Why Palin is the Left’s Worst Nightmare
In a piece he titles “Palin and the Leftist Elites,” Mark Hendrickson makes some key observations about what it means to be a progressive and a liberal – just obvious things that the left themselves overlook.
The left can’t stand that Palin, like Reagan, is not an “intellectual” – such as the left (highly) regards themselves. “To leftist intellectuals,” Hendrickson writes: “it’s okay to have a president who thinks he visited 57 states, a vice president who has claimed that Franklin Roosevelt went on television to calm the people after the stock market crash of 1929 (no TV yet, and Hoover was president) and a Speaker of the House who has insisted that we must switch from fossil fuels to natural gas. All ignorance, error, and mental dullness can be forgiven as long as one subscribes to the political catechism, “The government must control economic activity.” What is unacceptable, even evil, to them is someone like Palin who doesn’t subscribe to the same catechism, who just doesn’t “get it.”
Hendrickson was struck by a passage from the late Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises who wrote back in 1944:
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.
And we are still fighting these ideologies today! Apparently, we’ve learned nothing in the past 60 years – so we are bent on repeating these mistakes. Although Hendrickson makes the mistake of calling Palin “polarizing,” (and Obama isn’t?), the whole thing is worth a read.
