the sad red earth

Music: “In the Painted Room,” by Karenn Gibson Roc, from the album Touching the Soul

Video: Phil Roc:

Label: Lemon Grass Music

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 8:28 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar, Culture Clash.

Shrink sounds like an enlightened, empowering doctor, the kind I certainly want myself. Do not condescend. Explain everything I wish to know, which will be a lot. Enable me, and provide me with options. And please – please – know more than I do.

And the pilots shall fly the planes, and the aeronautical engineers build them. The programmers shall program. The biomechanics shall manipulate genes. And the surfers of the sea shall not aim protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider like bottle caps in a game of skully along the Pacific Coast Highway. For knowledge is a awesome thing. Unless it is of something soft like political science. (Science? Really, please.) Or sociology. Or history. Or government. Or – good God, man, watch out for the quicksand! – English.

We are all philosopher-kings in the realm of our own perfect wisdom. The tenants do not complain, and no court can seek to impeach us. Our rule is like a pure, sturdy blanket o’er the land, and it is without blemish. The citizens even get rebates. All hail the imaginary land.

It is a truth of human nature that what we can do at all, we will often imagine doing better than others. Familiarity breeds proverbial contempt. After all (in those societies that do), we all speak English. We’re all observers of society and political calculation, and know a tyrant is just a bully with an army. We’ve all read our Federalist Papers, our Smith and Marx and Keynes. (Oh, all right, and Friedman. So Krugman, neah.) We even know our W. Edwards Deming. And we’ve got ourselves a heap of street smarts, as Jimmy styles and praises it.

We can run a country.

It may even be that, roiled enough by the incompetence around us, we seek the mantle of leadership. We have the requisite political or networking skill (already we rise above), we achieve positions of responsibility, elected or other, and with a P an h or a D or some other alphabet soup after our names or none at all, we are become what we despise: we are elite. We are – how do you say? – anointed.

This discussion of elites confuses one concept in three attitudes. Of the first, that toward elites, Nightelf says, “Jay seems to get bogged down in ‘what is an elite?’ The problem isn’t ‘elites’, it’s elitism.” Well, yes, actually, I focused on elites because that is the subject I chose (thanks for noticing) and I chose it because that is the word Shrink and so many conservatives keep using – not elitism. Were there an actual problem with elites per se, it would, indeed, involve elitism. As I wrote

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

However, Nightelf, and Jimmy, and Shrink, all go on immediately to complain against the “insufferable arrogance,” the constitutional deviance, and the “statist” beliefs of, not elites, but liberals, even if styled as “liberal elites.” Which is my point exactly. Their complaints are properly lodged against liberalism, not the reality that leadership and governance will always be exercised by some kind of elite – the bus driven, for the trusting and hopeful, by someone who at least knows how to drive, maybe even, pray, by one who can drive at least somewhat better than the others, and who will probably, since it is good and responsible to regulate matters of safety and entrusted lives, have a commercial driver’s license, a kind of professional certification, an established imprimatur of elite status as a driver of commercial vehicles.

This conceptual confusion of what are perceived as liberal ideas and behaviors with the nature of elites mixes, secondarily, with the fact that the latter generally in our meritocracy (though always with exceptions), reach their professional or public state as the consequence of formal education and accrediting and certifying systems. (Imagine, please, the justifiable outcries were matters of professional guidance and public trust not in some way regularly established, reviewed, and certified – how the buses then would drive off cliffs and into walls. But perhaps some conservative, after centuries now, has conceived some better idea than the university and the professional school. Perhaps righteous dissatisfaction and outrage.)

From this mix follows the anti-intellectualism. Shrink offers a definition of “intellectual” serviceable for my purpose here:

The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.

One manifestation of a class so represented is that it is, by definition, ubiquitous and vocal: it ratiocinates, writes, speaks, educates, broadcasts, pronounces, declares, informs, congregates and issues statements and reports. You get the idea. It is all around us – what Jimmy calls the “three legged stool (Academia, MSM, Washington DC)” – and if one feels just a little misaligned with this class and its unavoidable voice, ubiquitous can come to seem oppressive. The desire for heads can rise in the blood.

