Does the Right have anything to say about what it is? Or does it just define itself in terms of how gawdawful the Left is?

I used to think that the Right had merely had its corporate ego inflated by the happy accident of "right" being the opposite not only of "left", but also of "wrong", and had naively believed it. I begin to believe that the Right has decided not to identify itself out of fear that it will look hollow, but intends to assassinate its opposition by identifying it with everything that is venal and vile. This method provides the useful cover of an attractive mask -- being the Anti-Them -- and will distract attention from some of the things done by people on the Right in the areas of corporate malfeasance and the erosion of civil rights.

I don't read Michael Moore either, except enough to know how he writes. Al Franken's books bore me. P.J. O'Rourke has wit enough to keep it interesting, though; he will skewer his own side with equal aplomb. He's mean but not bitter. I find the sectarian tracts on either side are bitter enough to be used as astringent.

Last night I attended a dinner for library volunteers, and was talking to a teenaged boy who has worked with me since he was in middle school. I was not surprised when the boy launched into an attack on liberal values (I know his parents), though I found it funny that he used the same types of defamatory arguments I read here. Immoral, thieving, anti-Christian, unpatriotic, indoctrinating people through the universities... and I wonder how much, if any, of this stuff he came up with on his own and how much was fed to him. I wonder how much of any of this stuff is thoroughly thought about. And I thought of you guys when he added, "And bad science... evolution and like that..." Critical thinking: it's a real treasure.

I told him that I'm a liberal, and he looked shocked. "No, you're not!" he said. I assured him I am. "Well..." -- I saw him stretching for those talking points -- "you're not liberal, you just have liberal positions on some things." It seems to me I've read something rather like that here too.

He's only a kid, and a nice kid, so I let it go. I don't talk about politics with children unless they become insistent. It was enough for him to see a philosophy he has been taught to revile owned by someone who has helped him and who he likes. I wonder if he has put it together that the reviled philosophy informs the behavior from which he has benefitted.

The Right had better hope it doesn't succeed in destroying its opponent, because then it would actually have to fill in the gaps left in the body politic and, heaven help us all, stand for something.

Regards--
Mary Anne