Kevin Williamson in The National Review, The Irredeemables Hillary Clinton and the politics of leftist condescension

The progressive mind believes in the unity of vice, the flip side of the Socratic unity of virtue, the belief that all good characteristics are not only compatible but also related, that they are aspects of a unitary whole that is difficult to see in its entirety. The unity of vice, in the progressive mind, is the suspicion that someone who disagrees with you about taxes or climate policy is at heart a racist, racism being the comprehensive social sin in the American mind. If you are a conservative or a libertarian, you have no doubt encountered progressives who refuse to believe that the Koch brothers are longtime supporters of gay marriage, that Barry Goldwater was an NAACP member who funded a desegregation lawsuit out of his own pocket, that Rick Perry has been a leading voice on criminal-justice reform, that National Review has favored marijuana decriminalization since the 1980s. For those of the mindset criticized by Kevin Drum (and, sometimes, for Kevin Drum), “conservative” and “bigot” are synonyms. That is how modern progressives can consider the case of 20th-century southern Democrats who supported the New Deal, the Great Society, progressive labor reforms, the minimum wage, welfare, social-insurance programs, etc., and spit: “Conservatives!”

Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016-10-10-0100/hillary-clinton-deplorable-democrat-campaign-tactics

print