A Heritage Foundation symposium last week on the future of liberalism yielded statements that some lefty bloggers considered proof of ignorance, paranoia, and, above all, righties’ profound resentment that liberals have so much more sex than conservatives.
The panelist comments that drew the most fire from the bloggers came from Heritage’s David Azerrad, who asserted that liberalism’s message is “give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with [sexual] license,” and National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who declared that the left is “heading towards…authoritarianism,” notably on the issue of climate change.
In a Thursday post, the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman declared that “the prototypical Republican today” is a sixtyish guy who’s been seething ever since his buttoned-down high-school days when “the hippies” were “getting laid” but he wasn’t (emphasis added):
While the squares were getting buzz cuts, convincing themselves that the Vietnam War was a great idea, and nodding along with Richard Nixon's encomiums to the Silent Majority, the hippies were getting high, dancing to cool music, and above all, getting laid.
And the squares are still mad about it, even the ones who weren't actually born then...
…[Y]ou don't have to go far to find conservative fury not just at the idea that sex is an important part of life that need not be clothed in shame, but also at the fact that it's liberals who seem to be having it all…[T]he prototypical Republican today is that guy who 45 years ago was a high school kid in a starched short-sleeve Oxford shirt, gazing longingly at that open-minded girl in the peasant blouse…
That square is wrinkled and gray now, but he's everywhere in today's GOP. He's Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and he's much of their audience. He's the one who has Fox News on in the background all day, and he votes in every election. The 1960s and the cultural conflict that defined them won't release their hold on him, and since he makes up such a large part of the Republican electorate, the party is going to reflect his concerns and values, not to mention his resentments and disgust.
On Friday, the Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore denounced the Heritage panelists’ “bizarre vision of American liberalism” and mused, “Strange as it is for a lot of us liberals to realize many conservatives view us as sex fiends and potential prison guards, it’s a way of looking at things that is important to the internal dynamics of today’s hard-core Right.”
And on Saturday, Daily Kos’s chief conservative-basher, Hunter, opined that the panelists “manage[d] to combine pure ignorance of the subject matter with wild-eyed suppositions about what the truth probably is,” and added:
The People's Climate Rally is evidence of the authoritative oppression of conservatives? The group that showed up with flowers, multicolored signs, a guy in a polar bear outfit and a 10-foot tall puppet in order to demand that the nations of the world pay attention to rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns—they represent the face of the new genocide? You poor dear. Show me where the giant puppet touched you, Kevin…
[W]hen you gather a collection of conservative think-tank experts in a room…you will end up with…a gaggle of people [who] suffer from a collection of paranoias so severe that every web article, hobby and public event is considered [a] harbinger of imminent oppression.
