by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
RightNetwork.com<\/p>\n
Watching the recent interviews with George W. Bush on the occasion of the release of his memoirs has reminded me what it is like to have an adult for president. The issue is not so much that I agreed with all his policies. The growth in federal spending and entitlements under his watch, the failure to acknowledge the traditional Islamic roots of the jihadists, or the misplaced faith in transferring to another country the machinery of democracy absent the values and virtues that sustain political freedom, are some of the issues that in my view Bush got wrong. But like his classy refusal since leaving office to criticize his successor, the qualities of character on display in his interviews \u2014 self-deprecating, amiable, sincere, unpretentious, and principled \u2014 are, by contrast with Obama, as damning an indictment of our current president as was the recent electoral rebuke.<\/p>\n
Most impressive is Bush\u2019s disregard for the estimation of the liberal media and punditocracy, and his indifference to the brutal invective and insult they heaped upon him while in office. No more disturbing to Bush are Obama\u2019s attempts to use him as a scapegoat for all the problems Obama has failed to solve or in some cases has worsened.<\/p>\n
When Bill O\u2019Reilly asked Bush about this, he shrugged away Obama\u2019s buck-passing as a \u201ctactic,\u201d a mere political device, though one he himself was too principled to use. Here we see the maturity of an adult, of someone confident in his beliefs and actions and thus indifferent to the petty, self-interested rhetoric of those with a political axe to grind.<\/p>\n
How different from Obama\u2019s thin-skinned narcissism, his petulance in the face of criticism, his juvenile pushback (remember his using the sexual vulgarity \u201cTea Baggers\u201d to describe the Tea Partiers?) against any resistance to the notion that he is a superior creature, the \u201canointed one\u201d who merely by showing up will transform the world. His sullen reaction to the voters\u2019 disenchantment with him \u2014 the two-bit psychologizing about \u201cfear\u201d clouding the judgment of the masses, or his post-election refusal to acknowledge that voters disliked his disastrous healthcare legislation \u2014 all bespeak the mentality of a callow teenager who demands that the world acknowledge his excellence just because he asserts it, and then gets angry when it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Given that Obama displays the character of an adolescent, are we then surprised that 66% of people 18-30 voted for him in 2008?<\/p>\n
That cohort is the richest, most cosseted, most indulged, most obsessed ever, and the worst educated cohort in American history. But where would they have learned anything? Their schools are more concerned with massaging their self-esteem than with teaching them basic skills. Their teachers are more eager to subject them to therapeutic curricula that instruct them about safe sex and the glories of homosexuality, than to teach them history and political philosophy. They are more worried about turning students into global-warming cultists and \u201ctolerance\u201d fundamentalists rather than citizens worthy of political freedom. And they inculcate a self-loathing multiculturalism and balkanizing identity politics rather than the principles of liberal democracy, in which rights and value inhere in autonomous individuals, not categories predicated on grievance and victimization.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, popular culture and consumer capitalism have both made this cohort the supreme arbiter of taste whose preferences companies ignore at their fiscal peril. Television shows, movies, popular music, fashion, video games, even most iPhone apps are dumbed down to a 15-year-old sensibility that prizes cheap sentiment, received wisdom, transient intellectual fashion, instant gratification, noisy glitz, pointless vulgarity, and just plain dumbness.\u00a0Si monumentum requiris,\u00a0<\/em>surf the net or cable television, or spend time at your local Cineplex.<\/p>\n What else explains how projectile vomiting, juvenile masturbation jokes, and flatulence gags have become de rigueur in movies and sit-coms? What else accounts for the transformation of misogynistic, psychopathic hip-hop thugs into romantic heroes? Who else but a teenager could tolerate the banal lyrics and lame rhymes of most popular music, next to which Hoagy Carmichael or Cole Porter sounds like Shakespeare? What other sensibility could make a star out of Paris Hilton or Lady Gaga?<\/p>\n The result of this toxic brew of ignorance and inflated self-esteem is a voting block particularly vulnerable to superficial appeals to vaguely portentous sentiment (\u201cWe are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for\u201d), and attractive slogans that flatter their utopian delusions and pretensions to superior virtue (\u201cHope and Change\u201d).<\/p>\n But we shouldn\u2019t be too hard on these young people, plenty of whom can think straight and, despite their poor schools and a stupid and vulgar popular culture, have managed to develop virtues and learn some common sense. Many serve in the military and their churches, they take care of their families and friends, and they help out in their communities. As for their benighted coevals, being young means they have a chance to grow into a more mature and responsible political philosophy. After all, many of us in the Sixties drank the leftist and hedonistic Kool-Aid but managed to awake from that dogmatic slumber.<\/p>\n No, those responsible for these generational deficiencies are the adults who never grew up, the perpetual adolescents who created the schools and popular culture that keep the young mired in their ignorance and narcissism.<\/p>\n Back in the Sixties these Peter Pans decided the real world with its rules and limitations was too irksome to their desires and appetites, so they cast them off, camouflaging license as liberation. Their utopian whims and leftover leftist nostrums were elevated into a lofty idealism that either led to disastrous policies like the abandonment of South Vietnam, or degenerated into fashion accessories, the political equivalents of Che Guevara t-shirts. And they legitimized the hypocrisy of spoiled teenagers who scorn and mock everything that makes possible the freedom and affluence they enjoy and abuse.<\/p>\n The election seems to have put the grown-ups back in charge, at least in the House of Representatives. Maybe now we will see policy proposals predicated on an adult view of the world: reality cannot be bent to our utopian desires, the world cares nothing for our feelings or wishes, all goods require costs and trade-offs, human and social perfection is a pipe-dream, discomfort and disappointment are tragic constants, all decisions and actions entail unknown contingencies and unforeseen consequences, and most choices are not between the good and the bad, but the bad and the worse. To think otherwise is to think like a progressive.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a92010 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Watching the recent interviews with George W. Bush on the occasion of the release of his memoirs has reminded me what it is like to have an adult for president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,470],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-hH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":1097,"position":0},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lefts-selective-outrage\/","url_meta":{"origin":1097,"position":1},"title":"The Left’s Selective Outrage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine You know liberals are edging toward a full Jonestown-style meltdown when someone as smart as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman starts losing it. Last week Friedman worked himself up into a paranoiac frenzy over the tone of some of the criticism Obama and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-unexamined-president-and-his-media-enablers\/","url_meta":{"origin":1097,"position":3},"title":"The Unexamined President and His Media Enablers","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate. In the liberal-left narrative, the \u201cbirther\u201d issue was always evidence of the Republican Party\u2019s fringe kookiness: as the\u00a0Daily Kos\u2019s Markos Moulitsas crowed, \u201cWhat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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But White House spokesman Jay Carney might be the new champ, given his response to the House\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1098,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions\/1098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}