Profiles in Moonbattery: David Bentley Hart

Given their air of pompous superiority, aren’t liberal elitists of the type writing for the New York Times embarrassed to have their viewpoint personified by someone as conspicuously low-class and witless as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Let’s ask David Bentley Hart.

Bentley Hart bellyaches that he had to watch Fox News at an airport, “with the prime-time shows hosted by those two almost indistinguishable fellows with the suety faces, bouffant coiffures and nerve-racking mezzo-castrato voices.” This forced exposure to an opposing point of view inspired him to respond gallantly to an observation by Ben Stein that AOC’s ideology could take us down the Stalin/Hitler road:

I am painfully aware that the male Fox commentariat nurtures its sickly obsession with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez partly because they resent her cleverness, charisma and moral vitality, but mostly because they suspect that in high school she was one of those girls they had no hope of getting a date with (though, really, she comes across as someone who could look past a face of even the purest suet if she thought she glimpsed a healthy soul behind it).

Talk about embarrassing; we just stumbled onto a love letter. That’s right Bentley Hart, you heart throb might return your affections despite your suety face. Don’t lose hope!

While we are here, let’s see how an elitist progressive justifies wanting to destroy the most successful nation in human history and replace it with a dysfunctional hellhole via socialism:

It may be amusing to hear Republicans assert that a military kleptocracy like Venezuela is a socialist country because its government uses that word when lying about itself (rather in the way that North Korea claims to be a people’s democratic republic). It may make one wince to see Senator Bernie Sanders obliged (as he was on Monday at a town hall hosted by CNN) to explain once more that the totalitarian statism of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the (far older) tradition of democratic socialist thought. But fair’s fair, it’s not much less bizarre to hear a “progressive” like Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, assert that “socialism” simply means state seizure of all the means of production. (Had Marx and Engels only known this, they might have spared themselves the effort of denouncing the socialists of their time for failing to call for a completely centralized economy.)

Surprise! Venezuela, North Korea, the Soviet Union, et cetera do not represent “real” socialism. Never saw that one coming.

What does represent it? Every successful Western country except America, which isn’t socialist because it is full of dummies:

Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. In every other free society with a functioning market economy, socialism is an ordinary, rather general term for sane and compassionate governance of the public purse for the purpose of promoting general welfare and a more widespread share in national prosperity.

If I understand his editorial correctly, a capitalist economy is socialist so long as it carries on its back a big welfare state and the government controls healthcare. America has a huge welfare state, but the government does not yet completely control the healthcare sector, so we are dumb, not socialist.

A country that really is socialist — like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the USA under AOC’s Green New Deal — is not socialist, because its inevitable collapse into a retched slave state would make David Bentley Hart look like a fool.

On a tip from Lyle.

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