Think of this as Volume 11, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Like a bunch of kids realizing the onlookers finally believe them, that the Emperor is parading about naked, liberals are finally calling conservatives idiots.
This is the same exhilaration conservatives felt a generation ago as they saw the Great Society collapsing. It's the same feeling liberal academics had a generation before that, seeing the fall of the Boogoisie.
As regular readers of this blog know, such stupidity comes from a generation's old insight which is being deployed past its sell-by date. Today's stupidity is based on the Cold War assumptions brought to power by Richard Nixon and (later) Ronald Reagan.
True believers in that stupidity use the ideas of Nixon and Reagan the way medicine men might use shrunken heads. The attacks of John McCain in this last month have repeated both the strategies and tactics of the last 40 years, yet its Rove's minions who are being laughed at. (When your attacks are upstaged by Paris Hilton you've become a caricature.)
So for many people this is a summer of celebration. Liberals have a right to run around like Munchkins after the house fell on the wicked witch. But wise people, and if you've found this blog you're truly a wise person who looks outside the beaten path, should be examining the oncoming assumptions to see how they might be abused, and eventually overthrown, in years to come.
Having been inside the movement which came up with these assumptions, having named them the Internet Thesis, I'd like to offer my services as your guide. Especially since, like Krugman, most of the better candidates are too busy celebrating the collapse of the old order to look inside the new:
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