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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 The
Center Has Held
Liberal
elites don’t understand the real stakes…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 11/5/04
Now that, as
Hank Williams might put it, it's all over but the Democrats'
crying, what are some preliminary conclusions we can draw from
this election?
The most obvious is that the Democrats are increasingly out of touch with the
majority of Americans. Sure, over 50 million Americans voted for Kerry, but
that was to be expected given the combination of a nasty guerilla war in Iraq
and the irrational hatred of George Bush stoked by the lingering resentment
over the 2000 election and the antics of partisan fanatics like Michael Moore
and Al Gore. If not for those factors, this election would've been a repeat
of 72, 80, 84, and 88, other races in which Republicans shellacked programmatic
liberal Democrats.
Indeed, what is mystifying is that despite those previous debacles, and despite
Bill Clinton's success at running as a moderate Republican, the Democrats once
more put forward a Northeastern pacifist liberal, this time a rank opportunist
who had jump-started his political career by slandering his fellow soldiers
while they were still under fire in Vietnam, consorted in Paris with the enemy
while still in uniform, and then spent 19 years in the Senate playing Costello
to Teddy Kennedy's Abbot. The Democrats' penchant for picking losers reminds
me of that fable about the frog that gives a scorpion a ride across a river.
Halfway through the scorpion bites the frog, and then says as both drown, "It's
my nature."
Once again the Democrats have loaded on their backs a poisonous candidate whose
political nature is toxic to most Americans. The problem with the liberal elite
and those who share their sensibility is that deep down they don't trust the
average person. Liberals believe they alone possess some higher knowledge and
superior insight lacking among all those church-going throwbacks with their
quaint moral values and traditional ideals like patriotism and family and hard
work and self-reliance. Instead, the elite believe, with all the fervor of
the fundamentalist, that all those ideals are mere illusions (see Marx, Darwin,
and Freud) and that government social technicians are better equipped to run
things than the average Joe with his baggage of racism, sexism, homophobia,
and addiction to fast-food, talk-radio, and trashy television.
So when such a candidate and his minions talk to the people, despite donning
populist garb--one particularly threadbare when it's worn by a Beacon Hill
billionaire with five mansions--they can't help coming off as condescending
and patronizing. And say what you will about the masses and their presumed
oafish lack of subtlety, they do know when they're being talked down to. And
they don't like it.
They also know when they're being lied to. They could see through Kerry's "eat-your-cake-and-have-it" political
principles: "against abortion" yet a stalwart, absolutist defender
of abortion's creepy outer limits, such as late-term partial-birth abortion;
a "believer in traditional marriage" yet unwilling to lift a legislative
finger to defend it; a "fiscal conservative" who wanted to create
a gazillion-dollar health-care entitlement; a "tough warrior against terrorism
who voted to remove Hussein," and who then had a conversion on the road
to the Democratic primaries and spent the rest of the campaign decrying and
subverting the war he had voted for.
And don't forget, Kerry had the active support of powerful institutions in
our society: popular culture's rock-stars and actors and propagandists like
Michael Moore; and the mainstream media that helpfully offered up a steady
diet of disaster, second-guessing, and Chicken-Little prognostications. But
a majority of the people weren't fooled: they could hear Michael Moore's swamp-fever
fantasies in bin Laden's election eve video; they could see the hypocrisy of
Dan Rather eagerly accepting clumsily forged documents critical of Bush while
reflexively dismissing the Swift Boat Veterans' charges against Kerry; and
they had enough sense to realize that the media-generated hysteria over some
400 tons of munitions that might be missing was partisan bombast given that
400,000 tons had already been secured and destroyed.
And most of all, they realized that despite his occasional verbal stumbling
and grimacing in the debates, the President knows a simple, powerful truth:
that America will be safer against terrorism as long as America is on the offensive
against terrorism, and that Americans--not the U.N., not NATO, not the European
Union--are the best judges of when to use American power to defend America's
interests and insure her security.
The President won reelection because he's unashamed to say what he believes
and to act on his beliefs. He has a moral center shared by a majority of Americans,
who know that this country is and has been a force for good in the world. If
there's one conclusion about this election that should hearten us all, it is
that our moral center has held, and that despite all the passionate intensity
of the worst, the best still have conviction. tOR
copyright
2004 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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