Is Dailykos Really Rush For Liberals - Road to the Middle Class

WE RIGHT-WINGNUTS and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement. Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited. We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.

Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins.

OK. There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass. Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.

[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they�re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.

Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites. So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence? Hawkins writes:

Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.

Yet now they think it is OK?

A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.

So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks? Do they know something we don�t know? E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left�s answer to Rush Limbaugh. Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.

Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh�s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.

But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force? And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community? According to Dionne:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They�re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O�Reilly at their own game. No wonder O�Reilly is so annoyed.

But there�s a basic difference here. Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media. People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren�t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.

On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square. After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee. How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?

Here�s my two cents worth. I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats. I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.

Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic. The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them. But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift.

And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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