Camille Paglia: A Strange Servility Toward Big Government

Camille Paglia teaches at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. She’s a dissident feminist who rocketed to national prominence after her book Sexual Personae made the best seller lists in the early 1990s. She has a razor-quick mind, an acid-tongue and rapid-fire delivery. While I often disagree with Paglia, I like listening to her just to see what the next thing out of her mouth will be.

Paglia is a Democrat, but a Democrat who doesn’t mince words about the drift of her party. Writing in Salon, Paglia opined:

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

For the left, politics always was religion. Ersatz religion, to be sure, but still religion. And deviation is not merely disagreement, but outright heresy.

And we know what happens to heretics, don’t we?

Hat tip to Allah for the Paglia column in Salon.

Ed Morrissey follows up with another column.

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Tagged as: big government, Camille Paglia, Democrat, Democrat party, feminist, heresy, mob, Religion, Sexual Personae