Even many of those who think themselves not of this class recognize the centrality of the idea to human history and achievement – the idea, by nature, manipulated as some form of language. Inherent in this recognition, for some, is a kind of, not class, but status envy. Economic class resentment is anathema to conservative thinking, but the substitute of status resentment is not. Even Shrink, clearly of the intellectual class as he defines it, feels obliged, and apparently comfortable, to state of “Engineers, who actually build things” and “Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us” – all of which is, of course, true – that “[t]he average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.” We know that the contrary statement of comparative value – the terms reversed – would strike as immediately superior and offensive, but because the acceptability of status envy and resentment, particularly against intellectuals, Shrink’s statement bats no eyes. And so, too, amongst the comments to Shrink’s rebuttal in this debate we are treated to condescending, demeaning and clearly ill-spirited stereotypes of members of the “intellectual class,” some of whom referred to are contingent workers who struggle to cobble together an income of, if they are fortunate, $20-30,000 per year (without, generally, and by the way, health insurance), but who, because shitting on the life of the mind is always in vogue in some quarters, don’t qualify as “the people.”

What Shrink flirts with here is what Massimo Pigliucci labels “a third form of anti-intellectualism, unreflective instrumentalism. This is the idea that if something is not of immediate practical value it’s not worth pursuing.” Of the rejection of intellectualism Pigliucci writes

One can be anti-intellectual also by rejecting intellectualism because it is elitist. Anti-elitism is very peculiar to the American psyche, and it is virtually unknown in the rest of the universe. Most other people recognize that in matters of the intellect, as in any other human activity, there are people who do it better and others who are not quite as good. That does not—and should not—imply anything about the intrinsic worth (or lack thereof) of such people. Astonishingly, Americans don’t have any problem with elitism per se: just watch the adoring crowds at a basketball game and the recursive tendency to set up athletes as “role models” for our youth. The underlying assumption seems to be that everybody can become an Olympic athlete, but that the way to science and letters is only reserved to the lucky few. Ironically, the truth is quite the opposite: while the chances of making it in professional sports are almost nil, a country with a large system of public education and some of the best schools in the world can give the gift of intellectual pursuit to millions of people.

MaxedoutMama (who sends me verbal flowers when she agrees with me and calls me dolt when she doesn’t – but that’s okay, I like her all the time) states

the idea that anti-intellectualism is a necessary consequence of observing that our leadership is incompetent is just plain stupid.

Well, of course, I didn’t say that because it isn’t my thought. I have not said a word about the competence of our leadership, which MoM acknowledges, in her own grievances, encompasses liberal and conservative. I have been arguing that anti-intellectualism is a factor in a misconception of the notion of elites. We can argue about competence and how we strayed from the Constitution in, like 1793, and are now virtually a Soviet republic another time. That is not the topic I chose for our fifth go around. However, MoM does state

You discuss language. The people on SW’s blog are probably looking more at data and results.

She goes on to ask, “What data can you present to show that our leadership (not just political) is mostly competent?” As I say, I am not arguing here about the competence (or lack of) of our leadership, and, anyway to meaningfully respond to her question we would need to – you should pardon the expression – define what we mean, in this context, by competent and mostly. As to the opposition set up between language and data, with – I can’t help but feel – some implied derogation of language in the comparison, even statistical studies and reports, never mind political argument, are dependent upon clearly conceived terms of analysis, consideration, and discussion. Clarity of conception is the foundation for all, and we conceive in language.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to uselessly read a poem. I’ll get back to you with the data on that later.

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 8:30 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and driving force behind the now fourteen-year-old Individual Indian Money Trust Fund suit has been issuing periodic reports since news of a settlement of the case back in December. I wrote about it in The Nature of Things.

Although the “Ask Elouise” letters, sent to those on the litigation listserv are intended to keep the members of the litigation class informed, they provide important information about matters of importance to anyone who has taken an interest in this case. To begin, the settlement is not complete, and still in danger of being lost, until Congress ratifies the settlement agreement.

Why must the settlement approval process occur so quickly? Time is of the essence. If settlement is not approved in the short term, there is a very real possibility the settlement will fail and the parties will return to active litigation. First, Congress must ratify the settlement agreement before the Court can act to preliminarily approve it. In this election year, further delay will create a more challenging political environment for enactment of the necessary implementing legislation. Congress is a body made up of diverse and varied views and not all have an interest in a successful resolution of this case. Further delay will increase the likelihood that our allies on Capitol Hill focus their attention on other matters. Secondly, the Supreme Court has granted an extension of the time for the parties to submit briefing in connection with its review of the Court of Appeals decision that limits the accounting duty to “low hanging fruit.” It is unlikely that further extensions will be granted by the Supreme Court and further court activity is likely to kill the settlement.

