Its been interesting to read a number of stories and blog posts this week that imply a circling of the wagons by the left and the imposition of several forms of thought control to insure group cohesion.
Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias, prophet of the church of self-deification and droits-du-Seigneur, responded to Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" is this fashion:
One thing that dimwitted and immoral people do when under pressure is decide that lashing out with a kind of dimwitted and immoral violence is going to help them. Consequently, they got the dimwitted and immoral idea that they ought to torture people with techniques they got out of techniques the US government has developed to train soldiers in torture-resistance.
'Stupid', 'torture', 'immoral' and 'violent' were repeated over and over through out a not overly-long blog post--like a chant, or 'thought-stopping' behavior. Thiessen and his book are so stupid, immoral and violent, that Yglesias didn't even need to read the book to write a review.
From "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" by Prof. Robert J. Lifton M.D.
Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group's ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also.
Hmmm. What we've been calling liberal condescension is actually a matter of self-preservation by a beleaguered and besieged cult of left-wing religion. If you leave the group, then you to will be stupid, immoral and violent--the 'worst person in the world'.
Well, no one want that.
Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga (Kos) recently commissioned a poll in support of his forthcoming book "American Taliban", which unsurprisingly, characterizes conservatives (more specifically--Republicans) as virtually indistinguishable from radical jihadists--you know--'violent'. The poll--also unsurprisingly, reveals that conservatives are well, 'stupid' and 'immoral'.
Name-calling and demonization has always been a feature of left-wing rhetoric, but this specific litany is a more recent phenomenon, and appears to be engineered.
If money is fuel for politics, anger must be its lubricant. The Democrat's current woes are due to having provoked American anger, and so naturally the response has to be stoking the boiler of left-wing anger to try and keep up.
Good luck with that.
