In a new column posted at the Human Events website, Charles Krauthammer discusses (il)liberals’ preferred response to popular dissatisfaction with their policy proposals:
Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the
“bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably
called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less
remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous
charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast
media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on
incorrect thinking.— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power,
intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the tea party movement? Why,
racist resentment toward a black president.— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to
curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human
history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s
excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern
a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the
argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided
majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g.,
the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage
and reject a Ground Zero mosque.What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that
pre-empts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of
the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of
course, the race card.