Any settlement of a lawsuit involves compromise, sometimes the very painful and disappointing acceptance of terms far from true justice. Cobell, without whom there would have been no suit and no measure of justice in this matter, had to make a very difficult decision. She explains it again.

How did we get from plaintiffs’ calculation of almost $40 billion a few years ago to $1.4 billion today? The $1.4 billion settlement fund for the accounting claims was the product of negotiations between the parties and is, in my estimation, a fair resolution for plaintiffs’ accounting, restitution and damages claims after considering the risk associated with further litigation, the refusal of the Court of Appeals to order the government to provide a full accounting of all funds, and the absence of any time limit for final judgment in this case. It has long been plaintiffs’ position that more than that is due. But what matters is what is recoverable in Court. The litigation could continue another decade or more with no assurance that we will prevail on the merits. Other factors could not be quantified, including the deaths of tens of thousands of beneficiaries since the filing of this case. Those class members will never see the resolution of this case and the prospect of another ten years of litigation means that thousands more will be denied their rights too. It is important to also consider that the district court limited the award following the 2008 trial to only $455.6 million for plaintiffs’ accounting claims – significantly less than the almost $40 billion plaintiffs had requested.

AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 11:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

Tom Garafalo, The Havana Note – Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 1967-2010

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42 year old political prisoner arrested by Cuban authorities in the crackdown of Spring 2003, has died after an 83 day hunger strike.

Jonathan Chait, The New Republic – A Brief Reconciliation Primer

As Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, everything the GOP says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

Mitchell Cohen, The Huffington Post – The Shock of Dubai (H/T Yaacov Lozowick)

I am shocked – shocked – to discover there is killing going on in war. (And spies spying?)

ChristopherHitchensWatch – We Watch the Hitchens So You Don’t Have To

There is also The Daily Dishwater leeching off Andrew Sullivan. What am I, second rate Pâté? Where is the Obscure Writer Observer making a name off my, ah…name.

Eve Garrard, Normblog – Once more on Amnesty and Gita Sahgal

The real issue – and Amnesty must know this to be the case – is whether Amnesty should be partnering with, and thereby lending credibility to, people whose own commitment to universal human rights is in doubt. No adequate defence has been offered for this, and no adequate defence has been provided for suspending the employee who has blown the whistle on this topic, and whose own long-term commitment to universal rights for women is not in doubt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 8:07 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

ShrinkWrapped has offered his response to my The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White. Comments are closed here at the sad red earth and should be made at ShrinkWrapped. Earlier installments of this series can be found on the horizontal menu above.

The Open Mind V: Riposte

Let me see if I can touch on the key elements of Jay’s post.  First he points out that it is not the elites that I object to but their ideas, ie, not the idea of elitism, per se:

What Shrink and other conservatives object to is not the elite nature of these elites – were it not them, it would be others – but a set of modern and liberal beliefs that over recent decades they consider to have taken hold as the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Fair enough. But characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which they object as “elitist” does not merely mischaracterize the nature of their adversary, it stokes a malformed amalgamation of class, cultural, and social conflict that can have dangerous consequences.

That’s certainly fair enough, though incomplete.  I do object to the “statist” ideas of the liberal elites.  I also do wonder how “characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which (I) object as “elitist” … mischaracterize{s) the nature of (my) adversary” but I’ll read on.  Jay warns about the anti-intellectualism that can be a component of populism and points out that liberals do not have a monopoly on condescension:

What conservatives fail to observe in themselves – and I have had opportunity to experience this in large doses in recent months – is their own condescension toward their political adversaries, upon whom they heap an array of demeaning and otherizing labels and perceptions, including the deluded belief that they’ve got liberals’ number, while liberals don’t have a clue about them. Accordingly, they tell themselves that liberal objections to Sarah Palin arise profoundly on the level of cultural snobbery, and there is, indeed, an element of that.

As a member in good standing of the intellectual class* and a Jew, I am sensitive to the ease with which populism in the hands of unscrupulous politicians/leaders can become suffused with envy and arouse hatred toward designated scapegoats.  Jay is correct to warn of such proclivities, though to my perceptions attempts to scapegoat have been more prevalent thus far on the left than the right in recent years.

[*My definition: The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.  This is in opposition to the masses, which include such "lesser beings", like, oh, I don't know, Engineers, who actually build things or Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us.  For those who are immune to sarcasm, please note that I value the productions of Engineers, Entrepreneurs, et al, much more highly than most of what passes for intellectual ideas these days.  The average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.  (My singling out of Engineers and Entrepreneurs has almost nothing to do with the fact that my beautiful and very smart daughter-in-law is an Engineer and my less beautiful but equally smart son-in-law is an Entrepreneur; occasionally these kinds of coincidences just show up; go figure.)]

