I have to say that I have a hard time ginning up any sympathy for a Clintonista like Ms, Stewart (or Bill Gates, for that matter). Nevertheless, I suspect a lot of the attacks are indeed envy-driven. A caller to Rush Limbaugh raised an interesting idea as to why the leftists have been so busily attacking one of their own: Stewart’s whole business was based on the concept of women staying at home and creating beautiful surroundings for their families, the perfect ideal of a bygone domesticity. This concept is a mortal sin according to the dogma of feminism, so Stewart is a heretic who is simply getting what she deserves. It’s an interesting idea if nothing else.

Bill Gates is also on the liberal side, yet the liberals were lusting to destroy his company. They actually wanted to split up Microsoft and have it run by government bureaucracy. I happen to dislike Gates myself for reasons that are of no importance. But there are people who wanted to destroy him with the same vengefulness with which, say, the Democrats were hoping to impeach President Reagan over Iran-Contra.

Being politically liberal doesn’t seem to be the decisive issue, but having a kind of power or success that makes people feel you’re larger than life.

I don’t see Stewart’s domesticity angle being the motive. It may have to do with her presentation of herself as “perfect,” as perfectly competent and in command and control of everything. That produces a fascination which may also hold resentment.

But the facts of the case are the most significant thing here. They are making a felony charge on things that add up to very very little. She’s not charged with insider trading—which was the initial charge against her. She’s charged with some kind of misstatement that is so obscure it’s hard to describe. So the significance of this is the power of prosecutors to target someone they want to target.

“But the facts of the case are the most significant thing here. They are making a felony charge on things that add up to very very little. … [T]he significance of this is the power of prosecutors to target someone they want to target.” — Lawrence Auster

Yes, but why do they want to target her when she cultivates a leftist public persona?  Why is the left-wing establishment targeting her when she’s gone out of her way to put on a show of being a left-wing Dem-Party and Hillary supporter and big contributor?  I mean, she’s certainly paid her fair share of protection money to that whole sickening crowd. 

This to me is completely fascinating — she must have done something behind the scenes which in their (dull, lustreless, vacant, permanently unhealthy) eyes has neutralized her entire pro-Dem act. 

I see her pro-Dem (and especially, her pro-Hillary) thing as purely an act, by the way — one-hundred percent put on, though she puts it on convincingly.  In my view she puts it on because she senses that, for two reasons, she MUST:  first, she knows full well that, in the ways outlined by Carl and Mr. Auster, her whole schtick fundamentally rubs liberals and leftists the wrong way in the extreme (recall Hillary’s “What should I have done — stayed home and baked cookies like Tammy Wynette standing by her man?”), and second, she must survive in the world of New York City book-and-magazine publishing, an aggressively intolerant, bigoted world where someone who is not a leftist is treated like that Jewish Republican man was in the recent blog entry of Mr. Kalb’s, whose blind date suddenly simply said, “I can’t deal with this,” got up, and left, because he mentioned he was a Republican. (See also Richard Poe’s recent column, “Can Liberals Publish Conservative Books?”  http://www.richardpoe.com/column.cgi?story=126 )

Maybe just as when a bug gains entry into an ants’ nest under false pretenses, then is found out, surrounded by swarms, and bitten and stung to death, the New York City leftist establishment has realized Mrs. Stewart’s (Stewart was her ex-husband’s name, which she kept — that qualifies as Mrs, or Miss?) pro-left act is just that — an act. Maybe behind the scenes she flubs some of the shibboleths — maybe she just can’t get all the code words right at dinner parties, or manage a sincere-enough-looking smile each time Hillary’s name is adoringly mentioned, or something.

If she survives this I’ll be very interested to see if she doesn’t change to Republican. I think she’ll be almost forced.

