Reactionary Liberals and Idealistic Conservatives

In a post on his new web site, Victor Davis Hanson contemplates a world that, since his youth not so many years ago, has been turned upside down. As a youth growing up on a farm near Selma, California, Hanson was surrounded by reactionaries who blamed East Coast Jews for low agricultural prices, were driven to paranoia by conspiracy theories about secret cabals who ruled the world, took for granted that skin color was bone deep and the principal determinant of character and destiny, and saw distant peoples as incapable of self-rule. His parents taught him to reject this intellectually myopic worldview and to understand that we're all fundamentally the same regardless of race, ethnicity, or class. The world was complex, people who fail need scapegoats, and we're called to transcend the meanest urges of our appetitive natures.

Today, however, all the old reactionary language comes from the mouths of self-proclaimed liberals and purportedly open-minded academics:

"[I] think there is a deeper pathology involved. The leadership of the American Left is no longer a product of the mill, farm, or shop—and no longer strives for a 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and vigilance about a totalitarian Soviet Union. Here in California, Workers' Compensation fraud, not its absence, has nearly ruined the state; rampant illegal immigration cloaked in cynicism, exploitation, and racial chauvinism, not assimilation and integration of different peoples, is threatening the body politic. Corruption, waste, and fraud of a Democratic governor, not too low income and sales taxes, have bankrupted the state. Massive Medical fraud, not neglect and insensitivity, threaten ample health care to the poor."

Hanson's essay deserves wide circulation, so spread the word.