Is Liberal, Intellectual Condescension Really the Problem?
February 7th, 2010
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
A conservative professor of politics at the University of Virginia has written a column in Sunday’s Washington Post asking the question: Why are liberals so condescending?
In the setup, he writes, “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.”
Later on, he adds, “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.”
Rather than posting a comment on the Post‘s Website to point out how the professor has it so wrong, let’s take his argument apart here.
First of all, he starts out with an obvious bit of false spin, just like the conservative commentators on TV he seems to try to defend.
“…even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives.”
On the wane? President Barack Obama’s personal popularity is the same as Ronald Reagan’s after one year in office, and the Democrats still have a majority in both houses of Congress. Just because TV pundits are saying the Democrats may lose a few seats in the mid-term election in 2010 doesn’t mean their fortunes are totally “on the wane.”
In fact, it has been pointed out over and over again that the Republican Party is all but dead, except among white males mostly in the South. Just because one Republican won a Congressional race in Massachusetts doesn’t mean the Republicans are about to take back the country tomorrow. The election is still 10 months away. Anything can happen and probably will.
“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,’” according to the professor.
Well, isn’t that true? Conservatives are good at oversimplifying things into wedge issue sound bites. The administration of George W. Bush proved the anti-government party couldn’t govern.
Bashing government is a campaign ploy, not an alternative plan to get rid of the deficit.
While seeming to dismantle liberal thinking, the professor simply bolsters it.
He writes, “Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics … stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival…. 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.’”
This appears to be way more true today than it was in the 1950s and ’60s. I wonder if the professor bothered to catch any of the coverage of the Tea Party convention in Nashville?
The professor talks of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function, and rather than offering a real counter to that, the professor proves the case.
The first narrative is the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a vision that “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.”
All true. Where’s the evidence it’s not true? The professor doesn’t offer any. He just calls liberals “condescending.” For what? Being right?
He goes on to prove the case.
“This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically.”
Yes, and your point? We know that the Bush administration spent eight excruciating years using industry lobbyists to run just about every government agency. That is an indisputable fact. Every news organization in the country, including the conservative Wall Street Journal, documented the war on science at the EPA, the Interior Department, and on and on.
Is it an equal political argument to say it is a “liberal conspiracy of condescension” and use innuendo to imply that there was no war on science?
Perhaps the professor should visit one of the hard science departments at the University of Virginia and ask some of them what they think. Or are all scientists just liberals who scapegoat Christian conservatives for standing in the way of progress on solving real problems, like the energy crisis and climate change due to human induced global warming?
The professor says, “Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals.”
Duh. What is untrue about that? They all learned it from George Wallace in Alabama in the late 1960s and ’70s, which is what allowed Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to be elected president in the first place. There is a host of scholarship on the “Dixie Strategy.” I mean, just Google it.
There is not a serious political scholar anywhere who would really deny this at the end of the day. Politics is a game of words. Half the population has no clue about the facts. Whoever wins the spin war wins the election. That is politics American-style.
Obama has it right. The Democrats should keep hitting the Republicans where they live, in the land of Oz, and they will stay on top.
What the professor could have said, if he wanted us to take his case seriously, is that the Democrats have to prove they can govern by getting some concrete things done. Otherwise, they will lose enough of the independent vote to cost them elections.
Of course it is hard to get things done when “the party of no” filibusters every good idea just to stop progress so they can maybe win an election.
Obama has already said he will listen to their ideas. He has bent over backwards to try to work with the GOP, even to the consternation of many liberal Democrats who have tried to tell the president they won’t listen, they have no ideas, and they won’t help govern because it is not in their political interest to solve problems.
It is in their interest to flash Tina Fey glasses and ignorant, extremist, sound bites at the masses, hoping to fool enough of the people some of the time. That’s Sarah Palin’s job in Nashville. She has no chance of getting elected to anything. She is a spoiler that keeps the anti-Democrat crusade going another day on TV.
Alabama’s very own Ten Commandments Judge called Obama immoral. Does the professor really think that is true and that it will win elections? Where is the alternative governing strategy in that?
Answer: There’s not one. It is nothing but spin. Is it condescension to point that out? I think not…
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Tags: Conservative Paranoia, Intellectual Condescension, Liberal, Sarah Palin
February 7th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Obama believes, as do most Liberals, that he is dealing with gentlemen when he courts those on the right. He is not. He is dealing with men who have enemies lists, and long memories and an abiding fear that anything that left does to make the lives of people better is a hatchet blow to their core beliefs. Lying in order to “win” come naturally to them.
