You've said it yourself, John. These people are forever stuck in 1973.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et al, are 60-ish, which means they were in their middle twenties 35 years ago. I look back on my middle twenties (the late '80s) with a certain nostagia. I imagine Pelosi, Reid, & Co. do the same, and view the world through the lens of what they wish it would be-- the world of their youth. Too bad for them (but thankfully not for us) that world perished long ago, and they wonder why things aren't going as they "ought to".

I can imagine their thought-processes (if I may dignify their prejudices by such a term): "Of course our military is composed of thugs and creeps! By definition, only such people would pick up guns and kill people. So atrocities are the norm-- My Lai was no surprise to us, and there absolutely must be similar things going on in Iraq!"

(Take what follows with a grain of salt. I was born in 1962, so I'm either a late Boomer or early Gen X'er, depending on how you want to slice the demographic baloney.)

I'm not sure whether such mental stasis is peculiar to the Boomers, or to mankind generally. Every generation looks back to the past and sees in it a Golden Age that never truly was. But for some reason the Boomers seem especially prone to it.

A case in point is my brother-in-law. Paul is a fine man, a good father and husband, and has probably treated his cantankerous brother-in-law (me) more decently on many occasions than I deserved. One source of friction between us is his profession-- Paul is a college professor (which, by itself, is not a problem) who teaches what might be termed "public administration and planning". It's the subject that he teaches that's the problem. It's a specialty that he's pursued for over 40 years now (Paul's 64, born in 1943), and he's become so wedded to it that he has trouble wrapping his mind around Hayek's ideas of spontaneous order. It seems to me that "planning" and "strong central government" are his primary tools of thought, and so to him many problems in society can only be solved by such methods. It's like the old saying: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then pretty soon all your problems start looking like nails."

(Please understand that for the sake of brevity I've painted Paul's ideas with a very broad brush-- there's a lot of subtleties that I'm leaving out!)

Paul was born amid the quasi-socialism of World War II, raised in the seeming endless prosperity that appeared to have been made possible by the planning and central direction emanating from Washington, and was no doubt aflame with a youthful idealism when he embarked on his career circa 1965, to do his part to perpetuate such a wonderful state of affairs. (What a come-down the '70s must have been for the poor guy.)

So what does all this blather about my brother-in-law have to with Pelosi, Reid, and Co.? They're his generational cohorts, working in the same vineyards, so to speak. Paul deals in the theoretical end of things, while the politicians deal in the practical end of the process, applying theories (and their corrected versions) when they're applicable. They're kinda two sides of the same coin.

And both camps-- the theoretical (Paul and his colleagues) and the practical (Pelosi and the rest)-- are entranced by the dream of the '40s and '50s: to produce through scientific planning and management a bright, shining world, free of the errors of the past, ready to march forward confidently into whatever the future holds.

What (I think) Paul is uncomfortable with, and what drives Pelosi, Reid, and Co. absolutely nuts, is that reality is a pretty messy affair, not amenable to plans and "scientific management" and all the rest of the political-Taylorist folderol.

And I suppose that the foregoing is an entirely-too-long preface to a pretty short observation:

The Democrats are acting crazy quite possibly because they are crazy. For them, the world's gone mad, and they are reacting in ways that seem insane to us, who are comfortable with the way the world is.

I suspect (I'm not sure) that younger people of the left-leaning sort are somewhat less crazy, because they grew up with a conservative opposition, so they at least anticipate that their ideas are going to be opposed.

The liberal consensus was so strong when I was young that I never encountered conservative intellectual thought until I was well out of college. I didn't even imagine there was such a thing until maybe 1975. (My instant reaction was, "Oh, how obvious. Why didn't I think of this stuff myself.")

But if you were liberal back then, you were totally cocooned during your formative years. You didn't even realize you had ideas, because everything looked so obvious. Opposition would have just seemed like lunacy. And now they are still stuck in that place. They can no more engage seriously with Reagan or Bush than they could with Goldwater.

"...to produce through scientific planning and management a bright, shining world, free of the errors of the past"

The question I always want to ask is: By what authority?" By what authority do you claim to know what a bright shining world would be or look like? By what authority do you decide what the errors of the past were? (And if I disagree, do I get a vote? Ha ha, we know the answer to that one.)

They can give no real answer, because the question exposes an abyss they stand over, and don't dare acknowledge. Without authority our houses are built upon sand...

Well, I don't think they can answer you, John, not because they're aware of any "abyss" so much as they simply cannot give you one-- their assumptions are so much a part of themselves that they can't even perceive them. I think it must be like trying to see the back of one's head.

The more thoughtful ones would probably answer your question of "By what authority?" with an appeal to conscience, however misguided. To be fair, our parents lived through some pretty bad times, and it seemed to them that government solved the problems of those times. It's only natural that some of us would pick up such beliefs from our parents, and not question them any more than we would question the Sun rising in the east.

And so their appeal to your conscience would be something on the order of, "How can you be against [government-run health-care, public schools, the United Nations, what-have-you]? Don't you know how much good such things have done or can do? Only a hateful person could oppose such things!"

Again, it boils down to an inability to perceive many things: their own prejudices, the flaws in human nature, the incompetence of government which is a direct consequence of those flaws, and much else besides.

*shrug*

Whatcha gonna do, John?