I haven’t written much about Sarah Palin.  My initial reaction when she was nominated by John McCain was positive.  Here was a seemingly genuine person who had, through grit and determination, made her way to a Statehouse and apparently done a pretty good job.  During the campaign, she showed herself to be not-ready-for-prime-time, which was a concern for someone “a heartbeat away” but she didn’t seem any less prepared than Obama (who I was told repeatedly was brilliant, his comment that he visited 57 states notwithstanding), with his lack of actual accomplishments in the real world, and Sarah Palin was clearly less of a buffoon than Joe Biden. (One need only consider Biden’s comments about FDR going on TV after the 1929 stock market crash to reassure the country or his host of inane comments before or since.)

In any event Jay goes on to assure us that the liberal elite’s objection to Sarah Palin was not because she was a political threat or represented something that was anathema to prevailing liberal elite ideology but because of ”her deep and disturbing ignorance.”  Now, I am not all that interested in Sarah Palin at the moment.  I think she was treated terribly by the Media, a treatment that stood out for its contrast with the kid gloves with which they approached Barack Obama (and had the MSM done their jobs a bit more assiduously, Barack Obama might have actually been tested more on the campaign trail, which would have stood him in good stead for his current travails.)  Sarah Palin is apparently a decent speaker, seems to have decent political instincts and may, if she does her homework, be a viable candidate in the future.  I don’t think she is a viable candidate yet because, whether warranted or not, the image of her as an ignoramus has stuck; only she can change that and it will take time.  (I can’t help noticing how similar her experience has been to Dan Qualye’s experience; he never escaped his image.  We shall see if Sarah Palin can.)

The one place I might take issue with Jay’s post is his representation of “elites”; in three places Jay delineates what he means by elite:

An “elite,” by definition, is the “choice part,” of something, the “best of a class.”

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

It is the pride of American history, culture, and society that more than any nation ever, we live in a meritocracy.

I actually agree in part with all three statements but I do not think the “core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence.”  The core problem is that what defines our elites is only quite peripheral to what is actually importnat in our scoiety.  This is an important point that I alluded to in my humorous (well, at least the intent was to be humorous) aside about the intellectual class.  The “elites” and this includes Republican elites and Democratic elites, are defined by their belief that they know what is best for all of us (just look at the ongoing insistence by the Obama administration to jam a top down, healthcare “reform” down the throats of a resisting populace) at the very same time that they have become far removed from the lives of the people they deign to represent.  Historian Walter Russell Mead suggests the Tea Party movement is the heir of a long and honored American tradition of anti-elitism. [All emphases mine-SW]

Do Soldiers Drink Tea?

The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

… you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential.  Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals. No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

The United States has rarely been in greater need of rapid transformation than we are now. The information revolution, the rapid development of the global economy, the shift of cultural and economic power from Europe toward Asia, the enormous wave of immigration that since the 1960’s has been remaking the body politic once again, the breakdown of the progressive or blue social model as industries and financial markets rise and fall with a velocity not seen in the last 100 years: these changes are taking place all around us, but our institutions and policies are very far from keeping up.

Elites are becoming much less necessary as people become more and more empowered.  For just one example, at one time patients came to a Doctor unsure what was wrong with them and ignorant of their treatment options.  They hoped to be referred to someone competent who could offer them an appropriate treatment so that they could regain their prior functioning and good health.  Today we expect patients to come into the office armed with knowledge of their condition (or what they believe they are suffering from) and with great knowledge of their treatment options.  When patients suffer from rarer disorders, they often know more than their Doctors about their ailments.  The wise Physician sees his job as assisting his patient in finding the proper treatment and managing that treatment rather than as dictating from “on high” how the patient must behave.

Our patients are not passive recipients of treatment but active participants who must be made allies against their disorder.  No one can ever know more about your life than you can and with the increasing complexity of the modern world, this aphorism can be extended.  We are flooded with information.  Markets, even when they work poorly, remain our best tool for summing information.  Nothing so much defines our present day elites (on the left and the right) as the belief that they understand current conditions well enough to legislate solutions to social problems.  This was a fantasy even in the good old days of Progressive rule; it is nonsensical now.  Accelerating change means that top down approaches cannot possibly incorporate enough information to predict chaotic systems.  Not only can initial conditions never be adequately established, but by the time our cumbersome bureaucracy has measured conditions they are already far different than predicted (which is why so many government statistics include gigantic fudge factors, ie corrections and assumptions.)

