"The Angry White Liberal"

For quite a while, we've had this extreme political tension where one side seems incapable of seeing that another side might have a point - or at least might not be insanely evil. This author captures some of the problem very well:

The Angry White Liberal:
"We've spent the month of August talking about alleged right-wing rage, but it's really time we started discussing the Angry White Liberal. When things aren't going his way, the Angry White Liberal wails and gnashes his teeth, rends his garments, and hurls invective at the opposition. His rhetoric and prose is so heated, it's gotten to the point where you need to put on oven mitts before opening the paper. He is so convinced of the righteousness of his positions that he lashes out uncontrollably at anybody who disagrees with him. For the Angry White Liberal, dissent is anathema. Antagonism is illegitimate. Only conformity to prevailing liberal opinion is enough to still his rage.

. . . even though "health care" is not the top voter priority, even though the budget deficit stands at more than a trillion dollars, President Obama decided that this was the moment to remake one-sixth of the American economy.

The more Obama talked about health care reform, the further his numbers dropped. The country seemed caught in a time-warp. We'd been catapulted back to 2005, when another president attempted a major overhaul of the American welfare state. Then, too, the president deferred to Congress to come up with a plan. Then, too, as the president crisscrossed the nation, warning of the dangers of out-of-control entitlement spending, the public increasingly tuned him out. The innate conservatism of the American people--an instinctual resistance to sudden changes in existing social arrangements--came to the fore.

. . . Protest, which a few years ago was the highest form of patriotism, is now considered artificial, dishonest, misinformed, cynical, and mean-spirited. "An ugly campaign is underway," Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote in USA Today on August 10, "not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. . . . Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American."

Meanwhile, Harry Reid referred to the town hall protestors as "evil-mongers." Senate finance committee chairman Max Baucus preferred "agitators." Congressman Eric Massa, Democrat of New York, accused Iowa Republican senator Charles Grassley of "treason" for criticizing the health care plan.

. . .

Times columnist Frank Rich warned that the current debates surrounding health care resemble the "walk up to the Kennedy assassination."

. . .

The Angry White Liberal finds it simply incomprehensible that somebody might honestly and in good faith disagree with the Democrats' efforts. On August 14, blogger Steve Benen wrote on the Huffington Post that the "far-tight apoplexy is counter-intuitive." After all, "Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that would help them and their families?"

Forget Benen's exaggerated claim of threatened violence. Note, instead, that Benen cannot conceive that someone might actually think the costs to the Democrats' program outweigh the unrealized and perhaps unachievable benefits. Hence he divides Obama's critics into five camps: the "partisans," the "tin-foil hats," the "greedy," the "dupes," and the "wonks." The "wonks," we are told, compose the "smallest of the groups." In Benen's view, then, millions of opponents of health care reform have no reasonable grounds for their opinion."