Guardian UK: 'Condescending liberals' of the US unite

[marmar]

'Condescending liberals' of the US unite
A Washington Post article that sought to explain why liberals are so condescending was full of dubious assertions

Dan Kennedy
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 February 2010


There is nothing self-hating liberals love more than to be told they're elitists who detest and fear the real America. So when Gerard Alexander pitched an essay to the Washington Post explaining why liberals are so condescending, the editors must have been overcome by paroxysms of joy.

"See how we grovel!" you can imagine them thinking. "Surely no one will accuse us of liberal bias if we are willing to publish a conservative screed as mendacious as this."

Alexander's piece, published on Sunday, is filled with dubious assertions and strawman arguments from beginning to end. But it was not until I was almost through it that I came across a passage so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. Alexander writes:

"Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals."

Whatever case liberals wish to make against Bush, I am reasonably confident that it has nothing to do with his hail-fellow-well-met persona. His unthinking blunders into war, torture and trillion-dollar-plus deficits have rather more to do with it.

But it was the idea that liberals hold Palin in contempt because she switched colleges a few times that had me in hysterics. The real problem is that none of those colleges taught her not to answer "we win, they lose" when asked about her approach to foreign policy. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/feb/09/us-politics-usa