The Smug Style of Liberalism

From the left leaning Vox, a perceptive essay about “The smug style in American liberalism.” The author (one Emmett Rensin) seems to be not so much a conservative but an old labor leftist, with a large dollop of populism.

Some choice quotes:

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

It has led an American ideology hitherto responsible for a great share of the good accomplished over the past century of our political life to a posture of reaction and disrespect: a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason.

The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt The consequence was a shift in liberalism’s intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

And later:

Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.

Most damning, perhaps, to the fancy liberal self-conception: Republicans score higher in susceptibility to persuasion. They are willing to change their minds more often.

The Republican coalition tends toward the center: educated enough, smart enough, informed enough.

The Democratic coalition in the 21st century is bifurcated: It has the postgraduates, but it has the disenfranchised urban poor as well, a group better defined by race and immigration status than by class. There are more Americans without high school diplomas than in possession of doctoral degrees. The math proceeds from there.

Why does smugness to dominate the liberal culture?

As we have suggested, liberals are better able to cocoon themselves among like-minded people. They likely had liberal high school teachers, but most certainly had overwhelmingly liberal college professors. They self-select into professions defined by strongly (often monolithically) liberal or left politics (academia, journalism, the government regulatory and welfare state). They segregate themselves into ghettos (like Milwaukee’s East Side) and mostly interact with people like themselves. They get their news from liberal outlets.

While conservatives can isolate themselves to a degree, they cannot avoid the liberal indoctrination in college, nor exposure to the liberal media (whether it be the New York Times or the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). They are more likely to work in settings where politics is a bit peripheral and there is some diversity of opinion.

Thus liberal smugness is not justified by superior knowledge, or superior reasoning ability, or superior open-mindedness. It is simply the result of an intense tribal mentality.

Thus liberals richly deserve to have lost the support of the white working class. But this working class populism can play out in different ways: voting for Reagan or voting for Trump, for example. Not all ways of opposing liberal smugness are equal.

Decadent European Elites Hate Israel (And So Do American Academics)

From Jewish News Online:

What we have today is a moral, intellectual siege of Israel, by the academic and media elites of Europe’s chattering-class citadels. They’ve turned Israel into Global Enemy No1, the source of all the world’s sorrow, a nation to be railed against more than any other on Earth.

My dictionary says a siege is the “surrounding of a place” with the intent of making its inhabitants surrender. Could there be a better description of European progressives’ myopic singling out of Israel for invective, and their shunning of its wares, books and even people via the BDS movement? People in Israel feel this moral siege, this intellectual blockade, very strongly.

Some Israelis I spoke to seemed more upset about the turn against Israel in Europe than they were about the more immediate threat posed Islamists in the Middle East. It wasn’t hard to work out why. As one said, “We considered Europe a friend”: “We thought Europe and Israel had a lot in common, being Western and democratic.”

This cuts to the heart of the Euro-elites’ paranoia about Israel, their turn against it: it is really European values, the ideals of modernity and democracy, they’ve given up on. The thing that riles them most about Israel is that it reminds them of what they used to be like, of the values they once espoused, before they lost the moral plot and sank into the cesspit of relativism and post-Enlightenment self-loathing.

Plucky, keen to protect its sovereignty, considering itself an outpost of liberalism… Israel is a painful reminder to today’s morally anchorless European thinkers and agitators of what their nations once were.They hate Israel because they hate themselves.

Israel has become the whipping boy of guilt-ridden Western liberals who’ve given up on the very idea of the West.

Of course, the same critique applies to leftist elites in the U.S., who are reflexively anti-Israel. Academics (especially in the humanities and social sciences) are the most typical examples of this sort of decadence. As reported by Frontpage:

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

As Orwell made clear, corrupt language indicates corrupt thinking, and we have it in spades here.

And the fact that feminists think this way is particularly bizarre.

