Liberals respond to rejection with insults

Charles Krauthammer:

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the 40-year liberal ascendancy that James Carville predicted into a full retreat.

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? 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.

...
It is easy to spot real bigotry. Listen to Osama bin Laden talk about his rationale for his mass murder for Allah attacks and you see true bigotry marked by a call to genocide of those who disagree with him. Listen to the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and you here people saying, that while they may have a right to build it, the opposition is based on the feeling that it is insensitive toward the victims of the mass murder for Allah attack.

Me, I can see a difference between the two, but liberals not so much. Liberals have a tendency to demonize those who do not agree with them rather than engage them on the differences of opinion that separate them. But by trying to invalidate the feelings of those who disagree with them they have no chance of persuasion. In fact what they are really doing is fighting a rear guard action trying to keep more Democrats from abandoning their position.
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