There's a new weapon to use against liberals. It's called complexity. And happily for the conservatives, liberals are using it against themselves.
So terrified are liberals of being branded as extreme that some now preface any criticism of President Bush by saying that despite the fact his policies stink, they are sure he would make a lovely dinner companion. Other liberals offer the thought that though Bush may be dumb, which is an unwelcome trait in a world leader, his forthrightness bespeaks a self-awareness deeper than mere brains.
Such chastened liberals might say that Bush's unjustified and unjustifiable adventure in Iraq is deplorable, and then immediately add that they don't, you know, hate the president on a personal level. They are quick to follow that up, however, with the assurance that they do hate Michael Moore. They hate Moore because he hates the president. Moore also seems to hate capitalism, and because Moore hates Bush, and capitalism, and maybe even America, no one post-Moore can hate Bush without sharing the whole package of Moore-hatreds: Bush, capitalism, America.
Such conclusions derive from what many liberals now like to call "complexity" and "nuance," which are the essential components of "civility." (Civility was last year's complexity.) They contrast these qualities with the "simplicity" and "extremism" of "the left," though besides Moore, and Noam Chomsky, and some anarchists with nose rings and hangovers who are on the protest party circuit, no one can actually say what the left is or what role its members have played in a national politics that has swung steadily rightward for the last quarter-century.
No matter. The important thing is to be "complex" and not "extreme." So at a time of war, when the country and the world are entering a new historical phase, when radical change in social policy benefits the rich and ignores the poor, when voters are facing the most important election in decades, the liberals' role model is not FDR or Harry Truman or LBJ or Martin Luther King Jr. It's Henry James.
How did a Republican Party that has left vast stretches of the population convinced Bush stole the presidency, that dragged the nation into a purposeless war under false pretenses, that gives no quarter to dissenters within its own ranks, that compares John Kerry to Hitler and sponsors a smear campaign against him -- how did this truly fanatical, extremist political party succeed in making its critics feel guilty about the intensity of their criticism?
