Why Liberals Lose

It’s great to have a few Master Narratives, and the Pseudo-Conservative Outrage Machine has spent four decades creating them. The press corps is driven by liberal bias! And: Liberal elites hate your red-state values! And: For liberals, it’s all about political correctness! These simple messages provide key frameworks for pseudo-conservative complaints of all kinds. They place trivial gripes in a large, crucial context. For that reason, you hear them recited all the time. Just yesterday, we mentioned the need for the liberal web to develop controlling Master Narratives for liberals. Why do Dems, libs and centrists need Master Narratives? Consider what happened on Scarborough Country when USA Next was discussed just last night. The stage was set for a Big Liberal Triumph. Amazingly, Scarborough had assembled a panel which featured two liberals and only one conservative. And how absurd was the conduct at issue? USA Next’s attacks on the AARP had been so absurd that even Scarborough rolled his eyes at the pseudo-con group as he introduced the discussion. (“They went so far as to say AARP supports gay marriage and is anti-soldier.”) Here was the perfect chance for liberal spokesmen to state the obvious: Conservatives keep making a joke of your discourse. These groups keep trying to treat us like fools. The controlling point for the liberals was obvious: There they go again, dear viewers! But liberals have failed, in the past many years, to establish any Master Narratives. So note what happened when Scarborough began by throwing to Air America’s Rachel Maddow: [more]