>Liberals are more likely to be career politicians than conservatives, who usually find better uses for their time in a dynamic society than robbing the productive members of society to buy votes from the unproductive. The best and brightest of conservatives only occasionally make a career of politics, while liberals find little value for themselves outside of that business.
Your point reminded me of a column that I had clipped recently from the Post.
Karen
<<The emergence of the Right-Wing Dork (RWD) as a recognizable political type, whether running for office in Britain or conspiring behind the scenes in America, is a significant development. Washington has been packed with Left-Wing Dorks since at least the New Deal, but conservatives are supposed to value "real" work in the "real" world and are supposed to hold the capital's leech economy in contempt. Yet the RWD generally discovered politics at a tender age, and has never done anything else.
RWDs are drawn unquestioningly to Washington, where they work as aides to real politicians. Or, if they're lucky, they sink into a life of gilded socialism at a conservative think tank. Thanks to the conservative political revival of the past couple of decades, and the growing political activism of big corporations (a development fomented, as it happens, by Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism and father of Bill), the conservative ideas-and-agitprop industry is now a career track in and of itself. A RWD can go straight from college into a world of seminars, junkets and political intrigue, without ever holding anything most people would recognize as a private-sector job.
There is obvious irony here, but there is poignancy here, too. Are the RWDs hypocrites or martyrs? These are bright, energetic, ambitious people who could probably thrive mightily in the private sector, yet they devote their lives to promoting other people's right to do so. They fight for lower taxes on high incomes that they themselves could earn but choose not to. Selflessly, they promote the cult of the individual. For the good of society, they struggle against dangerous notions like "the good of society." Devoted to reducing the importance of government in our lives, they wallow in public policy so that future generations won't have to. They put up with life in Washington, the better to tear it down.
On the other hand, they do seem to be enjoying themselves.>>
washingtonpost.com |
