Michael Lind put on his "concern troll" hat again in Hey, liberals: Time to give the Beck bashing a rest Salon 02/15/2011.
When I was thinking about posting on this, I was considering pointing out how his criticisms are painfully vague. And discussing how his griping about liberal "elitism" just echoes the chronic rightwing Republicans whining on the same topic, which God Herself couldn't persuade them to give up. And talking about how it's important to pay attention to those actually setting the tone and spreading the popular ideas among Republicans and not just pretend that their more clean-shaved compatriots like David "Bobo" Brooks are somehow satisfactorily representative of raw-meat Republican opinion.
But all I really feel like saying is: Grow up, dude! Mockery and ridicule are part of politics and always has been. Sure, we can all agree with your statement, "The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards." But to be effective, they would have to use mockery and ridicule even more than Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews.
And it's hard for me to think of Chris Matthews, who spent years adoring that bold Maverick McCain and drooling over George W. Bush manly manliness in his flight suit as being a "liberal". Matthews is so chronically sloppy it's easy to find examples of his sloppiness. But your criticism of his treatment of Michelle Bachmann's loopy talk about the Three-Fifths Clause and how the Founders ended slavery didn't even make sense.
Lind can't seem to resist the "concern troll" impulse from time to time. Earlier examples in Salon include Are liberals seceding from sanity? 08/11/2009 (from the month that Tea Partiers showed up disrupting town hall meetings) and The rubes and the elites 04/15/2008.
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