If the Tea Party movement succeeds it will because it has been able to articulate a program designed to minimize government intrusions into markets and facilitate the return of power to the people.  Now that I think about it, “Power to the People” could be a terrific, catchy slogan for the Tea Party movement!  I wonder what Jay would think of it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:43 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Nick Meo, Telegraph - Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes (H/T Normblog)

It’s all perfectly natural. I was unhappy about Tibet, so I attacked Chinese on the streets of Los Angeles.

Christian Tau, Z-Word Blog - The Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo

Are we picking up a pattern here?

Jonathan Chait, The New Republic - Noonan And Republican Hubris

Like the good Reagan speechwriter she was, Peggy Noonan is in love with the sound of her own voice, and rarely makes sense.

Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post - Scientology Church hires reporters to investigate newspaper

As for accepting payment from the church, they said: “We were as objective in doing this job as we were in pursuing all the other assignments we’ve done for news organizations during the past 25 years.”

How do you hold reporters in contempt? I guess you hold them in contempt.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Assasinating Al Qaeda: not a problem

[D]efinitely something to remember when you are fed that soft-on-terror crap from the GOP.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 6:32 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.

Ah, siddown. Holster your resentments. I’m not talking about that black and white. I’m referring to the fallacy. (Murmer, murmer, grumble, murmer.)

Sometimes labeled, parthenogenetically, the fallacy of bifurcation, more commonly known as the either/or fallacy, this form of thinking also sports the “black and white fallacy” moniker. You get the idea. There are only two alternatives, in all the world. Choose one. And these would be, proffers whoever is doing the proposing of alternatives – regardless of the subject and just sose you know – mine or the wrong one.

Generally, I prefer the either/or label. (From my selfish copulater’s perspective – not such a fan of parthenogenesis.) Commonly, people stumble into either/or thinking rather obviously, when they present us with an explicit two-horned choice. You remember back in the Sixties – America: love it (uncritically, was the implication) or leave it. Or, not to wax nostalgic, more recently, when it seemed the conservatively voiced dilemma over what to do about Afghanistan entailed making a quick decision (or be a witless ditherer) to go all in, for all time, or be a punk. (Of course, Democrats are punks these days, but for different reasons.)

All bifurcations are not so obviously either/or, however. Sometimes it is not a specific argument we are getting, offering us an explicit pair of Chinese menu options; sometime the fallacy is embedded in the language with which we more generally converse about a subject, language that engenders the black and white thinking of stark and undiscerning alternatives. For example, when last I was heard from among the pixels at ShrinkWrapped, I was offering a comment there regarding the use of the word “elites,” a term of far-reaching opprobrium as Shrink and some other conservatives use it. It is a simultaneously loaded and vague term that leads us directly into the night and day of black and white thinking.

An “elite,” by definition, is the “choice part,” of something, the “best of a class.” All perception focuses on the meaning of “best” and the nature of its validation. The best scientists are those who do more of the most innovative work. The best runners are the fastest or those with the greatest endurance (along with some strategic wiles). These are the elites of their class, and they are elites born of meritocracy. All things being even (which, of course, they are not always, and to the extent that they are regularly not, we have a sociological and then political problem) if you have the skill, you join the elite.

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

We go astray when we confuse elite class snobbery with earned elite class status. Roger Federer does a pretty good job of being inoffensive about his tennis superiority, but if you listen to him talk enough, it is clear, of course, that he knows not just that he is superior to everyone else, but quite how superior he is. When this knowledge pokes through his inherent decency, it can catch for a moment the sensibility of the mere mortal who knows not what it is to walk on such a height, but as any good tough conservative Darwinian might say, “That’s life. He is better. Deal with it.”

It is the pride of American history, culture, and society that more than any nation ever, we live in a meritocracy. To the degree that that meritocracy is not absolute, that all things are not always even, we have much significant political debate, and a lot of political preening, about which party and what philosophy really represents the interests of those segments of society that are unfairly deprived of the respect and rewards, whatever they be, of natural individual merit. An elite that would deserve the scorn, as an elite, with which Shrink, and many of his readers, use the word, would be an elite structurally embedded in society, as, for instance, England long had, with the remnant consciousness of which it stills struggles. The closest the U.S. had to such an elite was a WASP moneyed class and what still tries to pass for “society” in New York and some quarters of New England. The great immigration of 1880-1920 and the meritocratic rise of its offspring has much demolished the estate of that elite, and the immigration of recent decades will finish the job. Look at our government, our financial and research centers, our universities, and the occupants are in very large measure the children and grandchildren of a risen working and middle class. How well individuals or intellectual coteries do their jobs is one matter of consideration, but by and large, in one manner of competition or accomplishment or other, they earned their way there.

