Goldberg: Seeking Tolerance and Reprieve from Culture Wars

.. the Offended Wars are a kind of Potemkin conflict for the true battle over double standards.

The assumption is that liberals’ hearts are in the right place, thus, when they stray off the path rhetorically or in some other way, it’s not seen as revelatory of something darker or more sinister. Of course, conservatives do the same thing. We assume the best of our own tribe and can dismiss a joke or errant tweet quite easily from one of our own.

.. I think one of the reasons we got here is that liberals were truly blind to the double standard they benefit from and the norms they were happy to see violated when the people violating them were “the good guys.”

.. the principle of religious tolerance was a last resort, an utterly utilitarian practical compromise, after the combatants in Europe’s religious wars recognized what C. V. Wedgwood called “the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”

.. First, we need to return to the idea of ideological and theological pluralism but moral consensus. People are free to believe whatever they like, and they are free to act on those beliefs so long as they don’t harm others. Second, we need a lot less nationalism (for want of a better term). What I mean by that is that the federal government and various national elites need to stop thinking that the whole country needs to think and act in one way.

..  Fox News likes to do stories that boil down to “Can you believe someone in San Francisco believes X!?” MSNBC likes stories that boil down to “We have troubling reports that someone in Wyoming believes Y!” The underlying assumption is that in America everyone is supposed to think alike. Well, unless someone is actually being harmed — and I don’t mean in the terminally asinine construction, “words hurt”

.. Lastly, we need to get as much power out of Washington as conceivably possible.

.. As long as we think that the federal government, especially the executive branch, has monarchical power to impose a vision on the whole country, we will turn political contests into cultural warfare. The Whigs couldn’t abide a Catholic on the throne because they believed the king would impose his vision on all of England. The Catholics felt the same way about the prospect of a Protestant crown. The solution is to restrain the power of the crown — so that the faith of the monarch doesn’t matter.

Elizabeth Warren Sells Out

Senator Elizabeth Warren once appeared on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, TBS’s unwatchable Daily Show spinoff. This pairing had potential — for the first time, Bee had a chance to appear funny in comparison with her guest. “I am exhausted. I am personally broken,” said Bee, referring to the political scene. “People come up to me all the time and they’re like, ‘What do I do? What do I do? Help me!’ So my question to you is: What should I tell them?”

Gesturing wildly and with an edge to her voice, Senator Warren had marching orders ready: “You get in the fight, and then you fight as hard as you can,” she responded.

“But what does that mean?” asked Bee.

“Oh, come on! You know what it means! It means when you’re told to be quiet, you don’t sit down and be quiet,” replied Warren. “You stand back up.”

.. Warren may wish for capitalism’s demise, but as long as it’s here, she plans to do as well as she can out of it.

.. Elizabeth Warren is becoming a brand. “She’s the Apple of politics,” said Adam Green

.. Warren “has tried out for many roles:

  1. writer of silly self-help books (back when she was advertising herself as ‘Dr. Phil’s financial guru’),
  2. academic, Naderite populist,” and more. It is now her turn to play a more familiar role:
  3. “First Lady of the Left.”

.. Merge the

  • “man of the people” cult of Bernie Sanders with the
  • “You go, girl!” cult of Hillary Clinton into one movement,

embodied in the very person of Elizabeth Warren, and you could have something unstoppable in 2020. This is the master plan.

Warren will be

  • the anti-Trump champion,
  • the feminist champion,
  • the working-class champion,
  • the young people’s champion,
  • the media sensation,
  • the pop-culture star,
  • and — don’t you dare forget — the (totally authentic)
  • racial minorities’ champion all in one.

.. Elizabeth Warren cannot deliver the goods. The senior senator from Massachusetts is awkward and halting, even enervating in her relentless hectoring. Her false enthusiasm — the country, she insisted to Samantha Bee, will come out of the Trump years even better than it was before because “we don’t have any other choice”

.. Elizabeth Warren is the kind of politician that only a true believer could love.