by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
This series written for\u00a0Private Papers will appear in four parts.<\/em><\/p>\n Part Three<\/strong> Remember the preexisting landscape of postmodern thinking of the last two decades that has dominated the intelligentsia, specifically the Foucauldian notion that there is no real absolute standard of good or bad, right or wrong, but simply interpretations and views, whose \u2018correctness\u2019 is predicated on the nature of power.Those who have \u201cprivilege\u201d\u2014in the case of America, stereotypically most white male Republicans\u2014capriciously adjudicate rules and standards for their victims, mostly the poor, women, gays, and people of color. Power is what determines how reality is gauged and victims marginalized\u2014and thus power alone is what promises justice and thus should be pursued at all costs without regard for bothersome constructs like consistency or truth that have no independent verity anyway.<\/p>\n Thus there are a number of logical consequences in the wider political arena that follow from such relativism and they may help us fathom why we are witnessing a new sort of incomprehensible and often illogical Leftist rage. In a world where text and speech, like everything else, are constructs, we see the emergence of a new crop of Leftist leaders who, first of all, are liberated by feeling no need to reconcile their progressive rhetoric with their own privileged material circumstances. The hypocrisy is startling, but has the practical effect of encouraging the rich and advantaged, a prominence that has evolved beyond the coffeehouse or foundation boardroom. The disconnect makes Americans scratch their heads in disbelief when they try to square what comes out of the raucous mouth of a Madonna or Ted Kennedy with the actual circumstances in which such folk live.<\/p>\n The subtext of a group like MoveOn.org is the pernicious influence of the corporate imperialist. Yet the current heartthrob and multimillion-dollar benefactor of such activists is none other than George Soros, who made a fortune hedging on currency fluctuations, often during wartime and to the detriment of small investors and deposit holders in leveraged banks. An Arianna Huffington runs for governor of California, grandstanding about the gas-guzzling SUV\u2014even as she lives in a natural-gas gobbling mansion. Unapologetic privilege and criticism of just that wealth in others is a logic extension of postmodernism, where discourse is reality and not predicated by the bothersome facts of the material world.<\/p>\n The common cultural tie that binds the screeching Howard Dean, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, or John Kerry is not personal knowledge of the cruelty and misery inflicted by Dick Cheney\u2019s corporate America, but precisely its dividends of prep school and lots of family money. The attack dog of Enron Terry McAuliffe is $20 million richer only as a result of questionable mega-stock transactions during the eleventh-hour collapse of Global Crossing. The epitomes of American hypercapitalism\u2014a Donald Trump, Warren Buffet, or Bill Gates\u2014are welcomed into the Democratic crusade against George Bush\u2019s betrayal of average America.<\/p>\n Limousine liberals are not new. But the hyper-rich\u2019s support for candidates who decry the unfairness of corporate capitalism is. Equally strange are the angry liberals at the forefront of the Democratic Party who are the elite beneficiates of capitalism\u2014whether we see the Kerrys flying on a private Gulfstream to environmental conferences, a Barbra Streisand faxing position papers to the Democratic leadership from Malibu, or the Heinz corporation\u2019s multinational wealth subsidizing lectures on the evils of outsourcing jobs abroad.<\/p>\n Consequently, the new anger over what Gore Vidal has called from his villa in Italy the \u201cBush-Cheney Junta\u201d emanates not from bankrupt farmers, ghetto-activists, out-of-work coal miners, or non-union waitresses. No, it is a sort of smugness that often breaks out in Al Gore\u2019s vein-busting sputtering, and is voiced by the privileged who feel that their populist rhetoric and boilerplate attacks on Halliburton and Enron need not have any relationship to their own awkward and often hypocritical existences.<\/p>\n Thus while there are still concrete demands for universal health-care, low-cost prescription drugs, and assured jobs, much of the real venom is packaged in the sarcasm and cynicism of a self-absorbed, out-of-power elite, not the masses\u2014specifically the worry among American intellectuals, professors, artists, and journalists over how George Bush\u2019s America is now portrayed abroad where they so often visit or have homes. Mooreism and Chomskyism are attuned to European slurs of stupid, Texas-like Americans, who fear that they are no longer to be welcomed or liked in Paris or Berlin. \u201cNot in My Name\u201d is the rallying cry of those really worried that an American President, who cannot say nuclear or once forgot the name of the President of Pakistan, has tarred them with his \u201csmoke \u2018em out\u201d and \u201cdead\u2014or alive\u201d yokelish brush.<\/p>\n Just as elite truth is grounded in rhetoric and intent rather than the reality of how one lives and works, so too without recognized absolute standards or bothersome facts, everyone can manufacture their own reality, one that is powered largely on the fuel of race, class, gender, or perceived oppressions. A New Jersey Governor, who must resign because he sought sexual favors from an aide, promoted an unqualified associate on the basis of lust, and was forced to come clean only hours ahead of blackmail-inspired revelations, grandly expounds on his own \u201ctruth.