Camille Paglia writing at Salon.com (hat tip: Drudge) asks some critical questions about Democrats and liberalism that go right along with what we’ve been contending on these pages and with what David Horowitz told Glenn Beck here last Friday.

Ms. Paglia:

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

[….]

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?

I have lots of things I would like to say to Ms. Paglia in answer to this question, but most importantly the answer is that it was never true.  Liberals never wanted liberty (they just talked a good game) and Democrats were really never the best helpers of the poor and that is why many of us stopped being liberals!