Paglia disappoints again with her latest screed (Salon, Too late for Obama to turn it around?, September 9, 2009):
Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.The only national coalition that existed was a fantasy in the mind of Democrats. While they constantly state Obama's election in terms of "landslide," the reality is that the margin of victory was incredibly narrow and was due to the masses of religious-conservatives (formerly Yellow-Dogs) staying home out of protest that McCain, of McCain-Feingold, was their Party's standard-bearer. The conservatives stayed home to teach Republicans a lesson, but the only one getting the punishment good and hard is, well, all of us.
Paglia may have believed that magic coalition was going to put an end to politics as usual, as Obama said he would do, but only fools believed him. What politician hasn't promised that? It was a classic case of wink-wink, nudge-nudge, as everyone to the Left of McGovern ssh'd their actual plans, and said whatever was necessary to fool the masses into temporarily allowing the Democrats a flash of majority. But like a child who has been caught with the neighbor's stolen toy, it will be ripped from their crying hands and returned to the rightful owner.
It seems that Paglia believed it, and more sadly, still believes the 1960s hype that Democrats have ever been about liberty rather than libertinism, and insipid emotionalism of the Baby Boomers pouting-ascendancy to Peter Pan-like adulthood, regardless of Lucy and her Diamonds:
I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."It isn't a nostalgic past. It is a fantasy past. Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt were always pandering commies, of the Guthrie school of serial wife-abandonment and alcohol abuse. Paglia is stuck in the 1960s vision of a world without bad stuff and the dazzling marketing of it being about peace, rather than getting a piece. Somehow, she manages to forget that the peace her comrades delivered came with the death of millions in the Killing Fields, and mass executions in South Vietnam. But what's a few million brown people dying have to do with that cool dream of a world without war, eh?
You'd think that after all this time, with the bodies piled up for all to see, she'd have figured it out.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills).I can't tell if she actually believes that nonsense or if she's repeating it like a mantra in hopes of convincing herself of a past that never was, and a Party that never has been.
The Democrats since Truman have been about one thing, and one thing only: Power. They actually admire the world's thugocracies and authoritarian societies as models of what is possible, rather than something to avoid. She sees it in the current crop of Democratic powerful, but refuses to look into the crystal-ball of history to notice that it was ever thus:
Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.Because, Camille, self-actualization as practiced by the Baby Boomers has never been anything other than elevating the self above every other self., i.e, I matter and I have power and that comes by taking yours, rather than recognizing that there is abudance enough for everyone, if they just work for it. That's always been what the Me-generation believed, and there's no evidence to suggest that the most spoiled and coddled generation will ever be about anything else except blatant selfishness and materialistic gain. The expanding government authority will be their authority, so it won't be the same authority of their parents, so it will be different, this time! They still don't get that self-actualized, applied to everyone, means that no one is special, and no one gets to elevate their lusts above everybody else's lusts. Self-actualization is about overcoming and controlling lusts, not elevating them as some sort of laudable achievement. I have a really difficult time accepting that she doesn't see this.
The 1960s Democrats don't care about the poor and starving masses yearning to be free and they never did. That was just an excuse for a party and a reason to get high. They just want to have moon-lit parties at the base of the statue as a great backdrop as a party theme. They care about getting laid, getting high, and getting and doing everything else they want, without one shred of recognition that those things have consequences. In fact, it is the consequences of bad decisions that they've been battling with their entire lives. If they wish it really, really hard, perhaps they can continue to escape the banal reality that living life without a net means you really don't have a net, and it will hurt like Hell when the high wears off. They still want someone else to bear the burden of the consequences and feel their pain. The goal has been to figure out a way to make the high permanent.
But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.No, it didn't. It was always about crass materialistic selfishness, but Paglia didn't see that through the pot fog and the marketing by music companies who released the peacenik-millionaires' pathetic music...
And sadly, she still doesn't.
Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).
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