'With mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments'
Most of you have probably seen this David Brooks column. But what caught my attention was his use of the 'mirror-image' metaphor to describe the interaction between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, etc. I've harped on the mirror-image phenomenon here, here, here, here etc. etc. It's sort of like Wellington's famous quote that if Napoleon does A.) Wellington would would respond with Z.) just to spite him. It's what happens when one or both sides in a contest (such as politics) so despise each other that they feel compelled to counter everything an opponent says or does. ... Not to belabor the point (I have a bad habit of doing that -- though at least I'm not as a bad as Andrew Sullivan), Chambers notes this mirror-image phenomenon in terms of Randian economics:

Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. …

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. … the author (hasn’t), apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing.

I'm still in a sort of state of disbelief that Alan Greenspan, Christopher Cox etc. actually bought into and tried to implement a variation of Randian laissez-faire economic policies. Greenspan is now left muttering something about how it was the humans, not the theory, that were flawed. Thank goodness he wasn't one of the Founding Fathers, who knew enough about human nature to include common-sense checks and balances in the constitution. ...  ¶ 6:41 AM