Camille Paglia: ‘How has ‘liberty’ become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?’

Camille Paglia’s latest Salon column:

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators?

First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate.

But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. (…)

It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

(…) affluent middle-class Canadians Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why?

Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in Canada the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible.

The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue.

The Canadian Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.