Reification and Reactionaries

Now that left institutions are ascendant, they are the reactionaries.  Mickey Kaus explains reification and the intellectual incoherence of the imitable E.J. Dionne.  It's the Brezhnev doctrine in birkenstocks.

MICKEY KAUS: Shorter E.J. Dionne: The Wagner Act exists. Therefore it must always exist. “Marxists would call this ‘reification’-–the attribution of a false permanency to what are in fact only transient, man-made institutions (like the organizations created by the Wagner Act). Back in the ’60s, when Dionne went to college, leftish types fought reification. The point was to change the system, after all, not to play games within it–-by The Man’s rules! But reification has now become the routine basis for Democratic arguments against Republican reform. . . . Dionne says Walker insidiously used ‘incumbency’ to produce these changes. ‘Incumbency’ in this case means a law was passed by a democratically elected legislature (incumbents all) and signed by a democratically elected incumbent governor.”