In a football game, if two teams of comparable talent are separated by only one fact:
--Team A watches Team B's practices and reads its playbook
--Team B watches only itself and reads only its own playbook
You would reasonably conclude that Team A has a huge advantage.
Something like that exists in American politics today. Going into the election Scott Brown's campaign benefited from a phenomenon that gets little discussion. I'm not talking about Brown's two rather obvious advantages: (1) a landscape of rising deficits and unemployment under an all-Democratic federal government that set up conditions for a revolt; or (2) an unusually weak opponent in Martha Coakley.
Rather, I'm talking about something akin to my football analogy. Conservatives, in general, know quite a bit about liberals--their dreams, thinking, habits, tactics, culture, etc. On the other hand, liberals (blue-state and big city ones especially) appear to know very little about their opposition.
Here are the reasons why liberals are more insular than conservatives:
Liberal Schools Most Americans receive their formal education, from kindergarten through college, from institutions that are liberal. The exceptions would be that small percentage of Americans who are home-schooled, go to Christian parochial schools or go to military academies. Most of us don't attend those schools. We go to liberal schools and are taught a liberal curriculum by liberal teachers.
Liberal Media and Entertainment There is now a healthy spectrum of news and opinion media in America, from Fox News and talk radio on the right to MSNBC, CNN and the networks on the left. We pick our poisons. Call it a standoff. At the same time, most of the commonly consumed media in the U.S. is still decidedly liberal. Primetime television shows tilt liberal; e.g., showing businesspeople as bad guys, etc. Hollywood is mostly liberal. Avatar--and I liked Avatar--is a movie shot through with liberal sensibilities. Media "celebrities" overwhelmingly donate to the Democratic Party.
Liberal Government Some of us are employed by government. We all deal with government some point or another. Overwhelmingly, the face of government is that of a service worker who is liberal. Many belong to the Service Employees International Union, one of the most liberal in the U.S.
Political Correctness in the Workplace The liberal-biased speech codes that swept universities in the 1980s arrived, more or less intact, 10 years later at America's largest corporations. Sensitivity training is now accepted as a normal part of workplace indoctrination. The corporate imperative to make a profit might be fairly labeled conservative, but the workplace environment itself is increasingly liberal. If you doubt that, post a Christian cross in one coffee clove and a Darwin sticker in another. Wanna bet which icon draws the wrath of Human Resources?
My argument is that conservatives are generally better acquainted with liberal America than are liberal Americans with conservative America. Conversely, it is easier to become an insular liberal than an insular conservative. That is certainly true in America's largest cities and its most heavily populated states (Texas being an exception).
This theory fits the facts of Scott Brown's upset in Massachusetts. Right now there is a lot of finger pointing among Democrats about why Coakley lost. Here is a snippet from the Washington Post.
Unfriendly fire engulfed the party long before the polls closed Tuesday and Republican Scott Brown had defeated Democrat Martha Coakley. Washington insiders a week earlier began blaming Coakley, while her campaign fired back that national Democrats didn't help her soon enough.
There wasn't much somber analysis of what drove independents from Coakley to Brown in the race for the Senate seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy. Democrats were too busy sniping in the classic Washington way: under cover of anonymity. But President Barack Obama's senior adviser took precise, public aim at Coakley's camp as Brown closed in on the prize.
"I think the White House did everything we were asked to do," David Axelrod told reporters before the polls closed Tuesday. "Had we been asked earlier, we would have responded earlier."
The signs of trouble were there. In the bluest of blue states, the election was seen, at least in part, as a referendum on Obama, on health care reform, on the Democratic majority that had controlled two of three branches of government for a year.
Democrats could agree on the obvious: Somebody had taken the seat for granted, had underestimated the public's anger over the economy, over the Democrats' health care overhaul, over plain old arrogance in Washington.
Which side is right? It doesn't matter. Coakley and the Obama administration made the same mistake. To requote the Washington Post story: "Somebody had taken the seat for granted, had underestimated the public's anger over the economy, over the Democrats' health care overhaul, over plain old arrogance in Washington."
Now the question becomes, why the underestimation? The answer again supports the theory: Liberals are more insular. They fail to see movement to their right.
The real problem for American liberals is that they don't know how insular they've become. Thus their late response to Brown's insurrection. Thus, also, their claim that Americans still favor (by 80%!) a "public option" in ObamaCare--as a poster on Daily Kos absurdly asserted last night. Thus the left's stubborn insistence that all reputable scientists agree on human-caused global warming and its likely catastrophic consequences.
President Obama is as insular as any president we've had. It is laughable to imagine Obama as the liberal Ronald Reagan, because Reagan himself was a Hollywood liberal and union head until the 1950s. Reagan knew how the other side lived and thought. He even liked some of them. Obama has had no such experience. He has had almost no personal relationships or consequential political dealings with conservatives during his whole life. In Obama's mental map, conservatives are space aliens.
This puts Obama and insular liberals like him at a substantial political disadvantage. But even after Tuesday's Brown Revolt, do they know it?
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