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"  I would dearly love it if people who weren&amp;#039;t alive in The Sixties would drop some brown acid, listen to the first Quicksilver album, or at least read more than two books before they start telling the rest of us how everything they would have loved about America, had they been alive then, went to hell in a handbasket the first time Ken Kesey sat down at a typewriter. Case in point is young Ross Douthat, a conservative affirmative-action hire at The New York Times who yesterday favored us with yet another rendition about how unauthorized sexytime is draining our precious national body fluids away from the Republic the way that the blood ran in rivulets down the slopes of Golgotha. Or something. (The usual Douthat Disclaimer \u2014 Douthat is a convert to Holy Mother Church. Take it from a cradle Catholic, converts can be the absolute worst. They are dogmatic drones who believe that the Church was founded expressly to take the knots out of their own personal ropes. This all started with St. Paul, the original sanctified convert pain in the balls, and has only gotten worse through the millennia.) People who fk without Ross Douthat&amp;#039;s permission have been expressing happiness over the results of the recent political election, and Ross Douthat is simply not going to stand for that sort of thing much longer. Winning an election doesn&amp;#039;t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you&amp;#039;ve just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you&amp;#039;re His chosen one as well. Dear liberals, do you know any actual liberals who think this way, let alone talk this way? Most of the ones I know were happy Willard Romney lost because he was unlikable bag of lies who hired a zombie-eyed granny-starver to be his second in command. The harshest versions of the criticisms Douthat finds so annoying came from people like Chris Christie. Also, too: If God had entered into it, Michelle Bachmann wouldn&amp;#039;t have been re-elected. Maybe it&amp;#039;s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction \u2014 or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance \u2014 let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning. I refuse to accept the term &amp;quot;curmudgeonly annoyance&amp;quot; from a teenage sex-panic victim with D&amp;#039;Artagnan starter-kit facial hair. Move along, please. Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values \u2014 reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. Or, as it&amp;#039;s known around the Douthat household, the Vatican. But it&amp;#039;s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear. If you&amp;#039;re drunk. Or stoned. Or haven&amp;#039;t read a dime&amp;#039;s worth of history in your lifetime. And, as for coalitions created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear, please see also the Founding of the Democratic Party, the Founding of the Republican Party, the Progressive Movement, the New Deal, and the Reagan Revolution. Andy Jackson&amp;#039;s farmers tracking their muddy boots through the White House parlors. The anti-slavery zealots backed by the fortunes of northern mill owners. Bob LaFollette&amp;#039;s crusades against the railroad trusts and in favor of open government. The men walking off the bread lines and into the CCC camps. The disintegation of &amp;quot;changing neighborhoods&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;forced busing&amp;quot; and the fear of high gas prices and &amp;quot;welfare queens.&amp;quot; There hasn&amp;#039;t been a successful political coalition in American history that wasn&amp;#039;t created and unified, in whole or in part, by &amp;quot;social disintegration&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;economic fear.&amp;quot; So what&amp;#039;s so different this time? Gotta be the fking. Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do \u2014 one more in keeping with America&amp;#039;s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they&amp;#039;re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren&amp;#039;t assimilating successfully \u2014 or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems. The Republican party has gone demonstrably insane in its public xenophobia in the past five years, which undoubtedly accounts for the fact that the president and the Democrats won every single demographic group in the country except white males. Asians immigrants rejected the Republicans. European immigrants rejected the Republicans. More to the point, all the various subsets of Hispanic immigrants rejected the Republicans, not because the Democrats encourage their promiscuousness and lack of educational drive for crass political ends \u2014 which is what Douthat is really saying here, but doesn&amp;#039;t have the courage of your average cracker \u2014 but because the public face of the Republican party was Jan Brewer, when it wasn&amp;#039;t Joe Arpaio, and because Rick Perry&amp;#039;s campaign died the moment he suggested that it might be helpful to offer in-state tuition to the children of undocumented workers. But is Ross calling all of these poor unfortunates moochers \u2014 and how does a guy so young manage to sound so much like an 80-year old, 19th Century WASP handing out chocolates to orphans at Christmas? \u2014 the way many of his ideological soulmates do. Oh. no, not Ross. He is a softer, more empathetic scold. This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking &amp;quot;gifts&amp;quot; (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles. But if conservatives don&amp;#039;t acknowledge the crisis&amp;#039;s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity...  Oh, Jesus H. Christ teasing the over on the Rams, stop right there, OK? Do we really have to bring up the red state/blue state stats depicting relative rates of divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, and other such concrete threats to &amp;quot;faith and domesticity&amp;quot; again? Yes, sadly, we must. A &amp;quot;left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity&amp;quot; don&amp;#039;t cross the threshold of the meth labs, son. ...all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House&amp;#039;s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats. Find me one liberal of any influence who &amp;quot;minimizes the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities.&amp;quot; Which party is it that contains the people who are working hardest against the societal and economic dislocations that disrupt families and hollow out communities, and which party just nominated for president a guy who built himself an personal sultanate on the very policies that do so much of the disrupting and hollowing? Somehow, I think outsourcing and deindustrialization had more to do with all the disrupting and hollowing than the fking Pill did but, then again, I didn&amp;#039;t fall off my horse on the road to Damascus and end up in the Chronic Ward of The New York Times. (And no church was &amp;quot;threatened&amp;quot; by the fact that its insurance company might have to provide for Presbyterian janitors some ladyparts medicine of which the pope and Ross Douthat do not approve. The way he insists that the universally ignored teaching against birth control is somehow foundational to the Church makes me wish Douthat had converted to Zoroastrianism. Also, too: The president won overwhelmingly among Catholics, despite the active public opposition on this very point by the Clan Of The Red Beanie. You lost this argument in &amp;#039;65, boys, and you lost it again this year.) This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It&amp;#039;s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for - the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom \u2014 was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement. The GI Bill was a sufficient foundation. The 91 percent top individual tax rate was a sufficient foundation. The work of government in channeling the great consumer demand and the increase in personal wealth was a sufficient foundation. A thriving labor movement was a sufficient foundation. The middle class rose in the 1950&amp;#039;s because the government committed itself to policies that would make it grow \u2014 for white males, anyway, and the households of whom they were presumed to be the heads \u2014 and because the leaders of American industry responded to an unprecedented explosion of demand. People didn&amp;#039;t achieve middle-class lives because they belonged to the local Methodist church. They achieved middle-class lives because they belonged to the AFL-CIO. No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn&amp;#039;t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline. Yes, millions of Hispanic voters who rejected conservatism and its party a couple of weeks ago, your political empowerment is a sign of America&amp;#039;s decline. It&amp;#039;s hard to believe more of them don&amp;#039;t vote Republican. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16729/ross-douthat-post-election-14752276/>