The Liberal Mania: Crazy in a Bubble<5>
The reaction is, literally, anger or hot letters of resignation or, in Limbaugh’s case, demands for same. It is never, ever a dawning reality
that there is quite another world-view out there held by thoughtful and honest people who simply disagree in good faith. The liberal mania
insists that what they know is equivalent to a revealed truth. Again, Buckley: "…it is usually necessary (for the liberal) to berate the
person who brought the matter up."
Exactly. And the considerable experience of conservatives since 1959 suggests that’s putting it mildly.
This is doubtless a revelation to Geraldine Limbaugh…ah…Ferraro. When Rush Limbaugh made essentially the same point Ms. Ferraro did about
Barack Obama, except in a sports context, he was pilloried by a sports network that instantly revealed itself as infected with a serious case
of liberal mania. If one waits long enough, goes the Chinese proverb, one will see the body of your enemy float by. In Limbaugh’s case the
body in question would be any prominent American liberal, and to doubtless her own surprise that body turns out to belong to Ms. Ferraro.
Ms. Ferraro is no more a racist than Rush Limbaugh. But in a casual aside she made the mistake of doing what Limbaugh has educated a good bit
of the American conservative movement to do quite deliberately – and what he did on ESPN: challenge the liberal conventional wisdom. Think
outside the left’s bubble. Don’t get swept up by the liberal mania, whether in politics, sports or anywhere else. In doing so (presumably
accidentally) a clearly startled and now quite furious Ferraro has found herself targeted as if she were a Klansman by no less than Obama
himself, who, suddenly stripped of his cover by his minister, appears quite adept at playing the meanest of the old fashioned politics. One
would hope that Ferraro, newly and thusly mugged, would both continue to hold her ground and realize the racial game that has been afoot in
her party for some two centuries, first with whites and, since the 1960s, with blacks, Obama included. The game is even played at ESPN.
Much has been made of the importance of this election, and surely when it comes to Iraq or health care or judges or the economy it is. But
there is something else at work here in this election, and perhaps Obama is right to open up a genuine conversation on race. It is time, past
time, for the bursting of the liberal bubble, to see if it is indeed possible to halt the “hurtling irrationality” Buckley identified so long
ago. To coax outside into the warm sunshine of honest debate those liberals on duty holding on desperately to an increasingly frightened,
timid, stereotypical, reflexively mean-spirited and condescending philosophy.
The liberal mania.