Is Obama “Everything”?
In my previous post I pointed to an excellent analysis of liberal condescension and gave a couple of examples of it (and discussed a fabulous example of it here). This condescension, as many others have pointed out, is in large part a product of liberals’ faith in their superior morality and their superior knowledge (“if conservatives weren’t evil or stupid they’d be more like us”).
But I’ve become increasingly convinced that liberal hubris comprises more than moral and intellectual condescension, or perhaps it’s just that their condescension knows no limits. It’s not that they believe they have more morality and wisdom than their opponents; they believe they have a monopoly on virtue and knowledge, that those who don’t share their views are not members of what they are fond of calling the “reality-based community.”
Consider this all too typical comment from Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat representing parts of Fairfax County and some surrounding towns in Northern Virginia. Connolly, mind you, is more sensible than many of his fellow caucus members. President of the freshman class of Democrats in the House and widely and with some reason described as a “moderate” (of course, Pelosi et al. can make many liberals look moderate), Connolly recently told ABC News regarding the coming “health care summit”:
At some point, the public is going to demand that Republicans participate like mature adults, and not just say ‘no’ to everything.What is startling about this comment is that there is nothing startling about it. Virtually all the Democrats and talking heads on MSNBC say the same thing, over and over. They really believe, they take it as an article of faith, that their 2000+ page health care bills (and everything else they propose) represent “everything,” that to oppose them is not to favor something else but simply, nihilistically, to say “no.”
The liberal view — what we propose is “everything”; opponents favor nothing — is perfectly consistent with (who knows? May even derive from) the view of Obama as The Messiah.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.Amen.