RAMESH PONNURU
Writing in National Review
These days, conservatives and liberals seem to find it
hard not only to get along, but even to comprehend one another. What liberals
don’t understand about conservatives would fill several years’ worth of
this magazine, and has. The chief thing conservatives don’t understand
about contemporary liberals is why they hate President Bush. Conservatives
see him as a decent, moderately conservative, and not-especially-partisan
figure. They can’t understand why he arouses such strong dislike. What
follows is an attempt neither to excuse nor to damn the Bush-haters, but
to understand them.
Some of the reasons for their animosity are quite obvious.
We conservatives may think that Bush won the last presidential election
fair and square, and find most of the Democrats’ complaints about Florida
foolish. But foolish grievances can also be understandable ones. An election
that close, with so many disputes in its aftermath, is going to lead to
hard feelings.
The country’s cultural divisions, and the way they underlie
our political ones, account for another large chunk of the hostility.
Much as President Clinton became a symbol to conservatives of everything
they detested about “the Sixties,” so has Bush become the symbol
of what liberals dislike about modern America. They see in him the narrow-mindedness
they associate with the Bible Belt and the boardroom.
Related to this is the tendency of liberals to regard
liberalism as the natural home of intelligent and sophisticated people.
This self-image, which seems to be quite important to them, is rooted
in primordial memories of ancient quarrels between the party of reason
and the party of tradition. Bush never defers to this liberal self-image.
He has made it pretty clear that he, unlike some previous Republican leaders,
does not care what the editors of the New York Times think about anything.
Even the hostility directed at Bush because of the Iraq
war may be largely a function of the culture wars. Surely part of the
reason that this war and the Kosovo war were greeted so differently by
liberals (and conservatives) is that the latter was seen as a blue-state
war and the former is seen as a red-state one. Much of the public debate
seems to be turning on people’s attitudes toward Europe, American exceptionalism,
and other value-laden topics.
These liberal tendencies reinforce one another. Florida,
for example, changed Bush’s alleged stupidity from a source of disdain
to one of anger. Subsequent events have made things worse. To be opposed
by a fool is one thing; to be bested by him, repeatedly, is far more galling.
Which brings us to what may be the deepest cause of the
Democrats’ current mood: their dispossession. They do not run the White
House, or the Senate, or the House, or a majority of the governors’ mansions,
or a majority of state legislatures. Republicans do not like being out
of power any more than Democrats do. But Republicans are used to it. Three
times in the last 40 years, Republicans have been shut out of national
power: 1960-68, 1976-80, and 1993-94. Democrats, on the other hand, have
not had so little power since the 1920s. Not so long ago, the House was
their family heirloom. By 1995, they had held it for 60 of the previous
64 years. For Tom Daschle, being shut out of power must feel something
like losing a birthright. For Al Gore, it may feel exactly like that.
The change in the media has been at least equally disturbing.
Once upon a time, liberals could count on the media to broadcast what
liberals saw as the truth. What the truth was did not depend on where
you turned the dial. Then came Rush Limbaugh and, still worse, Fox News.
It is impossible to overestimate how big Fox News has become in the liberal
bestiary. Liberals talk about it as though Brit Hume were our answer to
Tom Brokaw, when he is really, in terms of viewership, our answer to Judy
Woodruff. For liberals, the other networks provide the truth and Fox spews
propaganda. It outrages them that it is treated as a legitimate news outlet
on a par with the others. “Non-stories,” such as the politically
embarrassing portions of John Kerry’s Senate testimony in 1971, can now
get pushed into the news. First some conservative website makes it an
issue, then Fox gives it coverage, and then Democrats are forced to spend
time talking about it on real news shows like Meet the Press. The world
has turned upside down.
And the millennium had such promise! In the late 1990s,
liberals began again to feel, for the first time in decades, that history
was on their side. President Clinton was popular, and the public had met
the Lewinsky scandal with a shrug of indifference. True, liberalism had
been somewhat chastened by the failures of the 1970s and 1980s. But it
was marching on. In 2000, a larger percentage of voters chose a left-of-center
presidential candidate than in any election since 1964. Liberals had their
best Senate election since at least 1986. And there was a huge surplus
in Washington, just waiting to be invested in the liberal program.
Now the surplus is gone, and there is a chance that George
W. Bush will inaugurate a lasting Republican ascendancy. Horrible as it
is to be shut out now, liberals must face the positively terrifying prospect
of being shut out for a long time to come.
It all seems so terribly unfair. Someone must be to blame.
Liberals quickly came up with an explanation: Conservatives cheated. They
got their buddies on the Supreme Court to install Bush as president. They
exploited the war on terrorism. They smeared the patriot Max Cleland.
They undid the election of Gov. Gray Davis in California. They started
that sinister television channel. Daschle and the rest were just too nice
to fight back in kind.
When liberals began planning to start a radio talk-show
network of their own, conservatives jeered that they already had NPR.
But the conservatives missed something important. The pretense to objectivity
of an NPR may seem laughably or infuriatingly false to us conservatives.
But that pretense imposes real constraints on the media. The liberalism
has to be kept implicit. Dan Rather may be more effective than, say, Michael
Moore in getting Americans without deep political convictions to absorb
liberalism. But for the very reason he is more effective, he is less emotionally
satisfying to liberals. Conservative media figures have mostly felt free
to say what they really think, especially about the other side. Respectability
in the wider media culture was not an option. Now liberals feel beleaguered,
and they want a Limbaugh of their own.
Note that what liberals are doing here is not simply moving
left. The Democrats have moved left on some issues, notably trade. But
what chiefly distinguishes the Al Franken Democrats from their predecessors
is not their leftism. Franken himself seems actually to be a free-trading,
budget-balancing New Democrat, his policy views boringly Clintonian. He
is just a bit nutty about the Right. You could see the outlines of this
Democratic party forming in Gore’s 2000 campaign. His “populism”
often seemed to consist of screaming at the top of his lungs about wanting
a slightly different version of the patient’s bill of rights from the
one Bush was proposing.
Perhaps it will work better for Kerry. But an escape hatch
is already being prepared in case it doesn’t. Kerry has already invoked
“the Bush attack machine.” If Kerry loses, expect liberals to
spend years saying that the 2004 election was unfair.
| Why They Hate Him A world turned upside down |