Condescension

Following the re-election of President Bush there was a similar reaction of the Left - in the form of the Democratic Party in the US, and the usual examples of the Left in Europe - one of condescension to the American people. The US version of the condescension was expressed by Eric Alterman at MSNBC.com, and Jane Smiley at Slate, as well as the signs of the various anti-Bush demonstrations. Mark Steyn, in the Chicago Sun-Times, has a simple answer to these.

If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot.

And in The Telegraph, Steyn addresses the European version of this same reaction.