David Gelernter

His article in The Weekly Standard is incisive as always. The most enjoyable moment comes when he shows why actors turned poets should fear Yale professors:

At an anti-Iraq war demonstration in March 2004, the actor Woody Harrelson read a poem. "I recognize your face, I recognize your name. / Your daddy killed for oil, and you did the same." We often hear this "blood for oil" accusation. After the first Gulf War we had Iraqi and Kuwaiti oilfields in our grasp. If our goal was to steal oil, why did we give them back? Are we that stupid?

The more telling point is his identification of our liberal elites as the new reactionaries and Bush as a "progressive president in the best sense."

Reactionaries recoil from new ideas and try to suppress and defeat them. They want things to stay the same....Reactionary liberals want everything to stay just the same. All trends must continue just as they have been.

Gelernter is a conservative but his portraits of FDR and LaGuardia in 1939: The Lost World of the Fair were warm and positive. He clearly admires both men despite their liberalism.

But their liberalism was free-wheeling, pragmatic, and experimental. Faced with the economic crisis of the 1930s, FDR was willing to try many different potential cures. AND, he was quite willing to jettison those that did not work or which created political opposition.

Many of his self-styled followers have lost sight of his flexibility. They hold onto both his goals and his programs. Thus, we dare not change anything about social security, labor laws, or utility regulation. A man who thinks cars should be just as they were in 1938 is clearly a reactionary curmudgeon. What, then, of the man who thinks old age security should use the funding mechanisms and delivery systems of 1938? Just the man who want to use fuel injectors instead of carborateurs is not an enemy of the internal combustion engine, so, too, not everyone who suggests changes to social security is a Scrooge in disguise eager to send senior citizens to the workhouse. The refusal to acknowledge this really is reactionary.