Why I Am Not a

Liberal
A Political Discussion between
Conservative Sally Morem and Liberal
Virrudh

After 520-some posts responding to a wonderfully acerbic Ann Coulter

column at Townhall.com some months ago, I ran into a series of posts by a
liberal with the handle “virrudh” in which he really vented his spleen against
conservatives and conservative ideals. I took the opportunity (handed to me
on the proverbial silver platter and served up with the proverbial silver
spoon) to respond. As I did so, Townhall.com readers and participants
learned many reasons why I am not a liberal. I’ll republish this discussion
here, with minor corrections of spelling and grammar.

We begin with virrudh in italics and continue with my responses in plaintext.

I also include outtakes and quotes from other sources to make my points
more pointed. These are highlighted in boldface. Virrudh begins the
freewheeling discussion of all things American thusly:

And maybe that is because we are spoiled. We have not had to go through so
much that other countries struggle with on a continuing basis, and so we
can indulge ourselves with nitpicking.

And the problem is? Why DON’T we have to go through the problems
other countries struggle with? Is there something special about America and
Americans? Something that has permitted us for generations to build up the
kind of wealth and power that other empires could only dream of?

Or is it because we Americans are merely lucky. “God protects drunks, fools

and the United States of America.” That sort of Bismarkian snide derision
combined (oddly enough) with frank admiration by European monarchs and
intellectuals. (After you’ve read all my posts in response to virrudh, you
decide whether we’re special or lucky.)

Page 1
But I will state very clearly that I do not apologize for being a liberal even
though there are many things that liberals (and others) do that pain me or
infuriate me.

What are those things? Showing disrespect to those who deserve respect?
Showing ingratitude toward what we should be grateful for? Lying through
their [liberal] teeth about their opponents’ actions and motivations?
Attempting at every turn to shout down or criminalize conservative speech?
Treason—aiding truly vile and vicious enemies of the United States while
trashing America? Anything else about what liberals do that infuriates you?
Anything else you want to get off your chest?

I am tired of having people who believe that the earth began less than
10,000 years ago making pronouncements about our educational system.

Do your really think Creationists control our school boards across America?
Really?

And these same people taking it upon themselves to decide who is a

Christian or not.

Christians have been doing that since Christianity was invented. Pay
attention.

And then telling us who should have civil rights and who shouldn't. The
amazing gall, when you think about it.

Christians have been doing that since civil rights were invented. Pay
attention.

I do not believe that we should make laws because they have a nice fit with
what the Bible says, even though I have been a dedicated life long Christian

Which laws have a nice fit with the Bible? Ones against murder or stealing?
They fit. Of course our laws against combining church and state don’t fit so
well. Perhaps you’re referring to those notorious American laws on sacrifice
that mandate slaughtering an unblemished lamb at the temple on Holy Days.
Or perhaps those other notorious American laws against worshipping golden
calves.  Does Virrudh REALLY think we’ve become such a theocracy?

Page 2
****

And then he discusses geopolitics:

Then along came the European Union. Its predecessors, of course, have
been around for 50 years now, but it was only fairly recently that the EU
itself has been gaining some real power. And that (presumably) was the
beginning of the U.S. being demoted to just another country on the other
side of the ocean.

In actuality, that is an exaggeration. The Europeans know they need us when

push comes to shove, but we have not yet admitted that we need them too or
have ever bothered to find out what was going on over there unless it is
some Muslim riot that we are thrilled to hear about. But as our dollar
continues to weaken and their Euro continues to strengthen that may change
too.

This is the same European Union that could only stand by helplessly as the
old Yugoslavia tore itself up and engaged in Hitlerian “ethnic cleansing.”
The EU was born helpless. And it remains so. No state (and the EU is
attempting in its bumbling way to become a state) can exist without mastery
and use of the most lethal force necessary to “ensure domestic tranquility
and provide for the common defense.”

