Mark Steyn in a post captioned, “The Loyal Genetically Predisposed Criminally Insane Opposition”:
What I find slightly unnerving is the curious determination of the contemporary left to attribute political differences to some other factor – to genetic predisposition, to mental illness (“homophobia”, “Islamophobia” et al) or, when all else fails, criminality (it’s not enough for Bush to have a different view on the merits of toppling Saddam, he also has to have “lied” and committed crimes worthy of impeachment in the pursuit of said policy).
I don’t know where this is headed, but it can’t be conducive to civil politics in a constitutional democracy.
No doubt conservatives occasionally speak just as harshly about the Left, but there’s surely a striking difference in quantity and quality. Leaving aside the insufferable Ann Coulter, how often does one see a right-wing parallel to liberals’ incessant accusations of bad faith or worse against people with whom they disagree on matters of policy? For that matter, how often does any liberal assert that conservatives are merely mistaken rather than knowingly dishonest?
As the Left more and more assimilates the idea that it faces not ordinary opposition but a perfidious conspiracy (à la Mearsheimer & Walt (U.S. foreign policy is secretly controlled by a Jewish-neocon cabal*) or Jonathan Chait’s The Big Con (supply siders know that their nostrums are wrong but pursue them out of sheer greed)), the more likely it is to conclude that argument is futile and that force is needed to thwart the malefactors. One of my consolations over the 2006 election results is that, by giving the Left hopes of peaceful victory, they may have postponed our next civil war by a decade or two.
* Proof-of-the-pudding footnote: The review to which I’ve linked, written by a liberal who excoriates M&W’s conspiracy theorizing, can’t avoid declaring that the Bush Administration “manipulated” intelligence to “mislead” the country into going to war with Iraq and that the sinister mastermind was Vice President Cheney, “a card-carrying member of the petroleum industry elite”.
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