You may be enraged at the waste of the Recovery Act, the fraud of Affordable Care Act and Obama’s new $1 billion “climate resilience fund” too, but as Washington Post columnist George Will writes, it’s not about helping Americans, it’s about helping liberals.
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Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives: making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.
Obama’s climate resilience fund “will enhance liberals’ self-esteem” and, make no mistake, “planet-saving heroism is not chopped liver.”
Liberals keep going on about positive self esteem, which would seem bizarre to a conservative. Why not just get on with life, liberals, instead of navel-gazing about it?
That just shows that you don’t understand liberals. Getting on with life doesn’t solve anything for liberals, because liberals can never know if their lives have any meaning. That’s because they are the “people of the creative self:” they believe in creativity as a religion.
Who really gets to be creative and know it? Einstein? The dearly departed Harold Ramis? Perhaps even the lion of the “hockey stick,” Dr. Michael Mann?
Trying to live the creative life on the cheap, liberals spend their entire lives twisting themselves into pretzels trying to persuade each other that they really are creative people making a difference. Otherwise their lives are meaningless.
One of the ways that liberals bolster their self-esteem is by declaring that the U.S. is “anti-intellectual.” Years ago, a dear liberal friend asked me why America was anti-intellectual, and just this February the New York Times stalwart Nick Kristof, before admonishing the professors for not coming up with enough cool policy ideas, wrote this to clear his throat:
The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.
One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life[.]
Ninety years after Sinclair Lewis and his pals were inventing the anti-intellectual meme with “Main Street” and “Babbitt” you still think the nation is full of mindless Babbitts. And yet you chaps have increased the government’s higher education spending from 0.1 percent of GDP to 1.8 percent of GDP according to usgovernmentspending.com, and sent half the nation’s youth to college to intellectualize them. What went wrong?
There’s another meme about the creative artist and it comes from the same era as Sinclair Lewis. In Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark,” we learn that the great creative artist must necessarily surrender her life to her art. In her other novel, “The Professor’s House,” an aging academic accepts that he will never hold a candle to the self-taught young man that showed up at his door one day wanting to enroll as a college freshman. The kid authors a great invention before surrendering his life in World War I.
Liberals want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be shine over the world as brilliant creatives but they don’t want to make the sacrifice.
They aren’t really creative; they aren’t really intellectual; they are just faking it. What a shame.