Still Punked
Joe Klein has been an interesting study in liberal journalism gone wrong, even while it struggles to right itself. In today’s column, State of the Union he makes a strong case against the current dead-end Republican obstructionism, while making the case for “Burkean conservatism–and against the innate optimism of liberals” and hopes for some sort of responsible Republicanism (with which we are recently unfamiliar):
“…to be a constant damper on undue liberaloptimism about the perfectability of the human condition…”
First off, I actually believe in the usefulness of an honest conservative opposition to liberal government. But we are so far from either honest conservatism or liberal government, it’s pathetically naïve (or deluded) to make that your vision for the near future.
Klein’s little jab at “liberaloptimism” also made me laugh and not just because it doesn’t in any way resemble any of the liberals with whom I’m familiar – quite the opposite, really.
It also reminded me of this guy and the present near final demise of the domestic auto industry. In a nutshell, in post WWII, the Japanese and US auto industries took fundamentally different approaches to quality control. US manufacturers decided that they had reached an “acceptable rate” of product defect (if I recall, somewhere between 3-6%) for their cars. Meanwhile, the Japanese manufacturers decided to set a target defect rate of zero defects on theirs (they knew that would never be achieved but had to be the ambition of a manufacturer to build the most competitive product). 60 years later, the Japanese makers are still eating our lunch on product quality and reliability, even using US labor in US plants. I hope you get the analogy.
And it is “conservatives” who have a fatally distorted view of human psychology and sociology, tending to fully recognize the qualities of the id and not much else (other than that provided by a higher power). Liberals are better able to see the full nature of the human equation. For one thing, they know that even liberals can be indoctrinated in an anti-liberal mythology and bias that’s hard to unlearn, especially from a high perch in the corporatist press.
