*South Park Conservatives*
a review
[up-front disclosure: I received this book as a review copy]
Welcome to the new millennium where the Left is the bourgeois and the hip and edgy crowd are Colin Quinn, Nick DiPaolo and middle aged bloggers.
Phrase I am stealing from Brian Anderson:
“multiculti sentimentality”
From Colin Quinn:
“fake compassion and nonevidentiary ideas about life”
"A sympathetic old-media regime has allowed liberals to get away with this tendency to argue by invective, rather than debate ideas seriously, and it has sheltered them from recognizing just how shopworn their ideas have become.”
Illiberal liberalism undermines two principles crucial to liberal democracy and central to its superiority to other forms of government.
First, democracy requires a willingness to engage the arguments of those you disagree with, recognizing their equality as citizens.
...The second ingredient of liberal democracy that the elite-media nourished illiberalism denies is a belief in the superiority of argument over force. ...[from The Federalist Papers] “Without reflection—reason—politics degenerates into tyranny.""
Brian Anderson lays out a clear description of the sea change in American politics prompted by three main factors: technology in the form of the Internet, increased freedom of the marketplace resulting from the abolition of the “Fairness Doctrine,” and the growth of conservative book publishing.
The technological advances of the Lovely Interweb with its low cost self-publishing tools gives us immediate access to one another’s opinions and has created as conversation among people who have felt alone and left out of the Political Conversation as it was portrayed by MSM. This conversation that is the free-for-all Internet has cut the legs from under the one-note-samba that was the only thing available to most Americans to read, hear, or watch on TV for decades. The resultant freedom is heady and that enthusiasm is carried into Anderson’s writing.
I believe that this freedom of communication will be as significant here in the US as it was in the Orange Revolution in the Ukrane and the new independence of the citizens of Iraq. And with the SCOTUS we have now, we’re gonna need it.
Highly Recommended Read
Claire,
Mind if I copy your review with full credit on to my Reading Room blog?
- Gullyborg
Posted by Gullyborg on 06/27/05 at 02:13 PM
Next entry: Answer me this
Previous entry: I Trudge through Sludge so you don't have to
