Jonah Goldberg‘s latest missive for National Review Online readers uses a silly MSNBC ad to point out a key contradiction in modern liberalism:
The ad they kept running during the [presidential] debate features Rachel Maddow standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam. The spots are a widespread source of ridicule in conservative circles, mostly because they show Maddow on the precipice of the dam in an ad hectoring us all to “lean forward.” You first, Ms. Maddow.
But the real joke of the commercial is the argument behind it. Maddow objects when “people tell us no, no, no we’re not going to build it. No, no, no, America doesn’t have any greatness in its future. America has small things in its future. Other countries have great things in their future. China can afford it. We can’t.” She replies to this chorus of strawmen, “You’re wrong, and it doesn’t feel right to us and it doesn’t sound right to us because that’s not what America is.” It’s one of several ads equating American greatness with big infrastructure spending on the scale of the Hoover Dam.
The reason the ad is so funny is that nobody thinks liberals such as Maddow would support anything like the Hoover Dam today. The Hoover Dam is a marvel. But by today’s green standards, it is a crime against nature. If you tried to build it, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace would be in court tomorrow blocking it, with Ms. Maddow cheering them on.
Indeed, look at all the activists attacking the proposed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. It would create thousands of construction jobs and yet liberals oppose it for the usual petrophobic reasons. Ironically, liberals love building highways and bridges, but loathe making it affordable to drive on them.
This is just a small example of the Catch-22 liberalism has found itself in. The Left yearns to “go big” but it wants to do so through the extremely narrow routes it has created for itself. They say government must rush into this economic crisis like firemen into a burning building. But they also don’t want to lighten the useless baggage the firemen must carry or remove the Byzantine obstacle course they’ve decreed the figurative firefighters must run through before getting to work.
