Last week, I put up a diary, "Conservative condescension comback contest!", soliciting suggestions for how to respond to the myth of liberal condescension that I had spent 6 diaries deconstructing the previous weekend. It was suggestion made by Oaktown Girl, and a very suggestion it was. The diary was great fun, it got over 80 comments, and I really appreciated the energy, excitement and thoughtfulness it generated. Here are a few of the more popular responses:
"It isn't elitist to tell the truth."
-- RandomNonviolence
"People who think giving your money to millionaires is good for you know a lot more about condescension than I do. I'm not sure I could spell condescension."
--T. Jacobsen
"Response: Yes, it's true. When you keep taking the low road, down is the only way anyone can look to find you."
--Daniel De Groot
"When liberals criticize conservatives, conservatives act as though we are criticizing someone else - voters, the troops, America. We're not - we're criticizing you. Stop hiding behind other people, tough guy. We gave you the truth and you called it condescending!"
--David Kaib
"Because 300 years of fighting for liberty and justice is enough to make anyone cranky."
--Sadie Baker
The only problem was this: I had no idea what to do next. Or at least no good idea. It was a real quandary, because on one hand, I thought it had been such a good idea that I wanted to do it again. But on the other hand, if I didn't have a good plan about what use to make of all the ideas we came up with, it seemed like it would be a waste of people's efforts that would soon grow stale.
So I'm back again, soliciting your ideas. I would like to ask for them on the following specific questions, but of course you can address anything you want in comments (as if I could stop you!) Here goes:
(1) What suggestions do you have for what we can do with the ideas we generated last week? How can we get them into wider circulation?
(2) Would you be willing to do something to help get them into wider circulation? If so, what?
(3) Do you think it would be worthwhile to do this again?
(a) Once or twice, just to see how it goes?
(b) Or with the intention to do it regularly, working on making it better as we go along?
(4) Would you be willing to help with the internal process? [What I have in mind here is help doing some sort of winnowing & combining process, to take initial suggestions and consolidate them into a more compact form--possibly with poll to select the most popular response(s).]
I'm really willing to move forward with this, but it won't work as a one-man show. So let me know in comments if you think it's worth pursuing.
Last week, I wrote a diary series deconstructing Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". I called it "Conservative condescension: Projection and conservative victomology on parade". In a comment, Oaktown Girl wrote:
I have every reason to believe
you are quite correct in that the next Big Lie that conservative will turn into conventional wisdom "truth" is the "Liberals are condescending" meme. Here's my question: what's our one-liner counter to that?
A detailed, well researched series like you have presented here is fantastic and much needed for the historical record. But in addition to that, to really counter these assholes we need to come up with something quick, sharp, snappy, and hard to counter with mere vacuous jargon. So we turn on the TV and the the talking heads toss out the "Liberals are condescending" line as if it's God's own Truth. The token liberal guest counters with...?
Well, she's absolutely right, of course. And what better to answer than to throw it open to the whole Open Left community. You don't have to have read my whole series--or even a single installment. We've all heard similar sorts of narratives for decdes now--about how snooty old liberals just can't understand common folks like Timothy McVeigh, or whatever. My diary series is considerably more specific than that, and if you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so (a bit more about it on the flip). But this is all about kicking the doors wide open and asking your advice. I would suggest that there are three types of suggestions that would be particularly useful:
(1) One-liners. Things that Oaktown Girl's hypothetical liberal guest can quickly interject to cause maximum consternation and disruption of the ongoing "liberal condescension" narrative.
(2) Elevator speeches. The 30-second rap that puts the liberal counter-argument in a nutshell.
(3) Memes. Think of them as seed thoughts. They don't have to be cleverly expressed. Get the meme right, and others can riff off them.
Of course, those are only suggestions. Write anything you want, really. But help us come up with useful, pithy, devastating responses to the "liberal condescension" narrative that we can help spread far and wide in the weeks and months to come.
Last weekend, I wrote a 6-part series exhaustively going through Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". I called it "Conservative condescension: Projection and conservative victomology on parade". There's a brief reminder of what was in each part on the flip. You'd think I had enough already. But there's some very good reasons why this is not the case.
First of all, a very good point was raised by Oaktown Girl last weekend about the need to come up with the exact opposite of what I had provided--a short--very short--response to Alexander that could be widely disseminated to counter the potential power of his narrative. We're talking one-liners here, folks--elevator speeches at most.
I'll be running a diary on that--soliciting your suggestions--later today, currently scheduled for 3:30 PM EST.
Second, I wanted to do up a systematic shredding of his touting of "welfare reform" as an example of something that conservatives got right and liberals got wrong because of their "condescension." I'll be doing a diary on that sometime tomorrow.
Third there were a couple of stunning rebukes of Alexander in the news this week. The first is relative simple to deal with--turns out that 80% of Americans are condescending liberals!Yikes! But the second takes up the vast bulk of this diary: a delving into the weirdness of CPAC. I'll just say this flat-out, you don't get much more condescending than the way conservatives talk about President Obama. But there's something much uglier and more primitive going on here, and I'm not talking racism, though that's certainly part of the mix. I'm talking primitive psychological processes that I've written about before that need to be looked at again.
