A reader makes this sharp observation:
When you linked to The Marketing of Evil, what caught my eye was the similarity between the subtext of this book and modern liberalism.
John Kenneth Galbraith, a man best described as "brilliantly wrong," burst on the scene with "The Affluent Society." TAS basically argued that the American people were well-meaning sheep. In their naivete, Americans would fall for any kind of slick advertising. JKG believed you could sell just about anything to the American people if you used enough bells and whistles. He wanted to show Americans the man behind the curtain so we would get on our knees, thank him for his wisdom and get behind increased government spending and excess at the hands of President Adlai Stevenson. That he was empirically wrong was of little consquence to him.
The Marketing of Evil doesn’t have the same goals as JKG. They would settle for Americans clamoring to overturn Roe, pretending gay people don’t exist and put the sexual revolution genie back in the bottle. But they don’t think the American people actually want Roe/gays/sexual freedom – we’re just naive sheep that follow the loudest bells, brightest colors and most pleasant whistles. And just like JKG, they will eventually be proven wrong – this is what the American people want. Americans may argue about how fast we are going "there," but our intellectual journeys aren’t the product of slick marketing. But just as JKG couldn’t comprehend why Americans favored a proven leader of men like Ike over the scholarly Adlai, the supporters of this tome cannot comprehend that America has chosen liberty over "traditional" morality.
A political movement is decadent when it starts describing the voters as duped sheep. And if the far right believes that Americans want to return to an era with gay people in the closet or jail, abortion banned, and contraception unavailable, they may soon be in for an electoral shock.
The Dish 