NONE LEFT

Today's YDN prints my final "What's Left" column:

It's funny that in all the media postmortems about how liberals lost touch with red state values, few asked whether conservatives have fallen out of touch with blue state values. It's sad that the person you're most likely to hear use an expression like "urban values" is Charles Murray, or perhaps some other think tank character better able to hide his racial contempt while warning that "urban values" are spreading virus-like into the bloodstream of mainstream America. Something in the American popular consciousness, and particularly in the mindset of our supposedly liberal media -- maybe racial demons, maybe suspicion of crowds, maybe those much-touted "millennial anxieties" over technological and social upheaval -- still holds forth America's rural parts as more authentically American than its cities. Otherwise, someone might have criticized the itinerary of Bush's "Heart and Soul of America" tour. And the county-by-county map might not raise its ugly head.

You can see all four years of me ranting on the YDN op-ed page here. From the LWB Archives: don't run from wedge issues; pundits are problematic; let's expand the meaning of moral issues and also win on the ones out there.