There was a time when conservatives were reviled everywhere for being "haters" and "mean-spirited." Then came Bill Buckley's magazine The National Review and a series of books by conservative authors the tone and quality of which gave the lie to the allegations of their opponents. It turned out that it was very difficult to find an actual conservative who fit the stereotype of a frothing Joe McCarthy out to lynch everyone to his ideological left.
Nevertheless, by the late 1960s the damage had been done. Conservatives, in the public's mind, had been stuck with a reputation for biliousness and the media was only too pleased to reinforce the image in whatever way they could. Conservative ideas had a hard time gaining a hearing because they'd been stereotyped as insensitive, fat cat businessmen who loathed both minorities and commies in equal measure.
In the 1980s, however, the emergence on the national scene of charismatic, irenic conservative personalities like Ronald Reagan made it even more difficult for liberals to sustain the specter of the fire-breathing conservative, and in the last twenty years that misconception has been greatly diminished.
The irony is that as the public has come to realize that conservatives are not the monsters they had been led to believe they were the left has ratcheted up the propaganda, trying to portray George Bush as a demoniac on the level of Adolf Hitler. In their desperation to show that conservatives really are the incarnation of Lucifer the left has infused our political rhetoric with far more hate, spite, cruelty and viciousness than anything their predecessors of a generation ago imputed to conservatives.
Nothing in our political past, for example, compares to the vituperation and sheer ugliness of the sort of thing that fills the left's blogs in the wake of the attempted assasination of Vice-president Cheney. Michelle documents some of the sick commentary here although I understand that some of the blogs she quotes from have now expunged the more disgusting comments.
There are several words that come to mind to describe people who think like these people do, but rather than indulge in trying to pin an appropriate adjective on them, as satisfying as such an exercise might be, I wish to simply wonder out loud if there isn't a connection between the ideology the secular left embraces and the kind of people that it seems to attract.
RLC