Sunday, September 02, 2007

Why Democrats do what they do...

From my favorite bloggers old post - Powerlineblog...
This is truly an intelligent assessment of why most Democrats do what they do. I say, most them have no 'fear of the Lord' (Proverbs, 1:7).

But why should this new form of cynicism appear just now, and why primarily among Democrats? I believe the answer to the first question lies in the modern (or actually the post-modern) intellectual climate. The essentially frivolous manner in which Clinton and Gore approach vital issues has clear parallels in current intellectual and academic thought. In the post-modern intellectual climate, “texts” (e.g., great literature, philosophy, and even laws and judicial opinions) are not valued in their own right, but rather exist to be appropriated by creative “scholars” for whatever purposes they see fit. Everything is up for grabs. The only limit on valid interpretation is the imagination, and political correctness quotient, of the
interpreter. In this world, it becomes possible for politicians to ask what “the meaning of ‘is’ is.” And once that point is reached, it becomes possible to suggest that whether one should vote to go to war does not necessarily depend on who has the better arguments.Why has this tendency surfaced largely among Democrats? One plausible answer is that Democrats are more closely linked than Republicans with academia, the true home of post-modernism. However, while Clinton and Gore undoubtedly have “breathed the air” of post-modernism, so too have many Republican politicians–it is all around us.
A better explanation is that necessity is the mother of invention. After 1964 and before 1992, the Democrats lost five of six presidential elections, including three landslides. Their positions had become so unpopular that the term “liberal” became an epithet of derision. The party’s options were to change its core beliefs or to disguise them. Opting largely for the latter alternative, it needed and found leaders who were particularly skillful in the art of deception.
But this deception could only be tried if the Democrats were confident of getting away with it. And only the Democrats could have that confidence. First, only
Democrats could be confident that the overwhelmingly liberal media would, by-and-large, give them a pass. More fundamentally, only Democrats could be confident that their core constituencies would do so too.
The Democratic Party contains at least two core constituencies – African-Americans and feminists – whose leaders view rules as instruments of their oppression and
barriers to their advancement. In fact, the centerpiece of much modern civil rights employment litigation is the attack on neutral rules that disproportionately exclude African Americans from a particular job. Examples include tests, educational requirements, and even the requirement that an employee not have been convicted of a crime. Similarly, what is the demand for affirmative action other than a demand that the normal rules for selecting employees based on merit be ignored to the extent that they interfere with desired outcomes? And the disregard of leading feminists for the basic rules of scholarship is apparent in the notoriously shoddy “feminist scholarship” that has been exposed by Christina Hoff Sommers and others.
The common thread here is something akin to cheating. No wonder these core groups, and the sophisticates who believe that rules exist only to be deconstructed, admired Clinton’s intellectual gyrations on key issues and now tolerate Gore’s less supple efforts.

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