I’ve been struck by some quotes from former Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2022 book “One Damn Thing After Another,” a smart, insightful memoir from a person who I believe cannot be categorized as left or right, conservative or liberal. Highly objective, Barr writes the best explanation I have ever read on how the media lost its objectivity.
Barr writes, “Some liberal and progressive commentators suggest that our polarizing politics was somehow the consequence of an upsurge in right-wing extremism, but no sentient person could take that seriously. The decisive development intensifying the political divide has been the Democratic Party’s radical lurch to the left …”
Barr cites a left-wing journalist, Kevin Drum, who concluded, based on of survey data, that since 2000 Democrats had moved significantly to the left, “while Republicans have moved only slightly to the right.” Drum’s conclusion: “It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It’s the liberals.”
Barr writes: “I would not call today’s progressives ‘liberals.’ The leftward shift of the Democratic Party is not just an incremental step in a more liberal direction along the continuum of liberal democratic ideas; it is a break with the liberal democratic tradition. Radical progressivism’s messianic premises; its totalizing ambitions to control all aspects of life; its need to tear down society’s existing belief systems and institutions; its antagonism to free and open debate – all are alien to the values of liberal democracy.”
Paula McKenney
Woolwich
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