“Pathetic Republicans”

“Pathetic Republicans”: "Democratic policy initiatives, because they are “progressive” and “pro-active,” can be easily marketed by highlighting their perceived positives while carefully camouflaging the many problems that would not recommend them (the “living wage” is a good example, and works precisely because most people don’t understand the economic forces of the marketplace; the same holds true for attacks on “outsourcing” or, say, Wal-Mart: naturally, Americans are concerned about losing jobs to overseas manufacturers, or to corporate behomeths that would devour all of its competitors, particularly when they are being sold by progressive and liberal Democrats and the press gloom and doom, and are being constantly bombarded with the emotional appeals inherent in widely repeated anecdotal stories of hundreds or thousands of layoffs in a particular industry, etc. Of course, what they are never told is that globalization and “outsourcing” has resulted in a net gain in domestic jobs, and that the global free market is what keeps the price of upconverting DVD players at $50).

Conversely, Republican policy initiatives—inasmuch as they seem more and more to rely upon appeals to social conservatism—come across as precisely the kind of nannystatist intrusions and moralizing that Democrats and liberals (perversely) rely upon acti"