Perhaps it has escaped the notice of the NWSA experts on gender and sexuality issues that if one wanted to punish any Middle Eastern country for its subjugation and abuse of women, Israel would probably not be the first nation to come under reasonable or justifiable scrutiny for a group dedicated “to principles of human rights, justice and freedom for all, including academic freedom.” Totalitarian and despotic regimes throughout the region have created an oppressive group of social pathologies that negatively affect women, including genital mutilation, stoning of adulteresses, “honor” killings by fathers and brothers who have been shamed, cultures of gender apartheid in which women are seen as property with no emotional or physical autonomy, ubiquitous sexual assault, and a general subjugation of women, complete with regulations governing behavior, movement, speech, and even requirements that women be covered by burqa or hijab.

This is just more evidence, if any is needed, that feminism isn’t about women. It’s about left-wing politics and a set of cultural biases typical among leftists.

And among advanced industrial nations, American is the most like Israel. Which is why the leftists elites don’t like America either. And why ordinary Americans (especially Republicans) like Israel.

Multiculturalism

Attacking Catholic Teaching About Sex at “Catholic” Marquette University

From a notice sent around to faculty:

Discussion on human sexuality to take place

A discussion on “The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Sexuality” will take place Monday, April 11, from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Marquette Hall 200.

The discussion will be presented by Dr. Todd Salzman, professor and chair of theology at Creighton University, and Dr. Michael Lawler, professor emeritus of theology at Creighton University. Respondents will be Dr. Susan Ross, professor and chair of theology at Loyola University Chicago, and Rev. Bryan Massingale, associate professor of theology at Marquette.

For more information, contact Dr. Amelia Zurcher, associate professor of English and coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program.

This event is sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, the departments of English, History, Philosophy and Psychology, and the Social and Cultural Sciences McGee Lecture Series.

What’s the problem with this? The fact that the most secular and politically correct parts of the university are the sponsors is the giveaway.

In September of Last year the U.S. bishops highlighted major defects in Salzman and Lawler’s co-authored book (The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology). It seems the authors approve homosexual behavior, premarital sex, contraception, and artificial insemination.

In fact, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops saw fit to critique the book at length.

How do Salzman and Lawler deal with scriptural statements about sexual behavior? They simply assert that such were merely reflections of the cultural biases of the particular time in history when the texts were written, and are not normative for us today.

That’s terribly convenient. It relieves one of ever having to confront current cultural norms and take unpopular stands.

The sort of people who take this position never have an inkling that today’s cultural norms may be arbitrary fashions with no fundamental moral grounding.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with discussion of Catholic teaching about sexuality at a Catholic university, including the voicing of opinions contrary to Church teaching.

Unfortunately, as is typical at Marquette, no opinions supportive of Catholic teaching are likely to be voiced. Marquette’s own Fr. Massingale is both a political and a theological liberal, and Dr. Susan Ross seems to subordinate any respect for Catholic teaching to her feminist views.

If discourse at Marquette is going to be one-sided, it should come down on the side of Catholic teaching. But balanced discourse is always to be sought in a university.

But how does one rationalize one program after another trashing Catholic teaching?

Marquette is not, in any serious sense, a Catholic university. That claim is just a marketing gimmick.

Blacks Leaving Liberal States

From The American Interest:

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times.

The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state blacks fled the stagnant job opportunities, high taxes and rotten social conditions of the mostly blue northern states to seek better lives for themselves in the south.

The Census story is a shocker. First, according to the Times, the Blacks leaving tend to be the “younger and better educated.” Second, the three states Blacks left in largest numbers don’t just include snake-bit Michigan; the other two are Illinois and New York. Within those states, Chicago and the city of the New York (widely considered among the most successful cities in the country) are the places Blacks are deserting. 17 percent of the Black flight from Big Blue is from the Empire State; after almost a century of trailblazing social policy, New York State has succeeded in creating the most hostile environment for Blacks in the country.

It gets worse. One would think that the Blacks who choose to stay in the cold, unwelcoming North would cluster in the cities where more liberal and humane governance models mandate such generous policies as “living wage” laws and where all the beautiful features of the blue social model can be experienced at full strength.

