Home Truth

Jonah Goldberg gets to the essence of it:

One thing that he [Breitbart] and Bill [Buckley] shared was this basic contempt for the premise that the mainstream liberal elite institutions in the United States are in a position to judge and adjudicate the worth of conservatives. That they are in a position to judge our souls. That if we disagree with liberals, that proves that we are somehow wanting or lacking in compassion; lacking in humanity. That is a fundamental thing that enraged Andrew, this idea that if you disagreed about public policy, if you disagreed about how to organize society, that proved you were a racist. That proved you were a fascist. That proved you were a homophobe. It was the fundamental bad faith of the leading liberal institutions that controlled the commanding heights of this culture that infuriated him. And he refused, at the most basic level, to give them that authority over him or his ideas, and that is was fueled his Righteous Indignation, as his book title called it.

This goes back to the topic I was stumbling around with the other day. There's a lot of certitude on the Left regarding these fundamental questions. If you are on the Right, you are essentially compelled to deal with the arguments the Left makes every day because we live in a society in which the Left's worldview is only rarely challenged. Breitbart, like Buckley before him, was fearless about challenging that worldview. And that is why he mattered.