As a result of 60 years of American protection against the predations of the

Soviet Union and now Islamofascist terrorists, Europeans are in the situation
described so well by Robert Kagan—they live in their (presumed) pacifist
paradise (minus the Balkans), while America remains in the Hobbesian
world of war. As long as this remains the case, and I see no indication that
the Europeans are facing up to their situation and doing something about it,
the EU will remain what it has been: an American protectorate, with as little
real world power as that phrase indicates.

Here is an outtake from that essay quoted in boldface:

...Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into

the Kantian world of perpetual peace...In fact, the United states solved
the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only

Page 3
solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the
creation of a world government.

... By providing security from outside, the United States rendered it

unnecessary for Europe's supranational government to provide it.
Europeans did not need power to achieve peace, and they do not need
power to preserve it [due to unseen US power operating outside of
Europe].

Those European leaders and intellectuals with a semblance of knowledge

and rationality know all of the above. How else do you explain their
decades-long, even centuries-long, obsession with America? They know
that America matters in the world and to the world…and they don’t.

The hostility didn't come (that I noticed) until the beginning of the Iraqi war.
It hurts when your allies don't like you. It hurts even more when you start
not liking your own country yourself.

Now why do you suppose Europeans would care at all about what we did in
Iraq? With the noble exception of Great Britain, the Europeans have only
sent token forces or stayed out entirely. I don’t believe the furious venting
of anti-Americanism recently is due to our efforts in Iraq. I believe it’s an
excuse. And that it’s been going on a lot longer than virrudh noticed. Also,
I’d question seriously if any of these anti-American activists are actually
anything near allies of ours. At least I hope they aren’t.

There are a number of sites addressing the problem of anti-Americanism.

Check out for yourself. Learn the truth of what I say from the horse’s
mouth. Here are outtakes from two such sites:

During anti-war demonstrations in Britain left-wing marchers have

unashamedly waved banners defending known terrorists, shouted abuse
at American tourists and British pro-American supporters and
described George Bush in terms usually reserved for serial killers.
Banners decrying the attacks of 9/11 were nowhere to be seen. When
Daniel Pearl was murdered there was no outcry from the left in Britain.
Instead, leftist and liberal commentators concentrated their critical
faculties on the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at
Guantanamo.

Page 4
http://hnn.us/articles/9091.html

Since September 11, 2001, the attitudes of Europeans toward the United
States have grown increasingly more negative. For many in Europe, the
terrorist attack on New York City was seen as evidence of how
American behavior elicits hostility—and how it would be up to
Americans to repent and change their ways. In this revealing look at the
deep divide that has emerged, Russell A. Berman explores the various
dimensions of contemporary European anti-Americanism. The author
shows how, as the process of post–cold war European unification has
progressed, anti-Americanism has proven to be a useful ideology for the
definition of a new European identity. He examines this emerging
identity and shows how it has led Europeans to a position hostile to any
"regime change" by the United States—no matter how bad the regime
may be—whether in Serbia, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1043

And then there’s some downright strange wingnuts in positions of real

power:

Her theory? It seems the U.S. had to do something to weaken the

influence of the pope, who was an outspoken opponent of the war in
Iraq. Vollmer finds it all very suspicious that after the war, "Poland was
made a top occupying power in Iraq, naturally to weaken the pope's
hinterland. Or how then, of all times, the campaign against the Catholic
Church and the pedophilia was started, which was, of course, totally
justified, but at this point in time was definitely a tit-for-tat response."
Vollmer found it somehow strange that the US presidents traveled to the
Vatican despite the "tough power struggles."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,350763,00.html

Like a good conspiracy theorist, she doesn't point fingers directly, but lets
her comments hang in the air so that others can piece together the message.
In essence, with her bizarre ramblings she was saying that the US tried to
undercut John Paul II's political influence in Poland by giving his
countrymen an important role in occupying Iraq and instigating a pedophile
scandal against the church as a sort of smear campaign against the Catholic
leader.