The GOP is unable and unwilling to have a serious conversation with Americans about the fix we are in. Republicans don’t have a plan for deficit reduction — they just have different priorities. They want tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that they would pay for with deep cuts for working and poor families and the elderly in Medicare and Medicaid. They’d spend more on the military and even less on domestic investments. Republicans don’t have a policy, they have a posture.
Obama cannot please everybody; and he wastes a lot of energy when he tries. If Obama’s fellow democrats had a shred of spunk left they would do what they think is right and not worry about (and cave in again to) the the threats of filibuster. I would love to see the likes of McCain, Bohner, et al try to explain their “plans” for America on national television.
February 7th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
You got it right. A posture, not a policy. That is the difference between liberals and conservatives.
Is it condescending to point that out? Is it a “patronizingly superior behavior or attitude?” There is nothing patronizing about it.
It really is pretty simple. You are either for government solutions to problems, or you are against them.
Our recent experience dictates that the unfettered free markets and deregulation nearly collapsed the world economy. It took government spending to prevent that from happening. Even George Bush admitted it, then a few months later apologized for it. Which was a true fact, and which was a partisan political statement?
It is obvious. Nothing patronizing or condescending about that. Just the facts, mam…
February 7th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
In fact, the professor’s entire strategy is to castigate liberals as “condescending,” which is just another word for educated egghead elitist liberal. As if education mattered for nothing.
That seems to be the appeal of Republicans to the uneducated rednecks in the South. They resent being told something by anybody with an education. Somehow they know what’s right — because Rush Limbaugh said so. They get their information from the radio. Anybody who disagrees is just a “liberal,” as in pinko, commy fag. No reason to debate at all.
Good thing their sperm count is going down thanks to all those toxic chemicals in the environment. They are now in the minority and will remain there for the rest of their lives — unless the Democrats screw it up.
February 7th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Actually, there are people across the spectrum who can be fairly nailed for being condescending. Bill Kristol comes to mind immediately in that regard, as do several of his neocon cohorts.
Several leading (and rational) liberals and conservatives have called on Congress and the President to make “President’s Question Time” (a la the British “Prime Minister’s Question Time”) a regular event, because, like the time-honored sessions in Commons in the UK, it strips away all the spin and features the main players actually debating each other, unfiltered by anyone.
Meantime, we have people dropping propaganda bombs on the policy process, such as this professor, which adds nothing of value to the process and actually undermines it.
For contrast to today’s mess, remember the days when Barry Goldwater and Ted Kennedy were the most prominent US Senators? They were opposed to each other on many issues, but never stooped to the level of today’s politics. They also managed to develop a personal friendship that survived all the policy disagreements.
The professor is not part of the solution here, but just another part of the problem.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
He calls himself an assistant professor of “politics,” not political science. I suspect a close look at his program would discover propaganda at the heart of the research process, not research of the objective kind…
But, it’s provocative, so the Washington Post will run it…
February 13th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
This column was picked up by Truthout.org today. You can help get this info to more people by giving it a Digg from here:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/upcoming
Or here:
http://digg.com/d31Ii8Y
February 13th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I knew it before I looked it up. Gerard Alexander is not only a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, but according to his bio at the conservative National Review, he’s a right-wing think tank scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
His so-called academic research is complete BS. Look at this:
My research began with a focus on the conditions of democratic consolidation in advanced industrial countries, especially in Western Europe. My first book — The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell University Press, 2002) — argued that the key right-of-center political movements formed long-term commitments to democracy only when their political risks in democracy became relatively low as left agendas moderated across time.
Huh?
It continues…
Variation in these risks was used to explain variation in conservative regime preferences and in regime outcomes in Europe’s five largest countries from the 1870′s France to 1980′s Spain. This first research project also included two articles with related but distinct arguments. In the Journal of Theoretical Politics (2001), I argued that formal political institutions in democracy cannot create the degree of predictability needed for consoldiation. In Comparative Political Studies (2002), I argue that non-formal social-structural characteristic of countries are more important causes of regime outcomes than the formal regime characteristics emphasized in prominent claims concerning the rule of law and “institutionalized uncertainty.”
Related reasoning is the basis of an article in The National Interest, “The Authoritarian Illusion” (2004). My current research concerns factors affecting the size and role of government in selected cases in Western Europe and also the United States, and how they influence conservative attempts at reform of welfare states.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ga8h/
Right, professor. You might pass that off with some moron of a dean, but you are a right-wing nut in a tie, man. Get a job…
February 16th, 2010 at 2:05 am
With approximately 19% of the U.S. public currently belonging to the Republican party, and approximately 37% of the U.S. public currently belonging to the Democratic party, are not a large part of the real issues a result of the Obama administration, and Congress (both parties) continuing 85% + of what the George W. Bush administration was doing at home and abroad?
