On most of these issues, from illegal immigration to the Ground Zero mosque, the Conformicrats are losing the battle for public opinion by as much as 70/30. Yet even that isn’t enough to persuade them to mount an argument. So much liberal debate boils down to Ring Lardner’s great line:

Fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner’s story, The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, “Are you lost, daddy?” The rulers think we’re kids, they’re the daddy, and it takes a village to raise a fuckin’ Nascar retard child. The ruled think we’re lost, and being driven farther and farther off the map.

But the disparagement of dissenters as racists, sexists, homophobes, and retards is not entirely an act of misdirection. It reflects the so-called technocracy’s priorities: for Big Government bent on social micro-management, ideological enforcement takes priority over any other activity. When Hurricane Katrina swept in and devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, volunteer firemen—whoops, “firefighters”—from across the map headed south to help with disaster relief. FEMA dispatched them to… New Orleans? Gulfport?

No, to Atlanta—for diversity and sexual-harassment training.⁵¹

Which most of them had already undergone back home. But you can’t be too careful: Heaven forbid that a waterlogged granny should be rescued by an insufficiently non-homophobic fireman.

FEMA is supposed to be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Fairyland Equality Makework Agency. But so it goes. Government agencies created to demonstrate the laser-sharp problem-solving skills of the elite technocracy in the end mostly just enforce conformity with the state ideology. Thus, the “enhanced patdowns” of U.S. airport security are less about preventing terrorism than about preventing the acknowledgment of inconvenient truths at odds with the diversity cult. Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long. And, if you’re a nonagenarian spinster at LaGuardia with a TSA agent’s paws roaming ’round your bloomers while the Yemeni madrassah alumnus sails through the express check-in, the involuntary sensitivity training isn’t all that sensitive.

TWO SOLITUDES

If it were just Good King Barack and Henrietta Hughes, rulers and subjects, all would be well. But America still has a citizenry: the productive class—the ones whose labors have to fund both the swollen state bureaucracy and its dependents. It’s tough if you happen to fall into this third category. Most of the time, such as at that town hall meeting in Fort Myers, you’re not even part of the national conversation: you live in the Flownover Country. In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose title came to sum up the relationship between the English and the French in Canada: Two Solitudes. They live in the same nation, sometimes in the same town, sometimes share the same workspace. But they inhabit different psychologies. In 2008, David Warren, a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen, argued that the concept has headed south: