The Liberal Story Falls Apart

In BigHollywood.com Lawrence Meyers writes about the way that the liberal "story" dominates our lives. Here's how it grabs our eyeballs every day in movies and TV dramas:

Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)... Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders.

Humans understand everything as a story, and liberals, for the last century, have been the main story-tellers. It is their stories that dominate our culture and their stories that dominate politics.

When a criminal suspect fails to convince a jury of his innocence, we say that his story "fell apart" or "failed to hold up." It reminds us that we keep our stories until they fall apart and fail us.

Right now, the liberal story is falling apart, and just about all a conservative needs to do is point to liberal stories lying around in pieces on the floor.

Roger Kimball points to the liberal story about the recession that is cluttering up the national floor right now. Here's how you create a story that fails to hold up.

1. Make $1.5 trillion of risky loans to people you know are unlikely to repay them;
2. Allow financial instituions to slice, dice, and repackage the loans, leveraging them up to 30-1;
3. Require financial institutions to value their assets according to strict “mark-to-market” rules, thus denying businesses needed flexibiity during a crisis;
4. Impose onerous new regulations not only on financial institutions but on U.S. business across the board;
5. Keep talking about raising taxes so people and businesses pay their “fair share,” even though 43.4 percent of those who file pay no income tax at all;
6. Create an economic leviathan in the form of health care legislation that will simultaneously worsen health care in the U.S. while also making it wildly more expensive;
7. Keep emphasizing “green” jobs and “green” energy production at a time when unemployment is above 9 percent and energy costs are skyrocketing;
8. Invest billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money into failing private businesses with huge union obligations to keep the business going for a while longer so that the unions can squeeze more money out of the taxpayers.
9. Ignore the warnings of credit-rating agencies when they warn you are spending too much money and do not have a credible plan to address your skyrocketing deficits and then blame them when, months later, they downgrade your credit rating.

I recently had a e-mail exchange with a liberal still desperately hanging on to the narrative. Here are some of his comments:

• How much are the Koch Bros and Rove paying you and other Tea Party supporters to put out this garbage?
• The REASON we paid off the huge WWII debt was the emergence of a middle class, union benefits and wages, and a GI Bill that allowed millions of GI's to go to college and fuel the industry in the 1950's and 60's
• The real beginning date of our demise was 1980. Ronald Reagan was elected, the corporations began their ascent to total power and control and now young man, we live in a corporate oligarchy.
• 34,000 lobbyists in DC. Paying for campaigns and writing bills for their employers.
• 2% of the US owns 63% of the wealth. The top 2500 corporations paid no Fed Income tax in 2010. $2.5 Trillion in corporate cash on the sidelines creating NO jobs.

It's hard to get annoyed with that sort of stuff. It is the story of the wheels coming off the liberal "whig history," the tale of social progress directed by wise legislation and socially conscious intellectual leaders that moves us closer and closer every year to a just and equal society.

It is all falling apart right before their liberal eyes, and they can't believe it.