Can't See the Forest for the Trees

Via salon.com, Camille Paglia identifies some trees, but still can't see the forest. Below are some quotes from the article.

At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.

If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left

Like so many boomers, Paglia sees the world through the smoke and haze of our late cultural revolution. Even as smart a lady as she, doesn't understand that the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism were against our authentic institutions and principles of individualism and freedom which they wanted to trade for the anti-freedom and the strict authoritarianism of the far left.

We, the People, must fight against the usurpation of our institutions with all our might.