How Can You Believe People Encouraged To Be Like That Are Capable Of Self-Government? or The Price Of Having A Left Based In College Kids And Old Guys Who Want To Pretend They Still Are There

It's not only the good-life world as imagined by Trump and the likes of Sheldon Adelson that is, as I said in the passage you whine about:

The imagined alternative in secular, a-religious, anti-Christianity produces a world which is a brothel governed by gangsters.   

I said something nice about the largely forgotten protest-singer-songwriter-folkie, Tom Paxton the other day.   Thinking just now about your whining about that passage in my piece the other day made me think of this song of his:

You're going to have to excuse me if I suspect that that imagined crowd having a rollicking good old time at the bar was not going to achieve universal health care, take care of the children, clean up the environment, or even reliably get the crops picked. The consequences of having the American would-be left in the hands of people who never got over being in college, or high school has more than a little to do with why the American left has been a friggin' flop. It is a celebration of life as exactly those things I said you could expect from a secular, a-religious, anti-Christian view of life. 

I will note the LP that was on was from 1970.  In the following years they couldn't even manage to get the Vietnam War ended, they couldn't even get rid of Nixon.  That took the boring old Democratic leadership of that time, most of whom probably spent Saturday Nights reading their homework.  I imagine such lefties from scenes as imagined in that song as got old probably spend their time getting drunk at casinos, these days.  I'd expect a lot of them would vote Republican now.   I will note that it wasn't such people as who got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. put into effect, it was people who didn't live that way who did.

I went to bars like that when I was young and stupid.  I remember those times and wish I'd been young and a lot less stupid.   I think I felt some kind of obligation to pretend I was enjoying myself, the alcohol helped to not think about how awful it was.  Thank God disco made me realize I'd never really thought it was fun.  I could put up with a bar fight, I couldn't put up with disco.

The bold, manly, rollicking, barroom style lefty who imagines he's participating in a real workin' man's pleasures in such thing is supremely condescending, as he is proving he doesn't have enough respect for working people to imagine them as capable of being better and more responsible than that, of being a far more responsible and kind person   You're more likely to get that view of the underclass on Sunday morning in church.   

I still think some of Tom Paxton's songs still work better than Tom Lehrer's who had just about stopped writing songs by the time Paxton wrote that one.  But you're not going to get anywhere better than where we are now with his prescriptions on how to live.  I mean, look at where we've gotten since those boring old Southern Christian Leadership Conference guys stopped leading the left.

Figured I should take care of this before taking a couple of days off.