“The predisposition to slowly savor visions of your own defeat, even at the moment of total victory, seems like an essential component of ressentiment. If you feel too much like a victor, it’s sure hard to keep hating those rotten Krauts and Japs enough to demonize them, and then there’s a risk of dismantling the powerful military infrastructure you constructed to wage war against their perfidy. Victory contains the seeds of a more magnanimous future for the victors, even as it infuriates the vanquished. So the Left can only maintain the energy it needs to harness the culture wars as a tool for electoral victory if it constantly denies that it’s winning, by weaving itself a new narrative of encroaching right-wing radicalism that’s eroding the remnants of some Eisenhowerian golden age of nonpartisan unity and cooperation.
Have any of history’s other revolutionaries been so reluctant to celebrate their own revolution” – Edward Hamilton.
Meanwhile, McKay Coppins goes to New Hampshire in search of Christianism. He’s still looking:
Throughout the event, speakers repeatedly referred to protecting and championing “values” — but they weren’t talking about traditional marriage or unborn babies. Paul used the word in relation to the Bill of Rights, particularly privacy, as he railed against the NSA. Cruz employed the term in a lengthy lecture about Obamacare. And Greg Moore, AFP’s New Hampshire director, drew applause when he said, “We know that New Hampshire values are summed up in four words: Live free or die.”
And now in Nevada, the GOP platform has removed mentions of abortion and marriage. Maybe it’s time some of us took yes for an answer.
(Photo: Same-sex couple Joseph and Jim pose for a photo as they wait to be officially married at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office on the first day New York State’s Marriage Equality Act went into effect on July 24, 2011. By Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images.)
The Dish 