Is Liberalism the Only Side for Thinking People?

[TexasTowelie]

A Tennessean op-ed makes the case — unwittingly and with splendid irony


One knows full well the pointlessness of taking on every piece of jejunity that finds its way into The Tennessean’s opinion pages, but Sunday’s op-ed screed on the state of liberalism by the paper’s designated milquetoast columnist, Saritha Prabhu, taxes the immune system. The piece mostly just parrots the kind of knee-jerk left-bashing prattle that spews routinely from mouth-foaming commenters on Wall Street Journal articles. But what makes this high-school-quality essay worth highlighting is Prabhu's sublime (though presumably unintentional) sense of irony.

Prabhu charges liberals with trafficking in moral and intellectual superiority — rank condescension arising from conviction that their positions comprise “the only side a thinking person could be on.” Yet by erecting her argument on a gossamer thread of simplistic overgeneralizations and false moral equivalencies bereft of evidence or examples, she unwittingly makes the case for the very thing she condemns.

Let’s go to the videotape.

Prabhu: “They are trying their best to overthrow the results of an election through non-democratic means: trying to get Trump out of office with anything that sticks – mental unfitness, Russian collusion, Stormy Daniels, anything.”

Actually, Saritha, your average “thinking person” knows that machinations involving duly appointed federal prosecutors, conversations about impeachment, or notions of the 25th Amendment implicate distinctively democratic means — processes rooted in the Constitution and the rule of law. They may or may not be good ideas as matters of policy, politics or practice, but to call them “non-democratic” celebrates ignorance, not democracy.

Read more: https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/21004028/is-liberalism-the-only-side-for-thinking-people