Liberal Condescension, cont.

It’s funny how when someone points something out you see it pop up over and over again. Take Gerard Alexander’s piece on liberal condescension, for example: After reading it in the Washington Post last week I’ve seen examples pop up all over the place. Gerard’s piece, you’ll remember, is about the tendency of liberals to feel no need to argue their position on the merits, instead choosing to dismiss conservatives out of hand. As he puts it,

American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.

For the latest example of this, let’s take a look at Jonathan Chait, who unleashes this little gem in his defense of Andrew Sullivan against charges of anti-Semitism:

Indeed, on the Middle East, Andrew falls prey to a habitual tendency to see the world divided between children of darkness and children of light. This is not a problem for a writer who is describing conflicts between Democrats and Republicans.

I saw this earlier and shook my head, but JVL reminded me of it this morning and it seemed even more ridiculous when pulled out on its own. That’s a pretty perfect encapsulation of the idea in Gerard’s piece. Liberals see the battles over health care, global warming, and other policy initiatives as a one divided between children of light and children of darkness. Guess which side they view themselves as on.

(As an aside, this whole “Andrew Sullivan is/isn’t an anti-Semite” kerfluffle has been kind of interesting, in an Inside Blogball kind of way. For the record, I side with Reihan, Chait, Frum and others in thinking that Sullivan isn’t an anti-Semite; this was all prompted by Leon Wieseltier who does and explains whey he thinks so, at great length, here. Here’s Andrew’s response. The most devastating rejoinder, however, has come from his Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:

6) One other thing: Andrew Sullivan doesn’t know that much about the Middle East. I know that sounds odd, given that he is a former editor of The New Republic, but there you have it. One of the many reasons I don’t engage his blog more frequently on matters relating to the Middle East is that he’s not very knowledgeable about the intricacies of the American-led peace process, or of internal Israeli politics, or internal Palestinian politics. This might be because these issues don’t interest him. The politics, contradictions and motivations of Netanyahu’s approach to Obama do not interest Andrew. Netanyahu’s apparently self-evident evilness is what interests Andrew. Extremists on both sides of the issue want the Middle East to be simple, but it’s not. The Middle East is a tragedy precisely because the Israelis have an excellent case, and the Arabs also have an excellent case. This essential fact has often escaped Andrew’s attention.

Ouch. You should read Goldberg’s whole post; he doesn’t think Andrew is a firebreathing anti-Semite either, but he does worry sometimes about the way the things he writes are taken by actual firebreathing anti-Semites.)