[Note]: This started off as a simple diary, but like Topsy, it just growed: six parts, three today, three tomorrow. My only excuse is that I think the subject could become a very significant meme this election cycle, and that thought feed my obsession. Hope I'm wrong, tho.
Of course, it's true that liberals can be quite condescending. Just about everyone can. But some folks can do it upside-down and backwards in their sleep, secure in the knowledge that they're the moral majority, and you're just one of those traitorous fifth columnists who want the terrorists to win, and are going to spend eternity just wishing you could be waterboarded. And those folks ain't no liberals, honey chile.
It's been a weird couple of weeks. Last week, Markos released the results of a Research 2000 poll he had commissioned, replicating and expanding on earlier poll results that strongly indicate an irrationalist strain of paranoid fantasy has a deep foothold in the GOP party base. While long-time critics and political observers such as myself were hardly surprised with the results, it seemed a very good idea to get solid poll numbers to measure the extent to which qualitative impressions were born out in cold hard facts. Among other things, the poll showed that 79% of Republicans thought either President Obama was a socialist (63%), or they weren't sure (16%); 58% of Republicans thought that either President Obama was either foreign-born (36%), or they weren't sure (22%); 76% believed that either ACORN stole the 2008 election (21%), or they weren't sure (55%); 64% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people (31%), or they weren't sure (33%); 57% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win (24%) , or they weren't sure (33%); and 68% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama should be impeached (39%), or they weren't sure (29%).
Then, at the end of the week, the Washington Post ran an op-ed "Why are liberals so condescending" (which it later turned out the Post had commissioned). As the headline implied, it argued that liberals were distinctively much more condescending than conservatives, prone to dismissing conservatives out of hand, and concocting crazy narratives to support themselves in doing so. "[I]t feels like many liberals dismiss what conservatives have to offer, from the start." the author, Gerard Alexander, an Associate Professor of Politics, from the University of Virginia, wrote in the introduction of the followup online chat, adding:
My point is that many liberals have developed entire theories that question that validity of what conservatives have to say, and those theories are voiced by media personalities, magazines, serious book writers, academics, and not just one or two but many politicians, up to and including Barack Obama. I'm unaware of a full-scale parallel to that among conservatives. I don't think it's a helpful posture, and would love to see it changed. So I welcome your thoughts.
One might think, from reading this, that Alexander was somehow unaware of the Dkos/R2000 poll, showing just how many Republicans believe entire theories that question that legitimacy and validity of the entire Democratic Party and even the Presidential electoral process-unaware, even though the poll had kicked up a storm of controversy by way of conservative denunciations, most notably on Fox. But in fact, Alexander was aware of the poll and had actually pointed to it in his original op-ed, using it (or, more precisely, Kos's remarks about it) in support of his argument:
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Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs -- including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"
I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?
Ignoring the underlying evidence, while highlighting Kos's tone, devoid of context, is but one of many tired rightwing tricks up Alexander's sleeve in writing this piece. In fact, a careful reading reveals a welter of different forms of deceit woven together in his narrative. Before looking at them in detail, it's important to note six things: First, the many diverse forms of deceit are easily woven together by Alexander precisely because the narrative of "condescending liberals" is so deeply ingrained, not just in conservatives, but in mainstream elite narratives as well. Liberals are condescending elitists, so the narrative goes, and therefore all manner of other things follow. The narrative is so familiar that one can simply toss in anything to support it, including the kitchen sink, and it will be accepted as if self-evident-or very nearly so.
Second, Alexander builds his entire argument based on anecdotal examples that can be interpreted to support his arguments regarding certain individuals-that they exhibited an attitude of condescension--or can be interpreted differently. He first assumes his interpretation is correct, then assumes it is widely shared by liberals in general, and finally assumes the attributed attitude or belief is sweepingly applied by most liberals to all conservatives and everything they think. This applies both to his argument pushing the elite/conservative narrative of condescension, and to his supporting arguments described in the next point.
Third, Alexander links the elite/conservative narrative of condescension to four narratives on the left he wants to attack and discredit, if not demonize.
These four narrative are:
(1) The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her.
More generally, I would call this the narrative of rightwing hegemonic warfare. And it's both true, and widely derided by Versailles Democratic elites. The notion that it dominates liberal thinking about conservatives is, unfortunately absurd.
(2) But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?"
This is a deeply contested narrative among liberals and Democrats. It's the only one of the four that actually has a plausible relationship to the "liberals are condescending" narrative. However, Drew Westin and George Lakoff both vigorously reject this narrative. Interestingly, Alexander ignores this, but he does claim both of them as supporters of the fourth narrative below.
(3) The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others.
And we're supposed to believe this is false? Hitler mustaches, Kenyan birth certificates, anyone?
(4) Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.
But, of course, liberals did not invent this narrative just recently out of desperation, condescension, or any other attitude or feeling. Conservatism itself has long distrusted reason, and embraced not just emotion and resistance to change, but a postive valuation of prejudice:
"You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them."