Page 5
Clearly, Europeans have their own issues—the resurgence of anti-Semitism,
a deep-seated (well-earned) fear of rising radical Islam, and an equally deep-
seated inferiority complex in response to the growing power of its American
daughter. Wishing these problems away by calling for American
appeasement of Islamofascism solves nothing. Instead, it very well may
lead to our doom.

*****

And then, virrudh cuts to the core of the differences between conservatives
and liberals…

Big government is not an evil concept for me.

It is an evil concept for me. It means:

1. Its $2.5 trillion budget means that the Federal Government is doing way
too many things, things that state governments, or local governments, or
private enterprise, or individuals should be doing…or no one should be
doing.

2. If the Federal Government stuck to its knitting, doing the things that it
and only it can do and really needs to do, it would be able to specialize in
those things, concentrating on them in such a manner that it would soon
learn how to do them superbly. Instead, it spreads its energy and spends it
micromanaging every aspect of our lives. And does so VERY BADLY.

3. By so doing, it deprives us of our individual freedom at every turn—the

freedom to create, to invent, to succeed, and yes, to fail.

4. And by so doing, it deprives us of the full blessings of a truly

decentralized, self-organized system of distributed intelligence as described
by Fredrich Hayek.

I have been to too many places where people would give their souls for a
government…

Which is precisely what they would have to do, metaphorically speaking, of

course.

Page 6
…that could and would give them clean air and water, build highways for
them, make transportation safer, could pay their public servants a living
wage so that bribery would not have to be a way of life, so that half their
children would not die before they reach the age of five, so that their
children could go to school, so that there was some semblance of
infrastructure within their society that would actually help their society
survive.

All of these good things are developed and built only by wealthy societies.
You can’t have a clean environment without wealth. Ask any citizen of a
Third World nation—or a former Communist nation. You can’t build
highways and the rest of a nation’s infrastructure without wealth. You can’t
pay government employees without wealth. You can’t buy your children a
happy, healthy, carefree childhood without wealth. You can’t build, supply,
and staff excellent schools without wealth. It may be necessary for local,
state, or Federal government to do some of this work, but they can’t do any
of it without a robust national economy to finance it.

The creation of wealth by necessity precedes spending by government.

Wealth is not hand-me-downs from a kind and compassionate government to
its client-citizens. It is the creation of a free and inventive and
knowledgeable people. Wealth bubbles up. It doesn’t flow down. And
people who are blessed with growing abundance always, Always, ALWAYS
live in and participate in free enterprise systems. Those are the only systems
that can manage scarce commodities and skills efficiently and make them
grow, not to mention managing the immense dataflow of large Hayekian
Extended Orders.

Government CAN NEVER create wealth. It can only spend it. Wealth can’t
be mandated into existence by law. It can’t spring forth from the business
end of a gun. Why? Because government by dire necessity is a society’s
enforcement arm. It retains a monopoly over the most lethal forms of
physical force. As such, it can’t create; only confiscate, normally in the
form of taxes, sometimes in the form of eminent domain.

Statists seem to believe that government can create wealth. They are in error
—the most fundamental error of liberalism. This is one of the most
important reasons I am not a liberal. The assumption that government and
only government can build and maintain civilization is what Hayek called

Page 7
the Fatal Conceit. It attributes to government the kind of power and insight
no government has ever had or could ever hope to have.

In the Broadway musical, Camelot, King Arthur woos his soon-to-be wife,
Guinevere by singing the title song about ‘happy-ever-afterings.’ The most
amusing line to this Minnesotan was “And there’s a legal limit to the snow
here in Camelot.” We know that the character King Arthur didn’t really
believe that. He was trying to charm Guinevere with his wit. But there are
large numbers of liberals who do believe that sort of thing. What else can
explain the absurd belief that human activity can cause climate change and
that government mandates can stop it? This line in Camelot stands as the
purest statement I’ve ever read or heard anywhere of the sloppy
sentimentalism of statism.

