Norman Podhoretz has a piece in the WSJ that reiterates all of the typical cliches which the Conservatives always deploy against President Obama: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and so on and so forth. He then gives the following history of the “New Left”, which I point out because it is pretty well in agreement with what I would predict he would say. For instance:
“Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and… their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.”
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but this kind of article inadvertently tells us quite a bit about the Conservatives. They always run, as Matt Taibbi once beautifully put it, “against the Sixties.” It is the social, not economic, revolution of the 1960s that they oppose.The people Podhoretz describes here as “anti-Americans” are what we know as feminists, humanists and other varieties of social liberals.
That phrase “American immune system” is a bit weird; as it is a sufficiently vague claim that it papers over the fact that none of the those Democrats have done anything so radical to the government as what FDR did in the 1930s.
(Also note that Podhoretz doesn’t really even try to explain why, if Obama is such a radical leftist, other leftists are so mad at him.)
In short, what we see here is the Nationalists demonstrating their hatred for such cosmopolitan ideologies as arose in the ’60s.