The more insistent the voice of rights claimants, the more legitimate their claims -- what a doomed anti-principle of good government! But then we have learned on the right and the left alike how expertly our establishment politicians have learned to pay ear service to the strident and marginalized. Yet only on the left does this therapeutic act rise to the level of a public cult in which ritual acts of hearing and respecting obliterate any means by which a person might learn the fine art of privileging claims according to whose interests merit the attention of government and whose do not: a recipe both for the endless expansion of government and the endless infantilization of its people.

You know what he's writing about here? The title bar on Atlantic.com. I am not kidding at all.

I have always found Poulous to be an infuriatingly pompous and painfully hyperbolic right-wing pseudointellectual, one of the few dim bulbs at the otherwise worthwhile American Scene; but at this point I feel like he's crossed into self-parody.

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