The establishment of individual freedom as America’s core principle is far

more kind and caring than statism can ever hope to be because it is in
essence a bow to Reality, an acknowledgement by those who would lead us
and those who follow that everyone can know something, do something, say
something, think something that is of great importance at some time. The
fact that we can never be sure which insight will turn out to be important in
the fullness of time requires us to be open to innovation from anyone at any
time. This openness to the insights of everyone is as different from statism
as a thing can be. It explains our love of individual freedom.

I thank God for those things.

I don’t. I thank the American people who had the wisdom over the
generations to “let it alone”—the most direct English translation of that
notorious French phrase, “laissez faire.” As a result, millions of people by
freely interacting produce those things.

And I beg Him to help me not be so angry with people who shout "it is every
man for himself; that is what makes us strong." ROT. It is community that
makes us strong. And it is community that gives us humanity. No man is an
island, and no man is meant to be an island.

Every man (and woman and child) IS an island—to the following extent: We
are limited by our own perception and our own experiences. We can only
live in our own bodies and minds. We don’t do Vulcan mind-melding.
However, we islands are part of an enormous archipelago—of social
intercourse with our fellow islands, er, humans. We can tap into others’

Page 8
insights indirectly and engage with them through spoken and written
language. Community is not a gaseous abstraction; it is individual
“islanders” in aggregate. As we participate in Hayekian Extended Orders,
vast catalytic chains of exchange permitting huge numbers of people to
freely cooperate in all areas of life, we create, often without meaning to,
extraordinarily complex and utile social structures.

I am tired of having a whole group of people think that the US is better off
with the rich getting filthy rich and the poor getting poorer, with the help of
the lowest minimum wage in the western world and an absolutely niggardly
attitude about helping the poor and needy. In case you haven't discovered
this –members of the upper management in big companies take care of
themselves first, the stockholders second, and the worker last (if they keep
him at all). And these are the guys you are so busy protecting!!! Let's build
yet another Wal-Mart. Forget the benefits. We wouldn't want that stock to
take a dip. And we would certainly be embarrassed if one of our most prized
companies wasn't led by a multi-billionaire. Amazing!

We assume that if a human system exists, some one specific human being or
group of humans must have deliberately designed it, and by so doing,
deliberately left in any weaknesses or immorality we perceive. Perhaps the
mythic Lawgiver—a Moses or Hammurabi. Perhaps a scientist—a Galileo
or Newton. Perhaps a captain of industry—a Carnegie or Gates. This is
manifestly false—a wrong assumption on all levels. These people did create
their own specific part of systems we now enjoy—jurisprudence, modern
science, capitalism. But they did not create these systems qua systems.
They participated in their creation as each of us does. We are misled by our
in-built prejudices inherited from hundreds of generations of hunter-gatherer
ancestors who by necessity lived very close, intense, communal lives into
thinking that’s how human societies work today. Statism is our natural
default position when we attempt such erroneous explanations of very
complex human systems and institutions.

Religion inherited the same default position. It tends to attribute statist

characteristics to their god(s) and by extension, religious dogmas and
structural characteristics of religions. Theology may mislead us; experience
must be our guide.

There is simply no way any human can know what tens of millions of people
know in an Extended Order or monitor what all the many and varied things

Page 9
those people do. We ignore the existence of Extended Orders and their
tendency to catalyze unanticipated consequences at our peril. So, when we
blithely take the statist default position, we naturally assume that whatever
systems “evil” people “deliberately” foster, much more kind, compassionate
and caring people (socialists, government bureaucrats) can fix. The history
of the 20th century stands as witness to the horror that results when power-
hungry ideologists play with human lives, driven by their earnest belief in
Dear Leader, the Party, or the Internationale—in a word, statism.

Here are some key words and some sites that explore the concept of self-
organizing systems of growing complexity, the ones Hayek and von Mises
described so ably.

