He provides only a very shorthand summary of the article. Arguably insufficient for those not familiar with the history of the rise of the US right. He then goes on and says that he interprets the evidence in fact (and indeed the whole sociological genesis of the article) as pointing to conservative failure, rather than the picture of success provided in the article.
He provides only a very shorthand summary of the article.
I believe I understand his criticism of the results of the conservative programs, and the "tongue in cheek" nature of some of his comments. But these are based on setting up a strawman description of an article that is patently false--and the article requires a subscription, I believe, to link to it, so a number of readers will, I think, accept the strawman. I can't understand your position on this one, Metatone. What is wrong with asking for accuracy on factual things? "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
You phrased things ambiguously:
article. Conservative failure???, it's just not what the article says. The closing paragraphs are
The issue there is that rdf never represented "conservative failure" as the view of the article. He says it is what he thinks. So that got me going.
rdf's summary of the article is clearly inadequate to discuss the article. The sadness for me is that I knew exactly what the article was going to claim before you quoted it. But then, maybe I've read too many histories of the US right so I know how people want to present it. You are entirely correct that whilst I might have interpreted the shorthand correctly, that's not what any sane individual was likely to do.