I don’t think that anything behind the scenes is necessary in order for liberals to turn on one of their own. To liberalism power and privilege represent inequality, and inequality is simply evil. This turning-on-itself happens with individual liberals like Gates and Stewart, it happens with large-scale multigenerational movements like Marxism and classical liberalism, and it happens everywhere in between. Every actual human being or group of human beings has to assert some authoritative inequality and some restrictions on freedom; therefore liberalism will always suffer, at all levels, from the symptoms of incoherent self-hatred.

Part of that liberal self-hatred, by the way, is the psychological defense of asserting that fellow liberals (who in the end differ very little from onesself) are the nefarious Other, the ubiquitous oppressor-untermensch that must be purged from the system in order to achieve the free and equal heaven on earth. There is a built-in tendency within liberalism to fragment into warring factions that differ from each other not on core values, but only on tactics, formal arrangements, or mechanistic expectations about the social machine (the classical liberal versus Marxist distinction is a great archetype here). World War II, for example, was in many ways a war between “go fast and be pure” liberals like Hitler versus “go slow and compromise” liberals like Stalin and Roosevelt. The distinction between neocons and modern liberals also comes to mind.

Envy is an evil everyone has been victimized by. So very many blue collar and liberal people enter into a visceral mob hatred of rich people based on envy. The French Revolution is an example. The usual suspects, blue-collars and liberals, have mentally convicted Dick Cheney of crimes at Enron and Martha Stewart of crimes in stock trading. Prejudgements are truly a necessary part of life. What is awful is persecution based on prejudgements.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Mr. Murgos, but it isn’t merely envy. It is a rational consequence of the belief that everyone ought to be politically equal. One of the most liberal people I have ever actually met in person is a billionaire and doesn’t have an ounce of envy in him. Ted Turner (not the person to whom I refer) and Jane Fonda are hardly envious of others materially. Indeed I know more wealthy people than the average and most of those I know are deeply committed liberals. Even those who would self-describe as conservative — a minority among the very rich — are really economic libertarians who do their best to avoid thinking about social issues beyond the notion that a democracy ought to be able to vote on them authoritatively. That is, the small minority that believes in a sort of social conservatism believe that morality should have a public authority only as a reflection of the exercise of the free and equal assertion of the will of the electorate. The actually-illiberal extremely wealthy person is a rare bird indeed.

Conservatives often say that envy drives liberalism’s tendency to war with itself. No doubt liberals do appeal to envy in massing popular support (although I think right-liberals make a similar appeal to disdain-for-envy). But the eternal war within liberalism itself — everything from the shunning of Martha Stewart to the war between capitalism and communism — is not primarily explained or driven by envy, it seems to me. It is driven by the strong moral conviction that politically (that is, in this-worldly power arrangements) all should be equally free.

Matt is correct that envy is not the sole cause of bad feelings about rich people. He is also correct in that another cause is a belief that rich people represent an injustice. Perhaps the injustice idea is the greatest cause. Everyone in America is rich today by early 20th Century standards, but there remains the idea that the rich represent an injustice.

Herewith (below) is Joe Guzzardi’s take: Mrs. Stewart’s prosecution is motivated partly by an obligation which prosecutors feel to send a message to potential transgressors, as well to punish actual ones. (He predicts she’ll do time.) For any who don’t of know him, Guzzardi is an excellent opinion-journalist writing partly for www.Vdare.com on immigration questions, who may be — I was never sure of this — a Democrat. (I happen to love his columns in Vdare.)

http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/masticating_martha.htm

Despite the facts of the case, personalities like
Martha and many others are able to hoodwink the people under the guise of a guiding home maker, in fact creating unwanted consumption to pollute
the simple people.
Please do not go after the image.

I believe Martha is innocent.Douglas Faneuil
is the person who committed the initial wrongby giving this forbidden information to Martha. If he had not done this the whole problem would not exist.Now he is trying to save his neck at the expense of Martha and the InJustice Dept. is helping him Who in the big league of business doesn’t operate on inside tips. This will put the iceing on Bush’s departure from the Whitehouse in November of o4 Hasten the date!