Friedrich Hayek
Ludwig von Mises
Leonard Read
Extended Order
Spontaneous order
Growing complexity
Distributed intelligence
Networks
Feedback loops
Autocatalysis
Chaos Theory
Complexity Theory
Free markets
Wealth

Once you develop a feel for self-organization, you’ll find it everywhere—

AND you will, at least partially, free yourself from that statist bias that lies
within all of us.

*****

Virrudh begins to show his liberal cultural snobbery:

Page 10
I am tired of having to go search for people who have actually been to a fine
arts museum, a symphony, or an opera.

Apparently, you need a new set of friends. Americans are far more
sophisticated culturally than given credit for by snobbish Europeans and
disdainful American Leftists. Check these outtakes:

The U.S. now has 125 professional opera companies, 60 percent of them
launched since 1970, according to the trade group OPERA America.
The U.S. has more opera companies than Germany and nearly twice as
many as Italy. In the most comprehensive recent study, the National
Endowment for the Arts found that between 1982 and 2002, total
attendance at live opera performances grew 46 percent.

Annual admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same

attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in
2006–07). In part, this reflects a shift toward seeing opera domestically.
“Foreign opera destinations like Salzburg and Glyndebourne are more
expensive, and more Americans are staying home—and probably feeling
safer for it,” says Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe
Opera in New Mexico.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-
contents/america2019s-opera-boom

With almost endless choice of music at one’s fingertips, one may well
wonder about the audience that remains for live music in America
today. Among adults, 41% said that they attended a live musical
performance within the past 12 months. This finding is drawn from a
study completed by Leo J. Shapiro & Associates this July, with 450
adults interviewed by telephone in a nationally representative sample of
U.S. households. The study finds that increasing electronic accessibility
to music of one’s choice has not done away with desire to hear music
performed live. Most Americans are taking time out to hear music
performances often paying admission substantially higher than the cost
of hearing that music on disk or tape. Nearly one-third of American
adults – 30% – have attended a popular music concert in the past 12
months and 27% have attended a performance of classical music,
including 22% a symphony concert, 9% a chamber music concert, and
6% an opera performance.

Page 11
The audience for live music is substantially greater than attendance at
major league baseball games. In the past 12 months, 19% of adults
attended a major league baseball game, compared to 27% attending a
classical music performance, and 30% a pop concert. Nearly one-third
of adults (32%) say they have attended a theatre performance of either
a play or musical in the past 12 months. This exceeds the 27%
attending a performance of classical music, and the 30% of adults
attending a pop concert, but is below the combined live musical
audience of 41%.

While popular and classical music performances are often considered to

be worlds apart, the popular and classical musical audiences overlap.
More than half of adults who have attended a pop concert in the past
year have also attended a classical music performance (51%).
Conversely, 58% of adults attending a classical music concert in the past
year have also attended a pop concert.

http://www.ljs.com/Americas%20Live%20Music%20Audience%20(8-3-
05).htm

I’ve not been able to find comparably comprehensive overall figures for
American attendance at art museums. But, I did note a survey made in the
Nineties showing 40 % of American adults claiming they visited an art
museum in the previous year. Even if many were actually “lying to the
pollsters,” this would still indicate tens of millions of Americans had
attended.

I am sick to death of being surrounded by a whole bunch of mean little gnats

who believe that the poor are poor only because they are lazy, too stupid to
make good choices, and/or drug addled and if we must punish the kids for
their parents' sins, too bad.

The poor aren’t poor only because they’re lazy, stupid, or drug-addled or
even largely because of those attributes. They are poor because they were
lured and trapped into those Great Society’s programs from which there is
no escape:

As we survey the plight of these unfortunates, we are usually unaware of

the role we have played in creating their poverty. For example, we fail to

Page 12
notice that when minimum wages go up in a particular region of the
country, welfare payments increase to the newly unemployed. Without
such awareness, we repeat our mistake of using aggression as we try to
help the destitute. As a result, we used the aggression of taxation to
support a massive "War on Poverty."

