On a more serious matter, some Democrats who are determined to oppose President Bush's proposal for reforming Social Security are going to make a politically dangerous, because condescending, argument. As part of his "ownership society" agenda, Bush wants to give individuals the choice of investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in retirement accounts they would own—personal stock portfolios. This is a complex proposal, with large transition costs—a matter about which people can intelligently disagree.

(Or unintelligently: The New York Times, continuing in campaign mode and accelerating its transformation from a newspaper into an advocacy institution, last Friday carried this headline: AARP OPPOSES BUSH PLAN TO REPLACE SOCIAL SECURITY WITH PRIVATE ACCOUNTS. But he has no plan to "replace" Social Security.)

However, some Democrats may oppose Bush's plan on the ground that it presupposes more intelligence than the average American possesses—that the average American cannot be trusted to invest competently. So part of the "pro choice" party believes that the average American should not be trusted to make choices about providing for his or her retirement.

Belief in the infantilism of the American public has been an expanding facet of some "progressive" thinking for 50 years—since the explosive growth of advertising, especially on television, in the 1950s. Then it began to be argued (see, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's 1958 book "The Affluent Society") that Americans are a bovine, manipulable herd—putty in the hands of advertisers who can manufacture demand for whatever products manufacturers want to produce.

I agree with Will, but think that something else is at work too. As I argued here, the deepest urge of many liberals is to prove their intellectual and moral superiority. One of the ways they accomplish this is by eschewing obvious explanations for misconduct -- greed, cruelty, or (in extreme cases) evil -- as too simplistic. Liberals would rather identify "root causes," as if the basic motivations just mentioned are insufficiently rooted. And the root causes that satisfy liberals generally turn out to be flaws in America and its policies. Such liberals thus are able to trash the American public coming and going, as too simple-minded to focus on root causes and, ultimately, as the root cause itself. President Bush can be viewed as the representative of this cartoon version of the public. No public figure seems less inclined to worry about the things liberals deem root causes, and few public figures have more vigorously pursued the kinds of polcies that constitute the alleged root causes of our woes. No wonder they hate him.