But one would be wrong. Blacks across the North are fleeing the urban paradises of liberal legislation and high public union membership for the benighted suburbs. The Times interviewed a professor to get the straight scoop:

“The notion of the North and its cities as the promised land has been a powerful part of African-American life, culture and history, and now it all seems to be passing by,” said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.” [bold italics added]

When whites leave failing blue cities and states, the pundits call this racism: all those white Californians fleeing Nancy Pelosi’s utopia for less ambitious jurisdictions where ordinary people can do things like get jobs and buy homes are clearly pathetic trailer trash hicks too dumb, too selfish and above all too racist to understand the gloriously multicultural blue beauty of California today.

So what are we going to call the young, educated Blacks making similar choices? Dumb cracker racists?

The failure of blue social policy to create an environment which works for Blacks is the most devastating possible indictment of the 20th century liberal enterprise in the United States. Helping Blacks achieve the kind of equality and opportunity long denied them was more than one of many justifications for blue social policy: it was the defining moral task that has challenged and shaped American liberalism for the last fifty years.

The Census tells us that in the eyes of those who know best, these well intentioned efforts failed. Instead of heaven, we have hell across America’s inner cities. Blue economic policy has cut the creation of new private sector jobs to a trickle in our great cities, while the high costs of public union urban services (and policies that favor government employees over the citizenry at large) impose crippling taxes and contribute to the ruinously high costs that blight opportunity. All the social welfare bureaucracies, diversity counselors and minority set-asides can’t make up for the colossal failure of blue social policy to create sustainable lower middle class prosperity in our cities.

Most Blacks of course still vote blue at the ballot box, but more and more of them are voting red with their feet. They are betting in massive numbers that southern Republicans will do a better job of helping their kids get good educations, police their communities more fairly (see this article, where NYT columnist Charles Blow blames the Black flight from New York on the racist police), offer more affordable housing and create a better business climate. Over time, this is going to affect the balance of power in Black politics and pull the Democratic Party (and the national consensus) to the right. Reapportionment is already pulling political power toward the South; New York today has fewer electoral votes than it did at the start of the Civil War and it is going to lose two more House seats in the next division.

This story has some strong implications for the “social justice” crowd at places like Marquette.

You claim to represent blacks (and Hispanics and other minorities), but the policies you favor — high taxes and government spending, strong unions, government educational monopolies, overbearing regulation of business — stiffle opportunity.

But, by some strange coincidence, they help people like you prosper.

Are your motives really so pure as you want to believe?

Germany: Liberal Theologians = Dying Church

From InsideCatholic.com:

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpa as “presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to” and then offered classic examples of chutzpa in action: “Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. A chutzpanik may be defined as the man who shouts ‘Help! Help!’ while beating you up.”

Leo Rosten should have lived to experience German Catholic theologians of the early 21st century.

In anticipation of Pope Benedict XVI’s forthcoming visit to his homeland, more than 200 German theologians -- men and women who have earned doctoral degrees in theology and teach in German universities -- have issued a manifesto, “The Church in 2011: A Necessary Departure.” The manifesto itself does not identify the destination for which the Church is to depart, but the terminus ad quem seems reasonably clear from a careful reading of the document: Catholicism is to transform itself into another liberal Protestant sect by conceding virtually every point at issue between classic Christianity and the ambient culture of the postmodern West.

It is, perhaps, no surprise to find German Catholic theologians publicly supporting the ordination of married men and women to the ministerial priesthood (overtly), same-sex “marriage” (slyly), and full communion within the Church for those in irregular marriages (subtly but unmistakably). These causes have been espoused for years. German theologians dissented en masse from the 1993 teaching of Veritatis Splendor on the nature of moral acts and from the 1994 teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the Church’s inability to admit women to Holy Orders. What was particularly striking about this new manifesto was its attempt to address serious problems with tried-and-failed solutions. That bespeaks a remarkable lack of intellectual creativity and historical sense.

Thus we are told that the German sexual abuse cases that came to light in 2010 have “plunged the Catholic Church in Germany into an unequaled crisis.” Really? I understand, and in many respects sympathize with, German complaints about the ubiquity of references to the National Socialist period whenever anything German is discussed. But was 2010 really a crisis greater than that in which German Catholicism found itself between Hitler’s 1933 accession to power and Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945? (Do today’s Catholics face crises of conscience greater than those faced by Count Claus von Stauffenberg or Sophie Scholl?) Moreover, what about the crisis of faith that emptied German churches over the past two generations, such that weekly Mass attendance in urban areas hovers around 5-10 percent?

