Red-diaper romper room rug rats get rambunctious

Interesting times. If I weren't afraid of #MeToo accusations I would observe that they make for interesting bedfellows.

From Scaling Wokeback Mountain by Maureen Dowd. The column is actually just an interparty memo to Democrats to straighten up and support Nancy Pelosi. Issued in th party organ, the New York Times.

I am not a great respecter of Pelosi's political aims, nor do I think she has been particularly effective in crafting strategic success for the Democratic Party. But I have to respect her tenaciousness and her legislative brawling at the tactical level.

Consequently, I am not especially interested in the objective of Dowd's column.

Other than for the fact that she is making exactly the same points and argument that Classical Liberals (in their various conservative stripes) have been making since The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom in 1987.

You would think, from her reporting, that Dowd had been reading Stephen Pinker and Jonathan Haidt. Especially the latter in terms of his The Righteous Mind and even more especially his ever more interesting research and work with the Heterodox Academy.

The most recent incident arises from an exchange between Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. From Dowd's column:

But instead, the 79-year-old speaker and the 29-year-old freshman are trapped in a generational and ideological tangle that poses a real threat to the Democrats’ ability to beat Donald Trump next year.

Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.

That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.

A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.

WOOF. That last line is exactly the perspective of Classical Liberals for the past three decades when disputing with critical theory social justice postmodernists. "I can disagree with you based on principles and my understanding of facts without it ever having anything to do with race, religion, gender, or any other identity obsession."

But critical theory social justice postmodernists in general and Democratic Party operatives have relied on cries of racism and other claims of identity hatred as their only counter-argument for so long that they seem to have lost the capacity to actually argue in good faith.

Dowd is stating a truth the other side of the aisle has been stating for a long time.

The young lawmaker went further, implying that the speaker was putting the Squad in danger, asking why Pelosi would criticize them, “knowing the amount of death threats” and attention they get. Huh?

A.O.C. pulled back and said she wasn’t calling Pelosi a racist. But once you start that ball rolling, it’s hard to stop. (You know how topsy-turvy the fight is when the biggest defenders of Pelosi, who has endured being a caricature of extreme liberalism for decades, are Trump and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.)

The A.O.C. crew threw down the gauntlet in a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. He wrote that when Pelosi and other Democratic mandarins try to keep the image of the party centrist, they are crouching in “the defensive posture” they’ve been in since the Reagan revolution.

Corbin Trent, a spokesman for A.O.C. and co-founder of Justice Democrats, the progressive group that helped propel her, told Grim: “The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,” with the older generation “driven by fear” and “unable to lead.”

Message: Pelosi is past her prime.

Yep. The young communists are a pain in the neck for establishment socialist-lite.

This is the passage where Dowd most reminded me of Haidt.

The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.

Again, it is something known to Classical Liberals for decades now and denied by establishment Democrats. Denied, it seems, until the same accusations from the red-diaper romper room rug rats make the claim against establishment Democrats.


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