Some people didn't like my post Saturday. I know, airplane lands safely level news. But you would think that the fact that liberalism has been on the down-slide since FDR died and in free fall since 1968 would at least make a few liberals wonder why that should be. The country elected and kept re-electing a man who would turn out to be the most liberal president in our history eighty years ago but we can't even get a real liberal who reliably supports his accomplishments nominated these days. It's not that liberal programs of that era haven't worked, even while subjected to massive media attack and a massive number of lies by babbling academics, Social Security is still one of the most popular programs ever adopted. What did people, with far more modest educational achievements, eighty years ago, know that people in the massively vaunted "information age" don't know now?
The common habit of scribblers, those who comprise that "information age" who wonder what went wrong for liberalism has been to blame The People, the "masses" who are alleged to be asses, ignorant, superstitious, fat, lazy and cootie ridden, a strategy which, if it were going to work, would have decades ago into that rather interestingly clueless means of obtaining their support. While I'm sure it was popular with those with a college education, those who would buy their books, review them in the media, and have them on their chat shows, it has been what could have been a total and entirely predictable failure as a political strategy in a democracy or even in a non-democracy.
I will run the experiment again, noting how stupid the scribblers who love to diss the majority of people and their nodding, babbling readers are and ask them how much they like being told they're stupid, conceited and entirely clueless and ask them how much me pointing out their true idiocy despite their educations and degrees doesn't make them want to vote for me.
The People are less stupid than the intelligentsia who have bought into the program of telling them how stupid they are. I have pointed out that among other things, The People rejected the stupidest of all of the political follies of the educated class of the past century, its infatuation with Marxism and it will turn out that they are wise enough to reject the successor of that elite Marxism, materialist atheism. But most of all they will refuse to go along with the idea that they are base and stupid from people who propose that they lead them on their behalf.
The real political lesson for liberals of the past fifty years is that as desperate as The People are for political leadership which will honestly work in their interest, they won't buy one that begins with disrespect for them and an ideological message founded on the belief they are nothing more than badly working computers made of meat. I think they may know what it took me so long to figure out, that you could rely on that mindset to produce just a different form of dictatorship. They obviously think they have more of a chance with despots that at least know enough to try to flatter them than one that thinks they'll go for those stupid enough to insult them.
As has been pointed out here before, FDR, the last successful liberal president, one of very, very few of those in our history, gave his ideological foundation very simply, he was a Christian and a Democrat. Though I think that would probably be better written with a small "d".
The People aren't the big problem for liberalism, it's the liberals who aren't liberal who falsely define liberalism. The problem, buddy, is us. Only some of us refuse to remain the problem.
Update: Obviously, there are those who insist that remaining the problem is going to work just given a little more time. That test of time failed with the re-election of Richard Nixon more than forty years ago.
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