sex & drugs, money & power
One of the great things about being a liberal is that you get to have fun with sex & drugs without feeling the least bit guilty about it.
That's because liberals get sex & drugs. They have fun with sex & drugs. They're comfortable with them. They don't see them as a big deal. So it strikes them as ludicrous for people to get worked up because the President gets a blow job in the Oval Office.
Conservatives, for the most part, don’t see it that way. There’s something about sex & drugs that conservatives don’t trust. They know they’re an important part of the human experience, but in the conservative mind the fear always lurks that too much sex & drugs will lead to something bad – public licentiousness, social chaos, collapse.
That’s why conservatives are almost always on the wrong side of any legislative issue that has to do with sex and drugs. They feel, almost instinctively, that whatever it is in the human psyche that loves sex and drugs has to be kept under control – probably because they are secretly worried that their own urges for wantonness might bust out if they’re not constantly being tamped down. (Think of Jimmy Swaggart in his motel room masturbating in front of a stripper or Bill Bennett sitting alone in his Las Vegas hotel pulling the handle on a slot machine.)
What conservatives don’t seem to realize is that the vast majority of liberals who are enjoying the pleasures of sex and drugs are doing so in a thoughtful, self-regulated way (though people who confine their love-making to the missionary position and their drug use to an eggnog at Christmas may not see it like that). Their behavior isn’t likely to lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
On the other hand, one of the great things about being a conservative is that you get to enjoy the pleasures of money & power without feeling guilty about it.
Conservatives get money & power. Liberals, for the most part, don’t.
That’s why liberals are almost always on the wrong side of every legislative issue involving money & power. There’s something about money & power that they don’t trust… and don’t understand.
Liberals know that money's important, just like conservatives know sex is important. But having fun with it? That’s another thing entirely. Money is a guilty pleasure for most liberals, just as sex is a guilty pleasure for most conservatives. If you go to a party in New York or Washington, people will talk about their sexcapades with no inhibition whatsoever. But they won’t talk about how much money they make or all the fun things they want to do with it. (If you go to a party in Des Moines, I suspect the reverse is true).
The Democrats I know seem to have a stake in projecting the impression that they don’t really care about money that much. They haven’t spent much time or thought trying to figure out how money works in the big picture, and don’t think it’s strange that they couldn’t possibly tell you what a yield curve is, much less a Laffer curve. It’s something they’re almost proud of. That skews the way they reflexively think about things like poverty and taxes. To someone ignorant about how money really works, it seems positively Dickensian not to have a minimum wage and vaguely immoral to let rich people keep so much of their money so long as there’s poverty and homelessness.
(Note to my liberal friends: (1) raising the minimum wage ALWAYS causes wage earners at the lowest level to lose jobs; the only question is, how many. (2) you can’t hurt the superrich, EVER, by taxing them more; they’ll just put more of their money in tax free municipal bonds or some other shelter).
(Note to my conservative friends: Liberals, in my experience, really feel bad at some level that they have things that poorer people don’t. They honestly care about the poor and down-trodden. They wish life were fairer. It’s a very endearing quality).
Then there's Power.
Power is an even a trickier thing for liberals to wrap their minds around. They feel in their guts that it’s a corrupting thing to have too much of, which is why they’re so uncomfortable with the new world reality of one superpower (us) and a bunch of also-rans (everybody else, including France). That’s why they want to go to the U.N. and entertain ideas like a “global test” before the U.S. takes any military action of any consequence. It diffuses our power and makes us seem more like one of the guys. It’s more comfortable. Plus it’s the generous thing to do… a little good old-fashioned noblesse oblige that shows how fair we really are here in America. I suppose the reasoning is that if we do enough pandering and condescending, maybe the little countries will stop noticing that we’re the ones with all the nuclear bombs and a military that could crush them like a bug.
I keep getting the sense that liberals want America to act like they act with their maids – paying them more than the market demands and inquiring after their parents back in Guatemala – as if such small generosities can somehow obscure the awkward reality of the situation.
Which is that they have more money and more power and more sex and more drugs than the maid.
That's because liberals get sex & drugs. They have fun with sex & drugs. They're comfortable with them. They don't see them as a big deal. So it strikes them as ludicrous for people to get worked up because the President gets a blow job in the Oval Office.
Conservatives, for the most part, don’t see it that way. There’s something about sex & drugs that conservatives don’t trust. They know they’re an important part of the human experience, but in the conservative mind the fear always lurks that too much sex & drugs will lead to something bad – public licentiousness, social chaos, collapse.
That’s why conservatives are almost always on the wrong side of any legislative issue that has to do with sex and drugs. They feel, almost instinctively, that whatever it is in the human psyche that loves sex and drugs has to be kept under control – probably because they are secretly worried that their own urges for wantonness might bust out if they’re not constantly being tamped down. (Think of Jimmy Swaggart in his motel room masturbating in front of a stripper or Bill Bennett sitting alone in his Las Vegas hotel pulling the handle on a slot machine.)
What conservatives don’t seem to realize is that the vast majority of liberals who are enjoying the pleasures of sex and drugs are doing so in a thoughtful, self-regulated way (though people who confine their love-making to the missionary position and their drug use to an eggnog at Christmas may not see it like that). Their behavior isn’t likely to lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
On the other hand, one of the great things about being a conservative is that you get to enjoy the pleasures of money & power without feeling guilty about it.
Conservatives get money & power. Liberals, for the most part, don’t.
That’s why liberals are almost always on the wrong side of every legislative issue involving money & power. There’s something about money & power that they don’t trust… and don’t understand.
Liberals know that money's important, just like conservatives know sex is important. But having fun with it? That’s another thing entirely. Money is a guilty pleasure for most liberals, just as sex is a guilty pleasure for most conservatives. If you go to a party in New York or Washington, people will talk about their sexcapades with no inhibition whatsoever. But they won’t talk about how much money they make or all the fun things they want to do with it. (If you go to a party in Des Moines, I suspect the reverse is true).
The Democrats I know seem to have a stake in projecting the impression that they don’t really care about money that much. They haven’t spent much time or thought trying to figure out how money works in the big picture, and don’t think it’s strange that they couldn’t possibly tell you what a yield curve is, much less a Laffer curve. It’s something they’re almost proud of. That skews the way they reflexively think about things like poverty and taxes. To someone ignorant about how money really works, it seems positively Dickensian not to have a minimum wage and vaguely immoral to let rich people keep so much of their money so long as there’s poverty and homelessness.
(Note to my liberal friends: (1) raising the minimum wage ALWAYS causes wage earners at the lowest level to lose jobs; the only question is, how many. (2) you can’t hurt the superrich, EVER, by taxing them more; they’ll just put more of their money in tax free municipal bonds or some other shelter).
(Note to my conservative friends: Liberals, in my experience, really feel bad at some level that they have things that poorer people don’t. They honestly care about the poor and down-trodden. They wish life were fairer. It’s a very endearing quality).
Then there's Power.
Power is an even a trickier thing for liberals to wrap their minds around. They feel in their guts that it’s a corrupting thing to have too much of, which is why they’re so uncomfortable with the new world reality of one superpower (us) and a bunch of also-rans (everybody else, including France). That’s why they want to go to the U.N. and entertain ideas like a “global test” before the U.S. takes any military action of any consequence. It diffuses our power and makes us seem more like one of the guys. It’s more comfortable. Plus it’s the generous thing to do… a little good old-fashioned noblesse oblige that shows how fair we really are here in America. I suppose the reasoning is that if we do enough pandering and condescending, maybe the little countries will stop noticing that we’re the ones with all the nuclear bombs and a military that could crush them like a bug.
I keep getting the sense that liberals want America to act like they act with their maids – paying them more than the market demands and inquiring after their parents back in Guatemala – as if such small generosities can somehow obscure the awkward reality of the situation.
Which is that they have more money and more power and more sex and more drugs than the maid.
posted by patrickhenry at 2:39 PM
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