The manifesto is also notable for its failure to examine academic consciences, an exercise that might have led to more measured assessments of responsibility for the current situation. Do these theologians imagine that they and their teachers bear no responsibility for the “paralysis and resignation” they deplore in German Catholicism? Does German theology’s tendency to treat the Bible as a specimen to be dissected rather than a gift to be studied with a full array of interpretive tools (including the eyes of faith) have nothing to do with today’s crisis of faith in a land whose very language was formed by Luther’s biblical translation? Has the theologians’ bizarre notion that “freedom of conscience” means abject surrender to the sexual revolution in all its demands had nothing to do with the Church’s failures to convert a hedonistic culture?

Few of these academics have any serious or sustained connection to the liturgical or pastoral life of the Church; yet they assume they occupy a privileged position from which to understand what has happened to German Catholicism and how its genuine problems can best be addressed. Why?

Seeking a rousing conclusion to their call to the ecclesiastical barricades, the German theologians advise their fellow Catholics that they should “look to the future with courage and walk on water, like Peter as Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you have fear? Is your faith so weak?’” A question to the professors: Would each of you who believes that Peter walked on water please raise your hand?

There is nothing particularly Catholic about any of this. Rather, it’s what we call the“established church syndrome,” and it most certainly applies to “Mainstream Protestantism” in the United States (which is no longer mainstream).

Relgious organizations that take for granted that a fair number of people will come through the doors (either out of habit, or because they have no choice) lose missionary zeal. They become places where people wanting a cozy sinecure go for a career.

They crave “mainstream” acceptance, which means they shy away from (and soon enough, actively oppose) ideas of which the secular media and secular academia disapprove, such as belief in miracles or Christian views on sexual morality.

Catholicism, of course, is heterogeneous, and parts of the Church have avoided this curse — the campus ministries at Texas A & M and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for example.

And some parts of the world are producing large numbers of men and women going into religious vocations, a phenomenon that seems to have coincided with the tenure of John Paul II as Pope.

Marquette, unfortunately, resembles Germany more than places where Catholicism thrives. It’s not the fault of the Theology Department, which is reasonably faithful. It’s more the fault of a politically correct Campus Ministry, campus bureaucrats and a heavily secular faculty.

And the fact that students come here socialized more by the mass media than by the Church (and indeed, only a minority of freshmen will now call themselves Catholic) doesn’t help either.

Obama: Giving Liberal Ideas a Try-Out For the First Time in Decades

From Matt Welch at Reason.com:

In just about every speech at their 2008 convention, Democrats promised voters that a change in the White House would, in Barack Obama’s formulation, restore “our moral standing” in the world. Replace the unilateralist cowboy at the top with a humbler multilateralist, and the path would finally be cleared to fix vexing international issues such as curbing carbon emissions and dealing with the mullahs in Iran. Like many of the party faithful’s long-nurtured beliefs, this hope has disintegrated on contact with reality.

“America is losing the free world,” said a January headline in the Financial Times. While that statement is exaggerated, the sentiment behind it has been gaining traction around the globe, especially in the wake of the climate conference debacle in Copenhagen. It’s not just that the less confrontational American president has been unable to deliver results. He can’t even get his phone calls returned.

“On the last day of the [Copenhagen] talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India—but failed each time,” Gideon Rachman wrote in the Financial Times piece. “The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport. So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India.”

It was easy for many Democrats to believe, during the nightmare years of “freedom fries,” that George W. Bush alone was to blame for the diplomatic prickliness between, say, Washington and Paris. But the basic conditions for American foreign policy have more to do with America’s outsized position in the world than with any particular politicians. Bill Clinton tangled constantly with the French, and now a visibly irritated President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone within a year from vying for Obama’s attentions to taking (in the words of a competing politician) an openly “anti-Obama position.”

