I'm a Leninist and I'm ok, I sleep all night and I work all day... (Good post, Nascar, and now also cscs has me trying to figure out the motives, too.)

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I've been mulling this over some more, and it's convinced me to stay out of the latest and loudest round on the home page, so I know what you all mean by the petulance. But I'll tell you how it's now feeling to me.

There's a line that's gone around for a long time, according to which liberals were shrill, narrow interest groups defined by a mix of their petty interests and lifestyle choices, while the GOP was generating real ideas. In this scheme, when pressed for ideas, all the liberals come up with are "I hate Bush personally." It started as a GOP spin, with gay marriage, hugging trees, and latte as the key points of the liberal agenda. But it became important to the media more widely and to a new breed of Democrats as well, perhaps well meaning and perhaps not.

Bai and N&S, to my hears, both make a case very much like that. Now, when pressed hard here to define his new ideas, Bai didn't really have much to say, so the argument ran in circles. And when pressed, N&S articulated something pretty much the platform already on the table, including that of a candidate many of us admire, Obama. So in Bai's case, it was natural for the hostility to him to grow, whereas in the latter case it was natural for there to be a more animated but pointless debate with hostility on both sides.

One side could say, but then why are you attacking liberals rather than rallying them to the cause? What's the real motive, why the disconnect between rhetoric and policy, and don't you realize that you're feeding disdain for liberalism and thus for the people who should become your own movement? And the other side could say, but then why are you attacking these guys, since they have real substance and you are maligning the plain sense of their proposals? Don't you realize that you're living up to the parody of yourselves as whiny liberals and thus feeding disdain?

I know it'd help if we'd all calmed down, and I was obviously on the side of those attacking N&S and praising older environmentalists for their record. But it seems to me that, when the damaging meme is spread, but aside from that just when a book like this comes out, the burden is on the writers, here N&S, to make their case and to make a fair case. It's not a great excuse to note that their case happens to encompass contradictions. Otherwise, we'd be defending every halfway moderate sounding David Brooks column.

And besides, we were characterized as Leninists. Or rather, we heard one of the most regrettable rhetorical tricks in the book, the "I will not say that...." There has to be a name for that line, and since we publish here in critical thinking and human communications, I'm dying to ask our authors.

John (who drinks coffee black)

http://www.haberarts.com/