Better Than You

Speaking of GE, Andrea Mitchell is awfully disappointed that you don’t know what’s good for you:

“You’ve got 47% of the people in our NBC/Wall Street Journal opinion poll who have health insurance who don’t like what the president is doing. The problem he’s got — 47% of the people who’ve got coverage don’t want change. They don’t like what they’re hearing. Now, they may not know what’s good for them, but the problem is that he always knew he was going to have to persuade people with insurance, that’s the largest number, not the people without insurance, for expanded coverage. So they’ve got a real problem.”

All, the old false consciousness trope. A vestiage of what Arnold Kling once dubbed “Folk Marxism”, it manifested itself at the start of the 1970s with Jane Fonda’s infamous quip that “If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that one day we would become Communist.” (Of course, the South Vietnamese would be on their knees soon enough.) And in a different form later that same decade, as Kate O’Beirne once described to Kathryn Jean Lopez:

In 1977, Jean Stapleton, hanging out with Bella Abzug announced that Edith Bunker would support the ERA “if she understood it.” Does that pretty much sum up what the feminist establishment thinks of many American women?

O’Beirne: The modern feminist movement has never enjoyed the allegiance of a majority of American women and that condescension represents feminists’ explanation when confronted with the evidence. The rest of us are too stupid to recognize our oppression. One of the most celebrated feminists you’ll meet in the book dismisses the surveys reporting that married women are happier than single women by attributing their contentment to being “slightly mentally ill.”

Of course, Mitchell herself has a long history of believing she’s infinitely more sophisticated than the booboosies who watch her. Recall her belief that the New Yorker’s botched cover last year, which infamously painted then-candidate Obama and his wife as Black Panthers armed with AK-47s was satire of the highest order, “too sophisticated to actually be perceived the way it is intended” by Middle America.

But coming from someone who’s a political reporter who pretends she doesn’t know the ideologies of her own co-workers, take Andrea’s medical advice with a grain or two of saline.