Just in time for last weekend’s National Tea Party convention – an event which will be remembered mostly for the way Sarah Palin had her devotees eating (and the rest of us reading) out of the palm of her hand – a series of op-ed pieces arrived in the nation’s media comparing the Everyman Patriots down at Opryland with the snobbish, know-it-all progressives who currently dominate Washington. The Washington Post, whose editorial-page leanings seem to shift with every stiff breeze (or massive snowfall), published two such analyses/warnings over the three days of Nashville teabagging.

One came from the venerable columnist Charles Krauthammer, who, while cheerleading the coming “Peasant Revolt of 2010,” declared that President Obama and his fellow Democrats continue to push their too-liberal agenda because they don’t understand the lessons of Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts. Instead, he fulminated, they view the world only “through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.” In this delusional Democratic view, he continued, “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” And Brown’s victory can be attributed to the mouth-breathing public’s “anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.”

A couple days later, a University of Virginia professor named Gerard Alexander posed many of the same questions, but with less fire-breathing intensity, in an op-ed titled “Why Are Liberals So Condescending?” Previewing a speech he gave Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, he ticked off a list of four “major [liberal] narratives about who conservatives are and how they function”: the “vast right-wing conspiracy” of cynical politicians and opinion leaders who acquire power through deceit and trickery; the “rank-and-file [Republicans who] must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst”; the idea that “Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants”; and the notion that “conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.”

Throughout his piece, which you really ought to read in full, Alexander’s tone remains level and reasonable, devoid of the pot-shots and name-calling so typical in Krauthammer’s work. As an unabashed liberal, I expected to come away from Alexander’s column feeling assaulted, even apoplectic; instead, I emerged from his litany of supposedly negative liberal beliefs thinking, “I agree with this completely — and the problem with it is … what, exactly?” (more…)