In Alexander's op-ed, the claim that evidence for these four narratives supports narrative of condescension is barely asserted, without even an attempt at proof--point one above-which in turn distracts attention from four significant main problems with some or all of them, which I've partially hinted at (or more) above: (a) What if they're factually true? (b) What if they represent the views of some on the left, but are more generally ignored by the most powerful individuals and institutions on the left? (c) What if they are used differently by different factions on the left, including as a way for relative centrists to attack relative leftists? (d) What if they coincide somewhat with what conservatives themselves have claimed?
Fourth, amplifying the questions raised in (b) and (c) above, Alexander cites a wide range of evidence-almost all anecdotal-and then simply assumes that it reflects a universal liberal outlook that is deployed specifically and (presumably) exclusively against conservatives. It thus ignores the considerable extent to which the examples cited involve matters that are widely contested on the left. This is precisely the sort of sweeping, undifferentiated argument against liberalism as a whole that he accuses liberals of making against conservatives. As such it is a classic example of projection, based simply on direct examination of the argument presented.
Fifth, there is a deeper logic underlying this projection, since the common pre-ideological core of conservatism everywhere is a defense of hierarchy, an assertion that certain people-traditional conservative leaders-are naturally superior to all others, and ought to rule over the rest of us, no questions asked, if push comes to shove. Sixth, this projection is an example of conservative victomology, in which relatively minor-even imagined-slights suffered by conservatives are magnified to gigantic proportions, in total denial of the fact that others suffer on similar grounds to a much larger degree. Since conservatives believe they are (or are aligned with) the natural, unquestionable leaders of society, and are morally superior to others, the asymmetrical nature of their perceptions of injury directly follows from their presumptions of moral superiority.
With all that in mind, we now turn to a more detailed examination of Alexander's op-ed.
Alexander begins his op-ed by casting blame on Obama for the failure-and even the sincerity-of his efforts at bipartisanship. This is absolutely necessary if he's to pull of the rest of his deception, so it warrents particularly close attention. The first paragraph reads thus (emphasis added in bold is mine throughout):
Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.
With neither a definition of "condescension" nor an example of what he means, it's impossible to refute the absent denotation of what Alexander is saying in the first paragraph, but the connotations is both clear and false. Obama's "appeals to bipartisanship" have not been deceitful or dismissive of conservative ideas. To the contrary, he's been notably dismissive of ideas to his left-widely supported by those who elected him-while being repeatedly solicitous of ideas to his right-supported by those who voted against him-even ones that are demonstrable failures. This has been evident in the stimulus package, where he adopted a large component of under-productive tax cuts, while dismissing calls for a much larger program, including aid to cities and states to prevent them from counter-stimulative budget-cutting. It has also been evident in health care reform, where the package he has backed broadly resembles the Massachusetts model associated with GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, while he worked to completely exclude any consideration of single-payer health care, which would actually produce massive cost savings that no other system can deliver. Obama's bipartisan embrace of Republican ideas has not been reciprocated by Republican support, but that's hardly because he's condescendingly rejected conservative ideas. It's because-as the Dkos/R2000 poll indicates-Republicans do not see him as the legitimate leader of the country, whom they have any responsibility to work with, unless he adopts all their ideas in their entirety. (See the GOP response to his call for a health care summit.)
The second paragraph is noticeably worse, as Alexander begins to introduce "evidence" that is not only anecdotal, but irrelevant to his thesis:
It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug.
Given that Obama's troubles stem primarily from fruitlessly seeking Republican support while stifling his liberal base, one can only say, "not so much." See, for example, the reasons why Obama voters support Brown in MA.
But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives.
Alexander then goes on to cite two examples that are two-edged, at best. First:
Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot"
The Post inadvertantly subverted Alexander's argument, with the "Bolsevik plot" link taking you a story that begins:
President Obama offered a muscular defense of his first year in office Friday in the most hostile of territories -- a gathering of House Republicans, who engaged him in a pointed debate that had moments of both tense drama and bipartisan comity over the stark policy differences that separate the two sides.
In an unusual session, Obama repeatedly accused Republicans of seeking political gain at his expense by opposing fiscal policies they had previously supported. But he also reached out for their help as he recalibrates his 2010 agenda to focus intensely on the economy, and he provided House Republicans -- a group he basically ignored for the past year-- with a 90-minute, nationally televised platform to air their policy prescriptions for the nation.
Remember, Alexander's thesis is that liberals baselessly and sweepingly reject conservative ideas out of their own arrogance and condescension. But, typically, what Obama actually said was far more nuanced than Alexander's cherry-picking would lead you to believe, and it's virtually impossible to imagine what aspect of what he said could be successfully challenged on a factual basis. The full context for the "Bolsevik plot" remark-as noted by Media Matters--is as follows:
OBAMA: And so we were in the process of scrubbing this and making sure that it's tight. But at its core, if you look at the basic proposal that we've put forward: it has an exchange so that businesses and the self-employed can buy into a pool and can get bargaining power the same way big companies do; the insurance reforms that I've already discussed, making sure that there's choice and competition for those who don't have health insurance. The component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year.
Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and, certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. No, I mean, that's how you guys -- (applause) -- that's how you guys presented it.
And so I'm thinking to myself, well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist -- no, look, I mean, I'm just saying, I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans -- is similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.
So all I'm saying is, we've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America.
Media Matters then went on to provide two dozen links to examples of conservative media figures pushing this meme.
Note that Obama accurately stressed the centrist, bipartisan nature of his health care plan, did not accuse all Republicans, but only some of attacking the bill so that "you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot." He did not dwell on that point, however, but went to say, " we've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality," and then added-almost by way of excusing them from responsibility--"many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party." In short, the soundbite that Alexander pulled out to make his point was not at all the blanket dismissal of all things conservative that he implied it to be.
Next:
-- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).
Here we have Alexander quoting Obama citing his and his administration's own absorption in political details, and failure to communicate about core values. He was not blaming the American people for this, he said " I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are." But if Obama won't condescendingly blame the American people for his own shortcomings, Alexander will be happy to do it for him, and then blame him for it. And putting words in the mouth of the President isn't condescending?
One brief paragraph concludes the introductory section of the op-ed:
This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.
And who outside the delusional world of Versailles seriously thinks that Obama is responsible for the breakdown in dialogue? Or that progressives who meekly supported his doomed efforts at bipartisanship are to blame for not surrendering enough? The notion is both absurd on its face, and deeply necessary for Versailles to believe. The fact that the Washington Post commissioned this op-ed strongly suggests that it has been predetermined as the grand anti-Democratic narrative for the 2010 election season. It's the "Gore lies" meme for this go-round.
We then move on to a two-paragraph transition, leading into Alexander's introduction of the four evil liberal narratives. It's notable chiefly for the fact that it completely buries a complicated multi-decade history with a simplistic, Manich3 good-vs-evil cartoon, exactly the sort of sweeping over-generalization that he claims to be the exclusive property of liberals. In order to dissect the two paragraphs properly, we take them in smaller bits:
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
This certainly fits neatly into Alexander's thesis. But there's just one hitch: Conservative intellectuals at the time felt much the same way. They recognized the need to completely revamp the foundations, message and political strategy, if they were to have any hope of returning themselves to a role of relevancy on the national political stage. Don't take my word for it, read a sympathetic conservative historian's account in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.
Next:
During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."
(1) It's certainly true that liberals-and virtually everyone else-" trivialized the nascent conservative movement". The reasons were pretty obvious: first the civil rights movement (ending ~350 years of "legal" subjugation and subordination of African-Americans), then the anti-war movement (first democratically-ended imperialist war by dominant world power ever), then the women's movement (virtually ending "legal" subjugation and subordination of women for the first time in Western history) were making history on an epoch scale. Even though conservatives managed to get Goldwater nominated to run for president, his electoral thumping did not herald a resurgence of conservative ideas. While in retrospect, there was significant and important political organizing that was overshadowed by other more dramatic movements at the time, there was not a great deal of intellectual activity to overlook. It was not until the 1970s that conservatives began significant think-tank funding, for example. So while what Alexander says is true, it is not necessarily proof of condescension. If you want to know about condescension during this period, go look at how the women's movement was treated.
(2) Hofstadter was a Cold War consensus political scientist, who went out of his way to portray the economically leftwing Populists as just as much of an example of the "paranoid style" as the much more contemporaneous McCarthyites. Furthermore, no less a conservative icon than William F. Buckley shared Hofstadter's concerns about the irrational rightwing fringe, as he rallied conservative figures to temporarily isolate and contain the growing appeal of the John Birch Society.
Next:
This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.)
Carter, of course, was not a liberal, despite his liberal position on human rights. Those who doubted him-such as Teddy Kennedy, who ran an unprecedented primary campaign against a sitting president of his own party--were very often liberals. The "Reagan boom" was largely due to massive Keyensian deficits, and Reagan's personal popularity did not produce a shift in public values. What did happen is that conservatives started spending vast funds in building up rightwing think tanks and media organizations-such as Sun Yung Moon's Washington Times. This had a profound impact on DC-centric elite discourse that had little relationship with the causes Alexander cites.
And finally:
But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.
I will deal with the four major narratives in the next four diaries in this series, and deal with the remainder of the op-ed in the last installment. But I just have to add the one minor detail that Alexander leaves out of his account: From 2001 to 2006 (except for Jeffords' defection, which gave nominal control of the Senate to the Democrats), conservatives controlled the entire federal government for the first time since the beginning of the Great Depression. And they managed to remind a large number of people just why they'd been out of power for 70-odd years. Between 9/11, the misguided wars launched in its aftermath, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the shredding of the Constitution, Katrina, massive debts, and two recessions, conservatives earned the disdain, not just of liberals, but of a lot of Republicans-turned-independents as well.
In conclusion, the introduction and transition of Alexander's op-ed are typical willfully perverse conservative misreadings of history in comic-book (not Marvel) form. The fact that the Washington Post would publish-much less actively solicit such a sophomoric farrago speaks volumes about the actual as opposed to the imagined ideological bias of the American corporate media. |
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