ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
The L.A. Times Book Festival was fun and interesting--and sunny and full of people (70,000 on Saturday alone). But I sometimes felt like I was in an alternate universe, where Katrina vanden Heuvel represents the center of American politics. The quick and dirty way to characterize the makeup of the panels, including mine, would be to say they reflect liberal bias. But that would be wrong.
The problem isn't that conservatives or libertarians are missing (though they mostly are) but that liberals--the non-socialist, non-Marxist people who make up the mainstream of the Democratic Party and, for that matter, American journalism--are so dramatically underrepresented. While you can find exceptions, the LAT Book Festival, like the LAT Book Review, represents the world according to David Horowitz, in which there are no liberals, only the left and a few token anti-leftists for "balance."