February 16th, 2010 at 9:17 am
You got it. Until this administration moves aggressively to replace all of Bush’s policies and personnel, we will trudge along.
The problem is, as we have reported with link after link on the news front page, the Republicans in the Senate are blocking everything. Their goal is to prove government doesn’t work. Until “the people” demand action from them, progress will be slow.
Too bad the Tea Party gang doesn’t get this. At least they show up to protest, if their ire is directed at all the wrong things. Where are the activists on the left?
February 20th, 2010 at 3:37 am
While the Republicans in the Senate are a part of the problem, it’s not as simple as the two-dimensional “either-or” mentality that those of both major parties in office like to so often claim is reality (i.e. this phony pretending it’s only “left” or “right” – as though there were only two viewpoints to everything in the world).
We also have the so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats – who seem to go in lockstep with the right-wing, along with a so-called “Independent” like Senator Joseph Lieberman.
We’ve had Senator Max Baucus having our own physicians and registered nurses being arrested and dragged out of the U.S. Senate (I’ve watched the footage of that happening in news broadcasts), for simply asking that single-payer medicare-for-all be a real part of the discussion, instead of being a forbidden topic to seriously discuss (and that’s also a position coming out of the Obama White House).
We also appear to have an oligarchy controlling 95% of the wealth and the policies of our nation – an oligarchy that often behaves like the royalty and corporations of Europe of a couple centuries ago, with even more catastrophic results.
You also certainly must have noted the relaxing of our anti-monopoly laws and regulations regarding the media, the resultant mass buying of and closing of many local newspapers, and the buying of local television, radio and internet providers, by large corporations.
There really have been and are protests by people from all walks of life in our nation (not only “activists” who are often simplistically labeled as being “the left”), but our U.S. corporate-controlled and mass-consolidated media doesn’t cover much of it (3 corporations now control approximately 95% of the media in the U.S., as opposed to 59 companies several decades ago, plus we lost the Fairness Doctrine back in 1987).
You’ll find protests and many issues from our nation have been and are covered in news broadcasts and publications in other nations, and also in our U.S. alternative media (including by reporters like Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill of Democracy NOW, and Laura Flanders of GRITtv), and once in a while in publications like Rolling Stone magazine, etc., for years on end now.
I’d also pay attention to what is being covered in the Rolling Stone magazine currently on newsstands across our nation:
No We Can’t
Obama had millions of followers eager to fight for his agenda. But the president muzzled them – and he’s paying the price
by Tim Dickinson
(From Issue 1098 – February 18, 2010_
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31961846/no_we_cant/print
(snip)
Not only did the White House fail to crank up its own campaign machinery on behalf of health care, it also worked to silence other liberal groups. In a little-publicized effort, top administration officials met each week at the Capital Hilton with members of a coalition called the Common Purpose Project, which included leading activist groups like Change to Win, Rock the Vote and MoveOn. In August, when members of the coalition planned to run ads targeting conservative Democrats who opposed health care reform, Rahm Emanuel showed up in person to put a stop to the campaign. According to several participants, Emanuel yelled at the assembled activists, calling them “f—–g retards” and telling them he wasn’t going to let them derail his legislative winning streak. “We’re 13-0 going into health care!” he screamed. “We’re not going to be 13-1!”
Emanuel also locked down OFA: When liberal activists approached the group about targeting conservative Democrats, they were told, “We won’t give you call lists. We can’t go after Democrats — we’re part of the DNC.” It was exactly the danger that Hildebrand had warned about when Plouffe made OFA part of the party apparatus. In the end, the activists scrapped the organizing effort, leaving the president without a left flank in the health care debate. “Instead of channeling the energy of the base, they’ve been squashing it,” says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential online forum Daily Kos. “When special interests are represented by people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, you’ve got to go after those people. Instead, you had OFA railing against Republican obstructionists, when the Republicans were irrelevant to the debate.” Given Emanuel’s background as a legislative insider, it’s not surprising that the White House shelved its activist base…
(snip)
I also perceive that the rage, disgust, despair, and the complete exhaustion of the patience of the public (including that which is as a result of George W. Bush and company’s lies and actions), will not stand for “Democrats” in office, who show via their actions and policies that they don’t have the courage of the convictions they claim to have and support. Don’t forget Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stating about those recently and currently in office in Washington, D.C.: “The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt. They are accepting money from the same corporations…”.
February 22nd, 2010 at 12:38 am
Of course, Martin. We’ve reported every bit of that here for the past five years, or about to be five years. Which reminds me, our anniversary is coming up in less than two months.
What will I say? : )