I hear a piece of conventional wisdom that the Republicans are the party of the Heart, and the Democrats are the party of the Head.
Oddly, because days gone by, the smear was “bleeding heart liberal.”
In the glory days of liberalism, heart and head went together. Rivers were burning, and enviromentalists wanted to clean things up. Black kids weren’t allowed to go to school with white kids, neighborhoods were zoned “whites only.” Tensions were very high at the time, but the liberal position had the emotional and intellectual advantage.
The conservative critique attacked excesses of liberalism – identity politics that read small insensitivities as major discrimination, civic spending that exceeded ability to pay, belief in hedonism as self-fulfillment, leading to drug abuse and endemic divorce.
There’s a good letter to Andrew Sullivan’s blog saying that so-called conservatives aren’t making sense anymore. Big deficits instead of fiscal reason, imperial adventurism instead of strong defense, big-government in our bedrooms and snooping on our library checkouts and credit cards, crony capitalist corruption.
So, maybe its true that Republicans are the party of the heart, but if so, it means what “bleeding heart liberal” used to mean — that an ideology that once had head and heart together has gone over the edge — they’re not making sense anymore.