of the treasonous tendencies of the American Left — its habitual friendliness toward the Soviet enemy — were not merely isolated coincidences of the Cold War.

It is possible now to examine the record of the Amerasia affair and other such cases and conclude, along with M. Stanton Evans, that Joe McCarthy was right. The administrations of FDR and Truman were riddled not only with communist sympathizers, but with willing agents of Soviet influence. One might criticize the means by which McCarthy chose to pursue his investigations, but it is impossible for the sober student of the era to say that there was nothing to investigate. If you wish to say McCarthy was engaged in a “witch hunt,” let’s at least discuss the coven that was the object of his hunt.

Communists, Conspiracies and Kooks

The orchestrated effort to smear and discredit McCarthy — to make him the archetype of an “-ism” synonymous with paranoid demagoguery — had lasting consequences. Among these consequences is that McCarthy now gets blamed for things he had nothing to do with, including the independent investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. McCarthy did not fire any school teachers, he did not blacklist anyone in Hollywood, he sent no one to the gas chamber, and he never claimed that there were “Reds under the bed.”

McCarthy was made a demon-figure by liberals in the 1950s — a demonization accomplished with the aid of some eminent Republicans — because liberals were eager to ensure that the Eisenhower administration (which took office in 1953) did not do what McCarthy had been demanding during the Truman presidency: Namely, to get to the bottom of the proliferation of Soviet sympathizers in U.S. government offices during the New Deal.

The shabby deal of Yalta and the shameful abandonment of anti-communist allies in China had made such an investigation necessary, if the United States was to stand firmly and effectively in opposition to the further expansion of Marxist-Leninist tyranny. Once Eisenhower took office, however, it became apparent that while many Republicans were willing to exploit anti-communism as a partisan political issue, they were not genuinely serious in their commitment to confront the process by which American liberals (as Hiss and other Soviet agents proclaimed with all apparent sincerity to be) had been seduced into treason by our communist enemies.

McCarthy became a public-relations problem for the GOP, was “thrown under the bus,” as we would now say, and his destruction was made a symbolic warning to anyone else who might think of asking such questions. Anyone who suggested any resemblance or sympathy between socialism and the liberal philosophy of the Democratic Party was, post-McCarthy, automatically dismissed as a dangerous kook.

Now, you may say that Glenn Beck is a kook, or that he is dangerous, but credit him at least for having the audacity to ask these Questions You’re Not Supposed to Ask, which provoke from liberals their trademark response: How dare you?

Means, Motives and Mala Fides

Liberals demand that their motives never be subjected to critical scrutiny. When the Obama administration ripped off the creditors of General Motors, defrauding bond-holders to give the United Auto Workers an inordinate share of the company in a government-sponsored bailout, no one could be permitted to ask whether this was motivated by a quasi-Marxist desire to “expropriate the expropriators.”

How dare you?

We could not be permitted to criticize Obama’s associations with Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers. Nor will liberals permit anyone to ask why Howard Zinn lied about his membership in the Communist Party, or what significance might be attributed to that deception.

How dare you?

Of course, liberalism routinely attributes to its critics the most malign motives imaginable. Criticize feminists, for example, and you will be accused of misogyny, of being an advocate of “back-alley abortion,” of desiring to keep women barefoot and pregnant, conspiring to bring about a patriarchal dystopia straight out of Margaret Atwood’s worst nightmares.

(To interrupt myself: Are readers aware that The Handmaid’s Tale is now on the reading list for advanced-placement classes in our public high schools? Am I the only one troubled by this fact?)

Liberalism’s continual efforts to portray its critics as acting on half-hidden ill motives — mala fides — requires that the bona fides of liberals be accepted without question. For if ever you begin to doubt the sincerity and honesty of liberals, if ever you begin to suspect them of self-serving cynicism, if ever you undertake to examine the gap between their public rhetoric anid their personal actions, their protestations of good faith are instantly revealed as lies.

Ted Kennedy? Bill Clinton? John Kerry? Who else but liberals would have such men as their heroes?