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 I dealt with the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This final diary deals with the underwhelming conlusion of Alexander's column.
First, Alexander insists:
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it.
But, since I've demolished his arguments about each of the four narratives, not so much. Remember, he's never even tried to produce any evidence that any of the narratives he's gone on about are held as widely or inflexibly as he argues--or more importantly that liberals claim they apply to all conservatives.
Next, he tries to have it both ways, pretending to back off a bit just before jumping in for the kill, and accusing President Obama himself of being an avid purveyor of the four pernicious narratives. Remember, one of those four narratives was characterizing conservatives as using racist appeals--and the example Alexander used to prove this hadn't changed a bit in decades was Jimmy Carter calling out the hysterical attacks on Obama, after which Obama himself rejected Carter. Needless to say, logical consistency is not one of Alexander's strong points. But it's about to get even worse:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, I dealt with the first three of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the fourth and last such narrative. A final diary will deal with the conlusion of Alexander's column.
Alexander's fourth narrative is perhaps his most baffling:
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.
What's baffling about it is that conservatives themselves have spent centuries now attacking liberals precisely for their reliance on reason, which conservatives have argued is far too frail an instrument to deal with the complexities of human affairs. In Part 1, I quoted from Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism:
"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."
More recently, Burke's importance was reaffirmed and amplified by Richard Kirk--less known to non-conservative than William F. Buckley, but a contemporary of Buckley's whose intellectual influence was almost as great--about whom Wikipedia says:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2 and Part 3 I dealt with the first two of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the third such narrative.
If Alexander's second narrative has a germ of truth to it, he more than makes up for that with his third purported liberal narrative of condescension: conservative exploitation of racial prejudice. It should be obvious that overt racism of the kind that was commonplace until the 60s and 70s is no longer socially acceptable in most places, and plays a relatively insignificant role in mainstream politics. But that hardly means that race no longer matters, or that more subtle forms of racial politics are not powerfully at work. One can see this quite clearly in the composition of the two parties, as measured by Gallup in June of last year ("Republican Base Heavily White, Conservative, Religious"):
With figure like these--a Republican base that's 89% white--it boggles the mind to hear anyone pretend that race has no impact on politics. Examples of racial messages in political campaigns are both abundant and notorious, as well. But above all, for the purpose of refuting contrary claims by conservatives such as Alexander, we have the testimony of one of the GOP's most influential party operatives, Lee Atwater. From Wikipedia:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, I dealt with the the first of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the second such narrative.
If Alexander's first narrative is a transparent bunch of hooey, the same cannot be said about his second one. There is some truth in claim that liberals look down at people repeatedly voting against their economic interests, for cultural causes that are repeatedly ignored or outright betrayed between elections. But this is an isolated observation, and the question is one of context, which raises a host of subsidiary questions: Are liberals who do this more or less condescending than the cynical conservative manipulators who run these games? Is there anything particularly liberal about this? Or is it simply a matter of elite attitudes towards the masses? Or--as Jack Balkin's analysis "Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories" suggests, of people who identify with progressivism towards those who identify with populism? And what about those on the left who reject the 'stupid voter' narrative one way or another? Such as George Lakoff, Drew Wesson, Larry Bartells ("What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?"), or me, for that matter? And, finally, what about all those liberals who are themselves members of the working class who haven't been fooled at all, but sure are pissed at Democratic elites for doing such a lousy job on their behalf the last three decades or so? The welter of questions like these points to where a genuinely honest debate about elitism and condescension, left and right, might take us. But it's not at all a direction in which Alexander has any interest.
Indeed, Alexander regards his interpretation of this narrative as so self-evidently true, without any possible alternatives, that he lays it out in a single sentence, then points quickly to three examples in support, before (condescendingly, one might think) telling us what it all means. First:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending" This is the first of four installments dealing with each of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension."
The first purported liberal narrative indicative of an attitude of condescension is a vaguely articulated awareness that conservatives engage in hegemonic warfare in a way that liberals do not. Neither Alexander, nor most liberals--even the examples he cites--actually sees things so clearly and sweepingly. Thus, the examples he points to generally point to, but understate an ongoing reality that liberals have long sensed, but never really come to grips with.
The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.
Alexander introduces and identifies this narrative with Hillary Clinton's statement about a "vast right-wing conspiracy"--that was actually documented as an organized effort to sustain scurrilous attacks on her husband, then the President of the United States. Clinton's claims were later confirmed by David Brock--one of the central actors involved--though he argued that it wasn't all that vast, but Brock was limiting the meaning to those directly involved in trying to dig up dirt to bring the President down, and not all those involved in spreading the propaganda, which clearly was more in line with Clinton's meaning. The fact that such a concerted effort was real, and that Clinton was referring to it after the documentation about it had already been assembled, simply does not matter for Alexander.
But surely, simply telling the truth cannot by itself be proof of condescension, or any other attitude. Something more is needed, and this would be obvious to anyone who hasn't already assumed what they set out to prove.
[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:
