Vampires Die in the Light of Day

I'm greeted at the beginning of the day by a couple of pieces that echo things I have discussed here before, but that fill in some important details. First, Michael Barone talks about the defeat of Old Media in this past presidential election. Others have, too, but I still haven't seen credit given where it was due: to Ronald Reagan. I have also been discussing soul-searching on the part of the Democrats off and on. These two themes intersect at the end of Barone's piece: "Memo to future Democratic nominees: You can no longer rely on Old Media to hush up stories that hurt your cause. Your friends in Old Media don't have a monopoly any more." I and many others have commented on the role of the blogosphere in shedding light on the political meddling by Old Media. But Barone brings up another interesting point: The Democrats have long been insulated from the need to worry about inconvenient facts by their alliance with the Old Media monopoly. They now no longer have this insulation and will have to change or die. Which they do will be a function of whether they have any concern for reality left. Or more likely, which faction, if any, of the Democrats can still deal with facts. I would guess, based on the continued popularity of such intellectuals as George Lakoff, that the Democrats will look for "better candidates" before they consider a better platform. Their short-term prospects may indeed be dim.

Charles Krauthammer's latest column piles more dirt onto the dead and buried "moral-values-won-the-election" myth and ties into the moral aspect of what the Democrats are doing to themselves. On the one hand, he dissects the famous exit poll that showed "moral values" as the top issue in the minds of voters. On the other, he explains why many in the Left feel the need to perpetuate the myth of the values voter, "[T]he fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. ... George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction. This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals, and from infecting the blue-state media. They need their moral superiority like oxygen [emphasis added], and cannot have it cut off by mere facts. And so once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat." Or perhaps the Democrats will not recover from denial. Maybe their moral "superiority" will make them blind even to the proximate causes of their electoral defeat.

In her collection of essays entitled The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand makes the case for a system of morality she calls "rational egoism." Like other thinkers, she discusses ethics as a system for guiding one's actions. Unlike other thinkers, though, she explicitly ties the concept of "value" to survival and demonstrates how altruistic systems of morality are actually harmful to an individual, reducing his quality of life or his ability to survive at all. Indeed, she shows that the moral is the practical. In the Democrats, we see a party that seems committed to a platform -- a set of moral values -- that has little basis in reality, that has been largely implemented here and abroad, and that has been largely discredited by its many abject failures. Yet they still cling to these objectively dangerous notions. Even through the fog of Old Media, we eventually learned of the failures of the Soviet Union, of socialized medicine in England, and of welfare in our own housing projects. But now the blogosphere sheds orders of magnitude more light on the old Leftist agenda, and at a faster pace. The Democrats, in that respect, resemble a mindless undead creature from a B horror movie. They are dangerous in the short term, but will disappear in the light of day. They sacrificed their minds to orthodoxy long ago and now, believing their own propaganda, are in no danger of regaining possession of their own senses. When you declare war on reality, as the Democrats have done, facts become your enemy and you will lose. This is why freedom of speech is such a precious thing: Freedom of speech allows us to examine an ideology objectively, giving us a way to limit its damage to those who accept it in denial of all evidence and analysis.

-- CAV