Obama’s approach was supposed to produce a more cooperative Tehran and Moscow, fewer terrorists in the Muslim world, and vast new initiatives to fight global poverty. Instead, Iran has murdered dissenters while speeding up its nuclear program, Russia hasn’t discernibly budged even after the U.S. abandoned its missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, a Muslim suicide bomber was stopped at the last minute from blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas, and global gatherings have produced even less concrete action than usual.

These developments illustrate a phenomenon that has been playing out across a variety of public policy areas: Progressive Democrats, after being outfoxed by Ronald Reagan, triangulated to the policy margins by Bill Clinton, then routed under the first six years of George W. Bush, are having many of the nostrums they championed during the wilderness years tested in the real world for the first time in decades. The initial results of this long-delayed peer review have been a shock to the progressive system.

The Copenhagen crackup was a dream killer in more ways than one. Not only did the breakdown give the lie to the notion that a cranky Texas oilman was the single greatest impediment to international cooperation and enlightened environmental policy; it laid waste to the argument that yoking the developing world to a “do as we say, not as we did” policy of energy consumption will somehow prove to be an economic and environmental “win-win.” If that’s true, the leaders of India and China—the latter of which has been serially praised for its green-energy initiatives by the likes of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—certainly don’t believe it. No amount of international do-goodism is going to prevent countries from acting in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.

Obama and the Democrats have been peddling a similar win-win line about the creation of up to 5 million “green jobs” in America, through a combination of cap-and-trade carbon permits, home weatherization, clean coal, higher gas mileage standards, environmental regulation, and various renewable-energy mandates. The “green jobs” political juggernaut has been credited to Van Jones, who was obliged to resign as Obama’s “Green Czar” last summer after reports surfaced that he’d signed a petition supporting an investigation of Bush’s involvement in 9/11. What’s interesting about Jones’ beautiful-sounding concept is that even its chief supporters admit there’s no evidence the theory is true. Which is hardly surprising, since most of Obama’s proposed environmental policies involve making energy more expensive while using more tax dollars to subsidize expensive clean energy sources. As The New Yorker put it in a long, flattering profile of Jones in January 2009, “the mechanics of creating green jobs—or even what jobs should qualify for the title—have yet to be worked out.”

The debate over these phantom jobs, against a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, will likely suck up the political oxygen in Washington after the protracted health care debate finally wheezes to a close. But Americans already have found empty pots at the end of other Democratic rainbows.

The $789 billion stimulus package of February 2009, thanks to a theoretical “multiplier” that would convert federal dollars into more than their worth in job creation, was supposed to (according to administration economists) “create or save” 3.5 million jobs and prevent unemployment from reaching as high as 9 percent by the end of 2010. Instead, joblessness shot through the 10 percent barrier before the end of 2009, and the government’s own tracking of the jobs allegedly created or saved has become a laughingstock with its double counting and imaginary ZIP codes.

What about the lobbying scourge that Democrats (like all good opposition parties) opposed so vociferously in 2008? Progressive theory holds that regulation of K Street, as opposed to a cutback in overall regulation, is the key to “change the culture of corruption” in Washington, as candidate Obama repeatedly promised to do. How’d that work out in practice? In December Politico reported that “Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government—and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town.”

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed.

Of course, liberal Democrats are intent on “neutralizing” and “removing” such “obstacles” by shutting up talk radio with the Fairness Doctrine, demonizing the Tea Party movement, and bullying potential opposition (health insurance companies, drug companies) into compliance.

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that the liberal-left New Class lives to inflict its experiments on the rest of us. The power, influence, prestige and incomes of the group are tied up in using politics. So they won’t tire of that.

They will always be a threat to a free society, and they will always need to be fought off. Happily, the most immediately threatening of their power grabs -- the attempt to seize control of the health care system -- has been defeated.

Detroit: Where Liberalism Leads

Should Government Make Health Care “Affordable?”

From Cafe Hayek:

The one good thing that came out of this whole credit debacle, I now have the perfect pithy response to all the lefties who tell me that the government should take over health care and make it affordable to everyone. You mean the way they made home ownership affordable to all through Fannie and Freddie? How did that work out for you?