The brilliant Dennis Prager has summarized the great divide in this way:
There are two kinds of people: those who fear terrorism, and those who fear second hand smoke.
The Left is content to fight imaginary evil, such as carbon emissions and second hand smoke and income inequality.
Yesterday, in the WSJ, Bret Stephens fleshes out the image of addle-brained Liberals, and their battles with windmills.
1. "Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.
Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal ... claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country [with] the highest rates of obesity.
The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” [This] gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.
2. The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School.
The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school?
... there is no epidemic.But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.
3. Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the same college administrators who have made a religion of diversity are really the second coming of Strom Thurmond.
Somehow we’re supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility. We’re supposed to believe this anyway because the future of liberal racialism—from affirmative action to diversity quotas to slavery reparations—requires periodic sightings of the ghosts of a racist past."
Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies
There are two kinds of people: those who fear terrorism, and those who fear second hand smoke.
The Left is content to fight imaginary evil, such as carbon emissions and second hand smoke and income inequality.
Yesterday, in the WSJ, Bret Stephens fleshes out the image of addle-brained Liberals, and their battles with windmills.
1. "Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.
Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal ... claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country [with] the highest rates of obesity.
The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” [This] gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.
2. The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School.
The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school?
... there is no epidemic.But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.
3. Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the same college administrators who have made a religion of diversity are really the second coming of Strom Thurmond.
Somehow we’re supposed to believe that twice electing a black president is evidence of our racial incorrigibility. We’re supposed to believe this anyway because the future of liberal racialism—from affirmative action to diversity quotas to slavery reparations—requires periodic sightings of the ghosts of a racist past."
Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies
