Wednesday, November 4, 2009

John Steele Gordon: Obama and the Liberal Paradigm - WSJ.com


John Steele Gordon: Obama and the Liberal Paradigm - WSJ.com:

"Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of 'speaking truth to power.' Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?

Simple: She's a liberal.

As a liberal she carries around in her head the liberal paradigm of how the world works and what needs to be done to make it work better. There's nothing wrong with that. We all use paradigms to make sense of what we see around us and couldn't get along without them. Unfortunately, the basic liberal paradigm hasn't shifted in a hundred years, while the world we live in has changed utterly since the late 19th century, when modern liberalism was born."