Jay Nordlinger grasps something of substance about contemporary politics!

Specifically about the fact that no matter how liberal Republican politicians really are, liberals see them as extreme right-wingers:

Powell’s Fantasy, Shared by Millions [Jay Nordlinger]

Colin Powell says that the Republican party has drifted too far to the right in the past few years—toward high spending, No Child Left Behind, a new prescription-drug entitlement? What in the world could he mean? That George W. Bush tried to reform Social Security, with very little support, including from his own party? Where and what is this rightward drift? It’s a fantasy, that’s what. But it’s a fantasy that many people adopt without thinking. The idea that the GOP is now more right-wing than it has been is laughable.

Look, the Bush administration has even stood strong for race preferences—as in university admissions. And the thanks it gets is to be denounced as far-Right.

I have noticed this over the past several years: I speak to liberals, and they regard Bush as some right-wing monster, a foe of government, a Social Darwinian, content to let dog eat dog. I speak to conservatives, and they say, “I wish.” To them, Bush is a big-spending, amnesty-granting squish. Indeed, Bush is in the odd position of being friendless: The Left regards him as intolerably Right; the Right regards him as Elliot Richardson with a twang.

What a bizarre political world, our current one. I feel that emotion is trumping reason, big time. (Did you notice I said “I feel”?!)

The phenomenon that Nordlinger is grasping is that as the left keeps moving to the left, they regard anything to their right as the far right. Thus the liberal Bush becomes the most right-wing president in history.

But how could Bush and other Republicans defend themselves from this absurd charge? They would have to point to the actual liberal nature of their policies. And they can’t do that, because that would break down the illusion, on which their political support depends, that they are conservatives.

And of course it is also in liberals’ interests to make people believe that anything slightly to the right of the liberals is right wing, as that energizes the liberals’ base.

In any case, the more Bush tries to placate liberals, the more they hate him as a right-winger. and he is helpless to defend himself from this injustice, because to defend himself would expose the fiction on which the electoral support of BOTH parties rests. The Democrats AND the Republicans require the lie that Republicans are conservatives.

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A reader writes:

Very interesting observation.

My sister, who is to the left of Alinsky and Marx, thus giving me insight into how these people feel (she at least does not think), told me Juan Williams is a conservative! Such abject close-mindedness—as if she lived in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany—is the result of reading only the NY Times each day (very carefully), NY Review of Books and the New Yorker, plus listening dutifully to NPR. Plus living in Cambridge, Mass. One cannot disagree with her—she gets very angry and irrational. So we have to stay off politics, except when she can’t help herself, forgetting that I am the one person she knows who does not agree with her.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2008 08:58 AM | Send