A note on a note: the previous post.
Dowd is lectured on moral responsibility by those who claim to represent it, but don't. "Enlightenment" is an ongoing process, and we all live in glass houses and always will. That's why the opinions of outsiders will always be important.
Dowd is a tabloid writer, exhibiting the ticks and tropes of the Catholic lower middle class. And as a voting democrat you'd think perhaps the intellectual elite of her party would want to consult her on how to approach a segment of the voting population. But instead they waste their time accusing her of misrepresenting herself as one of them. But she's never referred to herself as an intellectual.
The attacks on Dowd are launched from positions of an assumed, but specious, moral superiority. Her sort of pop psychology has it's limitations, but the refusal to engage it and her is akin to the refusal of the American intellectual elite as a whole to engage with anyone, inside or outside this country, who does not see the world through the lens of a dry academicism, an academicism that masks an equally dry and self-serving provincial nationalism. Where is this enlightenment in discussions of Palestine and Gaza? Where is it in discussions of the US and Iraq, when it's the elite, and the elite only, who fidgets about when to leave; as if the continuing growth of facts on the ground, of the construction of new and larger bases and the gargantuan embassy complex didn't imply that leaving is out of the question?
The list goes on. Neoliberalism sees and recognizes only itself, it's own rules and values. Everything else is illogic and irrationalism.