Klavan, perceived virtue, assumption, and manners

So NHFalcon is largely responsible for turning me on to Andrew Klavan.  Thanks, man.

Klavan has a number of traits that appeal to me, but I think my favorite is that his delivery is so placid—almost tranquil, really.  Yet rhetorically, he pulls no punches.  Loved this:

We know that leftists mistake their politics for virtue.  They think that voting for Democrats somehow makes them good people, and that they are therefore justified in treating anyone who disagrees with them like trash.

That’s from a blog post describing the treatment a young conservative comic got from an overheated representative of The Jon Stewart Show, when his agent dared to share with him the correspondence he had received explaining that “we never book conservative pundits.”

I think it speaks to something I touched on not long ago.  It could be that this false sense of virtue is part of what feeds the assumptive attitude.  (You know, “we all know this is the correct thing to do,” where “this” is some liberal fairy tale including only tenuous, if any, connections to the real world.)

I don’t think I’m going to go quite as far as I’m tempted to sometimes.  Superficially, it pisses me off, and part of me wants to say “that’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.  You’re joking, right?”  However, I do think I might rehearse and eventually deploy something like “actually, I don’t think that way at all.  I have arrived at radically different conclusions.  Do you agree that a thinking, reasonable person might differ with what you’ve said there?”

If anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

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