Dems: We're losing, so everyone must be crazy

[Little-Acorn]

BOHICA.

In 1994 when the political situation was similar to what it is today. Democrats were in majorities in both houses, there was a Dem president, and they were trying to pass socialistic programs and tax hikes without letup. That November, voters voted the Dems OUT of every majority, including the governorships of most states.

Various leftists in and out of the media, immediately announced that voters were "stupid", "immature", "had thrown a temper tantrum", etc. The idea that voters had thought things through and reasonably concluded that Democrats were bad for the country, never occurred to those leftist elites.

One thing remains constant, though: Those who are ignoring the history of that period, are starting to repeat it.

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http://opinionjournal.com

"We're Losing, So Everyone Must Be Crazy "

by James Taranto
14 Sept 2010

Politico's Ben Smith notes a near-trend: a pair of pro-Obama commentators who "float the same notion: That we're living in a fundamentally unreasonable age, that voters basically can't be trusted, and that democracy is just barely muddling through." First is George Packer of The New Yorker:

Nine years [after 9/11], the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don't stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up. . . .

This is why Obama seems less and less able to speak to and for our times. He's the voice of reason incarnate, and maybe he's too sane to be heard in either Jalalabad or Georgia. An epigraph for our times appears in Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom": "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."

Second is Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic:

Yet now, especially, that unreason seems to have taken an almost pathological turn. It is as if America is intent on destroying itself, its civil society, its fiscal future, and its next generation in an endless fit of mutual recrimination, neurotic nationalism, and religious division.

There's something hilarious about Sullivan, as kooky a writer as can be found on the staff of any mainstream publication, bemoaning anyone's lack of rationality. But as Smith notes, this argument is "being made increasingly." He adds:

Anyone who spends much time covering American politics feels this sometimes. At the same time, it's a lot easier to think this when your side is losing politically.

It seems to us, though, that the snobbish attitude displayed by Packer and Sullivan is a particular conceit of the left, and a big reason why the public has soured so quickly on Democrat rule. Obama comes across as "the voice of reason incarnate" only to an obnoxious know-it-all like Packer. To a normal person, he comes across as another obnoxious know-it-all.