Two "wrongs" don't make a "right." Welfare, which is charity by

aggression, ensnares the poor in a never ending cycle known as the
poverty trap.

In the 1970s, welfare payments and other forms of aid available to poor
families (e.g., food stamps, medical care, etc.) increased to such an
extent that total benefits exceeded the median income of the average
U.S. family! In 1975, working heads of households needed to make
$20,000 to give their families benefits equivalent to what they could have
on welfare. Only 25% of U.S. families earned this much!3 In 1979, the
median family income was $1,500 less than the potential welfare benefits
for a family of the same size.

In the 1970s, two working parents had to make more than the minimum
wage to match what they would receive on the dole. (4) A young working
couple with children might find that their net income after child-care
costs would be less than what they could receive on welfare. In these
circumstances, accepting aid instead of working would seem like the
smart thing to do.

Opting out of the work force at a young age has grave consequences
later on, however. While a working person might start out with less than
those on aid, experience would eventually result in raises and a higher
standard of living. On welfare, however, little progress is made over
time. Since most welfare benefits can be used only for food, medical
care, and shelter, saving is almost impossible. When their working
contemporaries are ready to buy their first house, those on welfare are
still unable to afford a car.

The attraction of the short-term gain encourages many individuals to

choose poverty for life. One study estimated that one-sixth of aid

Page 13
recipients could have worked but chose leisure and the other benefits of
being supported by tax dollars instead. (5) An elaborate study involving
almost 9,000 people documented the deleterious results of a guaranteed
income. One group of subjects, who served as controls, received no
benefits. An experimental group was told everyone would be given
enough money to bring total individual income to a specified target
amount. Those in the experimental group who worked would receive
less money than those who didn't, so everyone would have the same
income for three consecutive years.

http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/chap11.html

James Nuechterlein, editor of the religious periodical, First Things, wrote

an essay on one of his favorite philosophers: Edward C. Banfield. After
reading his scouring critique of the Great Society, The Unheavenly City,
published in 1970, Nuechterlein gave up his wishy-washy moderate views
and became a true-believing conservative. The Great Society is the poster
child for disastrous unintended consequences, the kind that happen when
you don’t account for what people really do when offered financial support
with nothing given in exchange, as opposed to what you hope they do. After
you read what Banfield said about the Sixties welfare state, you may well
join Nuechterlein in his conservatism.

The really sad thing is that the welfare state is much worse now:

The Unheavenly City could not have gone more radically against the
grain of the conventional wisdom on the causes and cures of the
intertwined issues of race, poverty, and civil unrest. In the wake of the
Detroit riot, the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders (the Kerner Commission) blamed the continuing outbursts on
"white racism." Banfield did not, of course, deny the existence or
malign influence of racial prejudice, but he insisted that the
fundamental cause of black poverty was based more in class culture
than in skin color. It was important to distinguish, he said, between the
historical and the continuing causes of black disadvantage.

Banfield marshaled a vast array of evidence to show that for most

blacks, conditions of life had improved across the board. But there
remained, especially in the central cities of the nation, a significant
minority whom progress had passed by. The problems within the black

Page 14
underclass (as it later came to be called) relating to crime,
unemployment, poverty, and education stemmed less, Banfield said,
from external discrimination or indifference than from a dysfunctional
way of life endemic among lower-class people everywhere.

He cited an earlier sociological study of white lower-class behavior-A. B.

Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth (1949)-to demonstrate his point.
Banfield quoted Hollingshead at length to show that the behavior
attributed ("more or less correctly") to lower-class whites-disrespect for
law, disregard of the future, laziness, promiscuous sex, indifference to
education-and the disapproval of that behavior by the larger society had
obvious correlates with the current situation of the black underclass and
of attitudes toward it. The culprit in the situation was culture, not race,
and cultural patterns of behavior were notoriously resistant to change
through public policy. Improvement was possible, Banfield argued-
especially through general economic expansion-but it could only be
incremental and would mostly have to come from inside the black
community itself.

The response to The Unheavenly City by liberals was instant and

unforgiving: Banfield was "blaming the victim." For those who were
persuaded that the essential, even the sole, black problem was white
prejudice-and that that prejudice was so pervasive and over whelming
in its effects as to leave poor blacks helpless to succeed in America so
long as it persisted-reference to behavior patterns in the black
community was but a diversion and an evasion. Racism was the
problem, its elimination from the white psyche the only solution. In the
meantime, amelioration would come for blacks only from "massive"
government programs of aid and support that might to some degree
circumvent the all-devouring prejudice that doomed reliance on private
initiatives, white or black, to inevitable failure.

The liberal response could not have surprised Banfield. Indeed, he had
anticipated it. Among the causes of urban discontent, he said, was
precisely the altruistic bias of middle-class opinion leaders, seized by the
urge to "do something, do good." But, Banfield insisted, we cannot solve
fundamental social problems simply by exertions of social will. It was
unfortunate, he thought, that the old urban political machines had been
supplanted by liberal caucuses. The smoke-filled room had been
superseded by the talk-filled room, and too much of that talk consisted

Page 15
of unappeasable righteous indignation. The "moral shrillness" of liberal
opinion, caught up in fantasies of transformations in the "hearts and
minds of men," had weakened the consensual bonds of society-had,
indeed, invited the urban outbursts that liberals now used to assault the
nation’s conscience.

Banfield’s conclusion was mordant: “Faith in the perfectibility of man

and confidence that good intentions together with strenuous exertions will
hasten his progress onward and upward lead to bold programs that
promise to do what no one knows how to do and what perhaps cannot be
done, and therefore end in frustration, loss of mutual respect and trust,
anger, and even coercion."

As this passage indicates, Banfield’s conservatism was rooted in a

refusal of sentimentality and a resolute anti-utopianism. Having read
him, I simply knew that he had urban policy right and the Kerner
Commission had it wrong. He saw people and situations as they were,
not as, were the world a different place than it is, they might be. Edward
Banfield taught me (more precisely he reminded me) that the wisest
social policy-and yes, the most compassionate-begins in an utter disdain
for illusions. To do good we must be undeceived.

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3245

*****

Page 16
And then virrudh harshly critiques some conservatives’ style of political
discourse:

I am sick to death of the lack of intelligence and wit and originality of the
types who come up with descriptions like libtards, dumbbuttcrabs,
dimmocrats, hitlary. I mean, really. The first time it is written is bad enough,
but then it gets repeated over and over and over by people who apparently
think it's a cool thing to say. I feel as though I have walked into an
unsupervised room full of junior high boys trying to outgross each other.

“Why do you feel that this open hostility is so necessary?”

Pure frustration. For most people, that’s the only way to express their pure
frustration at elites who don’t have a clue as to the needs and desires of
ordinary Americans. They may not have the political philosophical
background to express and explain what they believe is wrong, so they enter
the land of expletive deleted.

This also explains why Rush is so popular. It’s not, “Oh finally, I now know
what to think about political issues.” It’s more like, “Oh finally, someone’s
saying what I’ve thought for YEARS, and better than I could say it.” Which
was exactly my reaction to Rush and precisely why I am not a liberal.

Page 17
 Sources

Here’s the link to the original column and the resulting discussion thread:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2007/08/08/absolutely_fabulist?page=f
ull&comments=true#1b5eed76-8773-4070-b06c-e8377dc5dffd

Check out Robert Kagan’s original essay, “Of Paradise and Power,” which was later
turned into a book. Here’s the link:

http://www.vinod.com/blog/Books/OfParadiseandPower.html

Here is information on Kagan’s book:

http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Power-America-Europe-World/dp/1400040930

Page 18