On Goldilocks and speaking truth to power

Sister Toldjah hails a new essay by veteran political columnist Michael Barone, and rightly so. Barone summarizes his main point in one trenchant sentence: "I would submit that the president's call for an end to 'bickering' and the charges of racism by some of his supporters are the natural reflex of people who are not used to hearing people disagree with them and who are determined to shut them up."

The people not used to hearing disagreement are people weaned on politically correct codes of speech at major universities, Barone notes wryly. He also explains the often-overlooked irony of the current scene: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned us that there's a danger that intense rhetoric can provoke violence, and no decent person wants to see harm come to our president or other leaders. But it's interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer's town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man's finger in California."

Those two violent incidents tend to be ignored or dismissed by people who haven't got rhetorical skill enough to cherry-pick events that support their own positions, but evidence to back up what Barone asserts can be found even outside the Beltway, as my friend Brigette well knows. Brigette wrote a column explaining why conservatives (meaning, in this context, people opposed to President Obama) do not deserve to be tarred with the broad brush of racism. Her column was spiked by an editor who thought Brigette's carefully-reasoned analysis might be too incendiary for the more excitable readers of the New Mexico Independent, where Brigette is a regular contributor.

Not being a resident of Santa Fe myself, I can't speak to the accuracy of the timid editor's perception, but I do know that Brigette takes undeserved heat for expressing conservative views, even though her tone is typically irenic.

Unfortunately for Brigette (and to a lesser extent, for me also), high-mindedness seldom helps when you take positions that are at odds with prevailing or preferred narratives.

Certain progressives with whom I am friendly have banned my Facebook feed because, I'm told, they don't want to be "exposed" to the conservative political views that I sometimes voice or link to on that forum. The funny thing is that I'm hardly peddling toxins, and I suspect that those who fear exposure to my conservative thought would in almost any other context be singing the praises of open-mindedness.

Brigette's experience, in other words, is par for the course when you buck "Hope and Change." Otherwise level-headed people insist on finding alleged (and inevitably racist) subtexts in the opposition to our president, apparently because deconstruction as a scorched-earth tool of literary analysis has made so many inroads into popular culture that they get more of a charge from hunting imaginary subtexts than from taking statements at face value. Like the increasingly malicious Jimmy Carter, they misread opposition to Obama in precisely the way that the philosopher Nietzsche would have misread it: as a velvet glove that barely conceals an iron will to power.

Recite a partial catalog of presidential missteps that includes abandoning Polish commitments, ignoring the Honduran constitution, sandbagging American commanders, placing want ads for the next Leni Riefenstahl on the public dime, encouraging federal takeover of one-sixth of the American economy, etc., and some Obama fans will still ask why you really don't care for the guy in the Oval Office. Not long ago, former Vermont governor Howard Dean got a pass from this crowd for quitting his church over a bike path dispute, but they only extend passes to other progressives. Conservatives must tread lightly, or be charged by the likes of Maureen Dowd with saying things they did not actually say.

The town hall phenomenon and the September 12 March on Washington have not helped the progressive mood. Because President Obama's most fervid supporters are genuinely worried about what too many of them consider orchestrated attempts to "turn an all-white group of angry haters into a rainbow," it does little good to remind such people that oppositon to Team Obama is not "astroturfed" and not lily-white. Recalling Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, celebrated dictum about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, or pointing out that Hillary Clinton's high-handed attempt to reform healthcare behind closed doors was also stiff-armed a generation ago, does no good either, because -- as Bill Whittle of "Pajamas Media" made a point of explaining -- it doesn't fit the prevailing narrative.

Sadly, the prevailing narrative slanders anyone who has the temerity to oppose the president. It turns out that we were misled by the left's neo-Clintonian parsing of the verb "is." Dissent is only the highest form of patriotism when the right people say so. If they disagree with dissent, or do not publicly subscribe to it, then dissent devolves into thoughtcrime.

Many progressives instinctively grasp that their side has a "Goldilocks" problem: historical opposition to federal overreach is a messy fact that has to be hand-trimmed to fit a frame that is big enough to encompass the Civil War and Jim Crow laws, but no bigger. Too much context is -- for progressives-- a dangerous thing.

What I mean is this: Anyone who points out that questions about the role of the federal government divided Hamiltonians from Jeffersonians in the 18th century (long before Obama came along) merely gives Goldilocks an excuse to complain about how this chair is too small (The objection goes something like, "Times have changed-- don't bother me with Thomas Jefferson!").

So trying to use American history as a corrective for postmodern myopia is out: they have no time for that. But anyone who puts history on the shelf to wonder with a nod toward current events why Democrats scrambled to patch holes in proposed legislation that would not have needed patching if the president had been telling the truth about health care reform and illegal aliens gets dismissed with "this chair is too big."

In the minds of the most vocal Obama supporters -- those who don't even show up to debate , as at least one of them admits -- the only chair that fits Goldilocks just right is the one that says "I won."

Passive-agressive behavior is the order of the day, because progressives forget that the chair belongs not to Goldilocks, but to the three bears. Anguished calls from ranking Democrats for civility in discourse are accompanied by screeds that impute the basest possible motives to those with whom they disagree. Lessons from the American founders are declared out of bounds, and so are arguments based on the anything the Congressional Budget Office said in the last six months. Opposition to federal overreach must in their reading be forever tainted with support for the Confederacy or segregation. On recognizing that alloy, Obama partisans reach for the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension of the kind their standard bearer and his teleprompter can't help but employ. With the rhetorical rules rewriten to their own advantage, they can then declaim about the scourge of racism or dismiss anti-tax rallies as chimeras conjured by talk radio hosts without stopping to ponder whether opposition to their pet president is, in most cases, principled.

As the Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia) pointed out, it's easier for Obama supporters to climb on a soap box about racism than to think critically or to talk honestly or to admit that "maybe, just maybe, Obama would have been a better president if he had first been a vice president."

Make no mistake: there are racists. There are also people with a vested interest in making the racism charge stick to anything or anyone, whether it fits or not. Henry Louis Gates and his fawning apologists found that it did not fit Sergeant James Crowley, but the lessons of the so-called "beer summit" faded faster than the frothy head on a pint of Guinness Stout for those who pin everything on "angry white males."

Last I looked, Alan Keyes, Lloyd Marcus, Stephen A. Smith, and Michael Steele were black, Michelle Malkin was neither white nor male, and "opposition" was not a synonym for "hate." Moreover, anybody sputtering about "Uncle Tom" could probably use a few lessons in economics from Dr. Thomas Sowell. And yet the Left thinks everyone I've mentioned in this paragraph is invisible, because all they can see are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, each of whom was quickly written off as evil. What's wrong with this picture?