Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the sad fact that, while some conservative writers hold nuanced views on the issues of the day, in the real world that liberals live in, they are fighting some truly crazy ideas. Here's an excerpt from Drum's piece, which is a must-read:
The problem is that in the real world, these nuanced and moderate [conservative] thinkers have virtually no influence. Among actual politicians and high-profile yakkers, it's nearly unanimously held that, for example, the stimulus had no positive effect on the economy; that tax cuts always increase revenues; that Europeans all have poorer healthcare than Americans; and that man-made global warming is a delusion. Reihan and Megan and others like them may hold more careful views, but the vast bulk of the conservative movement simply doesn't. And that's the reality of the world that liberals have to deal with.
I would go further. Liberals, in general, hold what I think of as "policy-left" views on most of the controversial ideas of the day. We really don't have an ideological left in the U.S.; what we have are people labeled as left wingers because they have taken the trouble to see what works in the world and what doesn't and have decided on what works. Sometimes liberals get it wrong; but the reigning principle is select the policies that good science and good evidence supports.
The trouble is compounded for liberals when our feckless media reports the left-right views as if each had equal validity in a kind of "he said, they said" balance. You can't split the difference with stupid.
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