Liberal Fascism.

The virtue of free speech is that it lets you "spot the idiot."

Check out this essay by Roger Simon on how the Kultur is shifting:

I have been thinking for a while that the Culture Wars are turning and that the pervasive “libo-progressivism” of our Kultur is moving slowly rightward, but several reports of the last few days have convinced me this is happening more quickly than I had imagined.


The first comes from a post by the Anchoress showing parallels between recent comments by Woody Allen and NYT columnist Tom Friedman. Both men seem to be suffering from a kind of nostalgie du fascisme as opposed to the better known and more bohemian nostalgie de la boue — yearning for the mud — popularized by Orwell and others. (I wish it were the latter).

Woody Allen told Spain’s La Vanguardia that it would be a good idea if Barack Obama could be dictator for a “few years” to overcome obstructionist Republicans. Just a few days later, Friedman fantasized, on Meet the Press yet, that the solution to America’s problems might be to be more like China.

These are liberals? Well, you might say, and you might be right (pace Jonah Goldberg), that this has been their unspoken attitude all along. But publicly, this is crazy stuff. It’s self-destructive. Okay, Woody’s career is close to over, but Friedman still has his spot on the NYT opinion page. Talking about emulating the butchers of Tiananmen, even in jest, makes him sound like a totalitarian nutcase. Why is he spouting this stuff? Why is the governor coming off his motor now?

I’m going to hold my explanation for a moment, though you are probably ahead of me, and move on to a report near the top of Drudge tonight from Real Clear Politics. Apparently, for the first time, those bastions of the most conventional liberalism in our society, the networks, are turning on Obama. Reason: BP and the oil spill. It’s supposed to be Obama’s Katrina. Of course, I no more blame Obama for the spill than I do Bush for Katrina. Nor do I blame either of them for the difficulty in cleaning up these disasters. Those are unfair accusations. There are plenty of things to attack Obama about — like the worst foreign and domestic policies since Andrew Johnson — without having to pin a drilling accident on him, bad as it is. But the media, that never vetted him and have given him a pass on virtually everything, are attacking him now. Why?

They sense — and Woody and Friedman sense with a different reaction — that the Culture Wars are turning. It’s partly the Tea Parties, but it’s more than that. It’s the zeitgeist. The times, they are definitely a-changin’. Liberalism, as we have known it for decades, is on the defensive. With the welfare state unsustainable, it has nowhere to turn and its adherents are turning tail in every direction. They are mad and they are, in many cases, unmoored. Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.

The pining for a dictatorship was last done during the Great Depression.  We aren't there yet, but it's already happening.

The Anchoress suggests this reason for the phenomenon of liberals pining for a dictator:

Friedman and Mitchell, and even that self-absorbed twerp Woody Allen are all wringing their hands over something they cannot (yet) control; alternative media and how it has contributed to the difficulties of getting things done in Washington.


When the press had a monopoly on information, it was much easier for them to influence opinion; that in turn made the legislator’s jobs easier, too. Now, yes, things are more difficult for the politicians, but that’s mostly because they insist upon working as they always have (the incestuous commingling of pols and media freaks on the left, and pols and business freaks on the right, with back-room-deals-aplenty, back-scratching galore and pork, pork, pork for everyone) while the electorate has decided it wants something different.

So, Allen and Friedman–and others who have kept their faces before us for 40 years by coasting on the work of their youth, because they’ve done nothing memorable, lately–are feeling the shifting sand beneath their feet, and they’re wondering why America can’t simply submit to a fantasy of Limited Dictatorship. It’s so inconvenient for these elites to have to deal with the noise of the bourgeoisie – commoners who presume to opine on anything and who dare to object to the incessant lecturing from their betters.

So, let’s be China “for a little while…” (just long enough to get everything we want accomplished).

Because what they want must, of course, darling, be the very thing that needs doing.

Let’s allow Obama to be dictator “for a couple of years,” because that preening narcissist will certainly give up his dictatorship once the nowhere-utopia of which the left dreams is achieved. Right? Of course.