Vox‘s Ezra Klein would do better to examine his own party’s many phobias.
Few techniques enrage more effectively than a single-word admonition to “relax.” Try it sometime when someone is upset; it’s lighter fluid on the fire, every time. Smug people know this, including the Sultan of Smug, Ezra Klein.
The founder of the young-adult site Vox is back with yet another essay saying, “Relax, conservatives.” This one repeats a favorite myth of the smug-progressive Left, which is that conservatism is powered by “fear.” Klein thinks that if only conservatives would relax about inevitable “change,” and vote accordingly, we could all march forward together into a shiny new era of tolerance, compassion, free-thinking, and love. It’ll be like Woodstock, only with better toilets.
When Klein talks about “change,” he is thinking of demography. He believes conservatives are getting driven off the rails by fears of black people and Muslims and documentation-challenged immigrants and maybe feminists and abstract art. Going back a bit, we had an “inordinate fear of Communism,” in Jimmy Carter’s famous words. Klein is chill about all of these things and urges us to be as fear-free as he is. As all the smugprogs are. As the Democratic party inherently is.
All Klein is actually doing here is proving his status as a bubble boy who never sets foot outside his comfortably furnished, intellectually climate-controlled living space. He is so intellectually dishonest that he is able to fool even himself.
In fact, Klein and his party are all about fear. The Democratic party is defined by fear of climate change, of the police, of incipient theocracy, of white supremacists with tiki torches. It fears that the American Dream is dead, that the next generation will be far worse off, that abortions will have to…