\u201d So Governor James McGreevey proclaims, \u201cMy truth is that I am a gay American\u201d\u2014and thus, presto, he cannot be blamed so much for malfeasance as praised for \u201ccoming out.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same manner Al Sharpton is hugged by Hillary Clinton and later invited to address the nation at the Democratic Convention, where he talks \u201ctruth to power\u201d of his victimization due to white racism, not the reality of a convicted libeler of New York city public officials, the promulgator of the Tawana Brawley hoax, or the inciter of riot and mayhem that in the past has led to the deaths of innocents. The forged CBS documents can be both \u201cfake\u201d and \u201caccurate\u201d: by the arbitrary and unfair standards of paleo-journalism, yes, they fail muster; but by the ends-justifying-the-means logic of the true relativist such \u201cfacts\u201d are merely bothersome annoyances that do not impugn the higher \u201ctruth\u201d that a reactionary imperialist can be brought down on rumors of laxity in his Guard service some thirty years ago.<\/p>\n John Kerry has finally embraced a sort of \u2018I\u2019m against it and for it\u2019 policy about Iraq, but his handlers are still worried that most Americans are uneasy about strident former anti-war activists now back in the national arena opposing another ongoing war. Thus Kerry\u2019s \u201ctruth\u201d is not that after four months in Vietnam he once returned home to characterize the American soldiers\u2019 fighting experience as one of \u201catrocity\u201d reminiscent of \u201cGenghis Khan.\u201d Rather, he too can be reconstructed as a victim himself, who was illegally ordered into Cambodia\u2014a non-event \u201cseared\u201d into his memory. Ditto Kerry\u2019s other creations, like owning assault rifles or SUVs\u2014again bothersome \u201cfacts\u201d that reactionary journalists wish to cite as inconsistencies, since they fail to appreciate that such noble white lies are necessary to placate middle America for the greater good of being elected to enact an agenda that really is in its interest.<\/p>\n Throwing someone else\u2019s medals away, distorting his own combat experience, or fabricating mythical missions into Cambodia; these are all merely the bothersome dotting the i\u2019s and crossing the t\u2019s of the Kerry truth that brave resolute fighters like himself are used as pawns in places like Cambodia and Iraq, then and now, by uncaring grandees like a Nixon or Bush.<\/p>\n Tomorrow we ask, \u2018How does this new hatred for Bush and our own disdain for truth affect our current war?\u2019 And answer, \u201cAsk Bin Laden.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a92004 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson This series written for\u00a0Private Papers will appear in four parts. Part Three The wages of postmodernism, or when facts do not exist, we can invent our own reality Remember the preexisting landscape of postmodern thinking of the last two decades that has dominated the intelligentsia, specifically the Foucauldian notion that there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[797],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1bX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11598,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-game-of-pseudo-authenticity\/","url_meta":{"origin":4585,"position":0},"title":"The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 15, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves. 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His dark counterparts exist in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Popular Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Popular Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/popular-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2373,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-post-racialism\/","url_meta":{"origin":4585,"position":2},"title":"The End of Post-Racialism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com So much for Obama striking a new tone on race. President Obama\u2019s response during his press conference to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates \u2014 that the Cambridge police officer \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d despite Obama\u2019s confession that he didn\u2019t know what really had happened\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. 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By Bruce Thornton \/\/ Front Page Magazine Online \u00a0 A few minutes into Sunday\u2019s debate Donald Trump\u2019s decade-old crude sexual banter with a reporter from an entertainment show was mentioned by the CNN\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5453,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/american-culture-the-truth-about-40-years-in-the-movies\/","url_meta":{"origin":4585,"position":4},"title":"American Culture: The Truth About 40 Years in the Movies","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers As\u00a0New York Times\u00a0critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered. Anybody old enough to remember films before\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde\u00a0can testify to the jolting power of Arthur Penn\u2019s kinetic blend of blue-grass slapstick, Depression-era nostalgia, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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\nThe wages of postmodernism, or when facts do not exist,<\/strong>
\nwe can invent our own reality<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n