Our Moderates, Their Leninists

The useful idiocy of Cautious Conservatives.

By Mark Bauerlein February 14, 2019

If I were a hard leftist, I would love thoughtful, responsible conservatives such as David Brooks. They’re so much more helpful than those sympathetic liberals at the Times, Atlantic Monthly, and NBC are.

“How We Destroy Lives Today.” That’s the title of the column Mr. Brooks wrote after the Covington Boys affair. That “We” certainly pleased the pushy progressives. It was exactly what they wanted our respectable commentators to say. Only for a moment did Mr. Brooks blame identity politics journalists and race advocates for demonizing the boy in the MAGA cap. Soon enough, he rose above the messy skirmish, looked down like a Hegelian sage upon it, and pronounced a general condition that implicates us all.

“In this case the facts happened to support the right-wing tribe,” Brooks admitted. “But that’s not the point. The crucial thing is that the nation’s culture is now enmeshed in a new technology that we don’t yet know how to control.” .............But what about Brendan Eich, Mark Regnerus, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Larry Summers, Dan T. Cathy, Charles Murray, Tucker Carlson…. Each one became a target, sometimes a physical target, for expressing an opinion the left found abominable, even though a good portion of the American populace holds it, too. The list could go on for a long time. Now, how many people have suffered the same fate, harassed and threatened, hounded out of their jobs, because of the right?..........Conservatives who generalize such attacks by the left into a general American problem are worse than feeble. They are foolish. They don’t know their enemy. They don’t even realize that the other side considers them an enemy. ................To Read More....