This from Roger Simon at PJ Media, who collars those who still think modern liberalism (aka statism) is cool. It’s not, and hasn’t been for some time. Everyone with the proverbial IQ above room temperature has come to the same conclusion. While that’s interesting, what is far more interesting is the political cohort that Simon fingers as today’s cool….
So go on. Guess. Can’t? Okay. In retrospect, it’s a head-slapper. Why? Because “cool” today is just about as opposite as you can get from modern statist liberalism, aka “yesterday’s cool.” After all, today’s cool people are all…
…libertarians, to one degree or another. As Simon explains:
A certain class of people who staked their lives on being cool ever since high school — whenever that was, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, who knows — are beginning to be confronted with the truth – that their ultra-conventional received wisdom, that which they thought was cool, is a bunch of hooey (I was one of them, so I know)….They continue to believe that government spending is cool, that it is a good thing (how square is that?), but out of the corner of their ears they are beginning to hear a different song:
Libertarians are the cool guys.
Libertarians?
What does that mean?
Oh, yes, that’s a word for conservatives who wanted to get girls at parties.
Well, it probably was. But times have changed on that too and nearly everyone with half a brain is kind of a libertarian now, at least partly.
A slight editorial correction here: Libertarians in college—at least the ones I hung out with—were conservatives who not only got the girls at parties, but were smoking dope while they did it. Worked pretty well too, as I not-very-clearly remember.
But back to Simon: What makes modern liberalism the mess that it is today is that it is mainly composed of people who desperately wanted to be cool in high school – wanted to be Abbie Hoffman or Eldridge Cleaver – but never were. Their longing – this need to be Abbie – has clouded their thinking and their ability to perceive reality, placing us all in a mess along with them.
Boy. He can say that again.
To read Roger Simon’s entire column, check it out at PJ Media HERE.