Do not mistake my meaning. I’ve sometimes described the Democratic Party as the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools. The liars in that formulation are elected Democratic officials and those spokesmen (e.g., Bill Maher) who strive to persuade the public that Democrats are the party of all that is True, Good and Right.

Partisan Delusions

One need not have a high estimation of Republicans to be skeptical toward such claims. The GOP has its share of scoundrels — including my distant cousin, that backstabbing RINO bastard with the dimwitted daughter — who deserve to be hounded from public office. (Help elect David Nolan to the U.S. Senate!) Yet because conservatism is a philosophy that does not consider government “service” to be a holy pursuit, we conservatives are quite cynical in our expectation that public offices will always be attractive to two-faced power-hungry narcissists like Cousin John.

Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, Lisa Murkowski . . . Say this for the Age of Obama, it has certainly produced conclusive evidence that the Republican Party includes no small number of self-serving liars whose only political allegiance is to their ambition to be addressed as “Senator” or “Governor” or “Congressman.”

That every critic of liberalism is automatically suspected of being a GOP stooge is a natural byproduct of the “How Dare You?” response that liberals direct toward their critics. If they can accuse you of nothing else — racism, sexism, homophobia, creationism, teenage witchcraft — at least liberals will try to paint you as a partisan, and demand that you account for every malfeasance ever committed by Republicans.

Yet the conservative who tries to turn the tables on that argument — demanding that liberals explain, for example, how Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy could make “waitress sandwiches” and still retain the unstinting support of feminists — will again run head-on into the familiar reply: How dare you?

This insistence that we may never question the good faith of Democrats and their liberal allies, who simultaneously proclaim every day that their conservative Republican foes are acting on vicious motives, ought to arouse profound suspicion in intelligent minds.

Why, for example, have Obama’s henchman lately been lashing out at progressive bloggers like Jane Hamsher?

At some point, Hamsher and her readers should begin to ask themselves, “What have we signed up for? If commitment to ‘progressivism’ and loyalty to the Democratic Party requires our public humiliation at the hands of those whom we have helped elect, has our loyalty been betrayed? And if those who betray us claim to be equally committed to the ideals we espouse, are those ideals really as noble as we believe?”

Begin asking yourself questions like that, Ms. Hamsher, and you may be surprised at how quickly you become an ex-Democrat. And once you separate yourself intellectually from the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, you may be horrified to discover that the ideals to which you have committed yourself are false and unworthy.

The liars who lead the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools depend on the unwillingness of their followers to admit they have been fools. No matter how often the Democratic Party rank-and-file are duped, deceived, hoodwinked, bamboozled, sold out, ripped off and fucked over — no matter how often this happens, some people never wise up.

These are the suckers who don’t deserve an even break.

Ex-Democrats: Past, Present and Future

Well, I was born and raised a Democrat, and so was Ronald Reagan. If I call Jane Hamsher a fool, I accuse her of no sin of which I haven’t been likewise guilty. But I would ask her and her readers to examine photos from Saturday’s “One Nation” rally and ask themselves: “Is this who we are? Is this what we support? Are the Republicans so bad that we must continue to swear fealty to such allies of Obamaism as SEIU and these idiots who call themselves socialists?”

In November 2008, three weeks after Obama was elected, I prophesied: “No prediction of what the next four years might bring is safer than this: The yawning gap between Hope and reality will produce a bumper crop of ex-Democrats.”

Whether or not Jane Hamsher will become part of that bumper crop, I do not claim to know. But I do know that in my travels during the past year, covering election campaigns and Tea Party activism, I have met many people who tell me that they supported Obama in 2008 and now regret it. Their lament has become a byword: “I voted for Change — but this wasn’t the change I voted for!”

Liberals can, and predictably will, fill the comments of this post with variations of their stock reply: How dare you?

But your problem is not me. Your problem isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or Mark Levin.

Your problem, my liberal friends, is that you have believed a lie, and that the truth cannot be forever hidden in a nation where people are free to proclaim the truth. Therefore the Democratic Party has devoted itself to destroying that freedom and so, when you question our motives for doubting their good faith, we will turn your accusation right back at you.

How dare we?

No: How dare you?

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