Essayist and media critic Chris Lehmann at The Baffler writes—More Mush from the Taste Police:
AMID THE GENERAL COLLAPSE of liberal governance, it remains an unshakable article of faith among our pundit class that liberal sensibilities possess a vicelike stranglehold on our cultural life. This fanciful belief may be, at bottom, a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy: since political commentators must, as a matter of professional pride, hold that their studiously branded mode of thought leadership sternly guides our republic through its many travails and challenges, the attitudes and taste preferences of our opinion makers are a matter of great political moment.
It is, at any rate, a cinch that the prescription of first resort for professional prognosticators of our national politics is this peculiar pundit brand of mind-cure. In this backward-spooling cosmology of our public life, the more stubborn and deep-seated challenges of structural reform, painstaking political organizing, and demanding long-term strategizing yield magisterially to the modulations of attitude, taste, and Zeitgeist fealty that the Vox Populi supposedly demands from its pundit class and the allied liberal cognoscenti. The penalty for noncompliance is severe: a land rush of taste monitors will deem you fatally out-of-touch with the tenor of daily life in these United States.
The first noteworthy paradox in the taste-policing racket is that it’s a singularly lucrative and prestigious one—one that frequently elevates its adepts into the very cultural elite they profess to scorn as they deliver their camera-ready talking points. Charles Murray crafted a stupendously useless book from it, David Brooks has made a career of it, and pollsters lovingly dote over it.
The shortcoming of these prim re-education sermons is that even their hypothetical purchase on the public weal is plainly well past the sell-by date. We have, after all, endured a devastating recession, followed in short order by an austerity-driven upward distribution of wealth, and a white-nationalist uprising on the American right, all within the past decade. On what imaginable planet should the question of how and where liberals feed, entertain, and irksomely congratulate themselves for their reading habits be a subject that any sane person gives a shit about?
Yet, there the pointless, tail-chasing sport of liberal-taste-baiting hulks, smack dab in the center of our approved political discourse. A mere fortnight ago, the tirelessly chastising Pastor Brooks took to his New York Times column to relate the harrowing saga of how the less educated yeoman citizens of the working-class republic are menaced by the specter of Italian cold cuts. (Yes, really.)
And now, in a sort of clickbaity apotheosis of the genre, comes Business Insider columnist Josh Barro, fretting over a point made by National Review editor Rich Lowry, about how liberals never win credibility among the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil because their cultural preferences are so resolutely foppish. As Barro argues, “Liberal moralizing tends to read as college-educated people in cities arguing that everyone should behave more like them. Usually, that’s the substance of the moralizing, too.”
And this substantive elite moralizing is just about everywhere, by Barro’s account. Meddlesome cultural Stalinists on the left want you to stop eating hamburgers at home, since meat-intensive agribusiness makes climate change worse (and because every pundit on earth has evidently staked out a position on meat sandwiches). They want you to refrain from watching football, since the sport is retrograde, racist, and dangerous. And the worst part is that they’re just getting started! [...]
If you’re condemned, as I am, to engage in the thankless scut work of media criticism, you’ll discover that the damning hyperlinks Barro supplies to document his case against “a movement” consist of a fashion-glossy advice column, a CNN explainer video, and a pair of click-bait offerings from British dailies. If this is what constitutes a PC police state in the making, then the HGTV channel must be broadcasting wall-to-wall North Korean agitprop. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Bush and African Americans:
Headline: "Bush laments poor Republican relations with blacks."
"I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties to the African American community," Bush said. "For too long my party wrote off the African American vote and many African Americans wrote off the Republican Party."
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Republicans didn't "write off" blacks, they used them as a demonizable prop to bring the Dixiecrat vote into their fold.
And who is Bush to talk, given the disaster he ignored in New Orleans? He could rush to DC on a midnight flight to sign the "let's meddle in the Schiavo family's affairs" bill, but couldn't be bothered to cut his six-week vacation short when Katrina hit.
Abraham Lincoln would be no more a modern-day Republican than Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms would be modern-day Democrats.