What Shrink and other conservatives object to is not the elite nature of these elites – were it not them, it would be others – but a set of modern and liberal beliefs that over recent decades they consider to have taken hold as the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Fair enough. But characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which they object as “elitist” does not merely mischaracterize the nature of their adversary, it stokes a malformed amalgamation of class, cultural, and social conflict that can have dangerous consequences.

The contrary concept to elites, providing us our black and white, is masses. Some conservatives use that term too. Oddly, in the ongoing radicalization of American conservatism, the almost substanceless shell of the Marxist lexicon comes into vogue. At the objectionable heights of power, we have an elite; rising up in opposition, in new consciousness, we have the masses, always mystically imbued, by left or right, with a direct line to salt-of-the-earth wisdom and moral centeredness. Here is Leon Wieseltier:

“I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person,” [Sarah Palin] recently told Chris Wallace, which is just as well. And she added: “I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it.”

At the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Palin made a similar claim for the moral superiority of ordinariness, twangily championing “real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals,” and “everyday Americans,” and finally “the people.” Palin is packaging herself as the perfect image of the American mean.

The invocation of “the people” sounds inclusive, but it is a technique of exclusion….It is based upon a particular definition of “the people.” How do Palin and the partiers know who the real Americans are? The mystical certainty of her divisive intuition reminds me of what intellectual historians used to call the “epistemological privilege” of Marx’s proletariat, his reprehensible old idea that access to truth is a feature of class position. Palin, too, is idealizing the proletariat for the uniqueness of its understanding, though her economics is starkly indifferent to its tribulations. And if you throw in Palin’s views on the “social issues,” on the questions by which we measure the decency of our society, then it is clear that this is an anti-elitism that is not egalitarianism, a common touch without genuine commonality, which is quite an accomplishment.

The danger in these muddled concepts is in the anti-intellectualism that always immediately grows out of them, and this too has been a feature of many Marxisms, from Mao to Pol Pot, with those of intellectual achievement – elite in that area and sense only – pilloried, stripped of their work, even murdered. Did wonders for those societies too. Conservatives often rail against that liberal condescension, toward the “common folk,” and it does exist.

What conservatives fail to observe in themselves – and I have had opportunity to experience this in large doses in recent months – is their own condescension toward their political adversaries, upon whom they heap an array of demeaning and otherizing labels and perceptions, including the deluded belief that they’ve got liberals’ number, while liberals don’t have a clue about them. Accordingly, they tell themselves that liberal objections to Sarah Palin arise profoundly on the level of cultural snobbery, and there is, indeed, an element of that.

George will observes that Palin “has been subjected to such irrational vituperation — loathing largely born of snobbery.” He then immediately returns the favor by noting that “America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism.” Down with down snobbery, up with the up, and this coming with delicious irony from the bowtied Ph.D. in political science who is as established in the elite as a Doric column.

Speaking as an insider, however, (shh!), I am here to reveal that the overwhelmingly primary reason liberals so object to Palin – despite some clear skills in a number of areas – is her deep and disturbing ignorance. Conservatives are now so in the grip of anti-elite fever, with its attendant derision of intellectual accomplishment, that they will not credit the value of that accomplishment and thus will not credit the genuine reason Palin is objectionable to the left. Energized by the passion of the Tea Partiers, they lose historical perspective – it is only seventeen years since the last round of populist revolutionary fervor – and fail to place themselves in a continuum. Here is Will again, who, if he hasn’t been purged and tried yet as an independent thinker, certainly has lost his party office:

But the reaction against [Obama] must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

After William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in 1908, his third as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, this prototypical populist said he felt like the man who, thrown out of a bar for a third time, dusted himself off and said, “I’m beginning to think those fellows don’t want me in there.” In 1992, Ross Perot, an only-in-America phenomenon — a billionaire populist — won 19 percent of the popular vote….

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today’s saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.

Will is here converging with Wieseltier, but he is just another elitist, too.

There is also the rather immense hypocrisy of Palin and many other populists. Anyone who has run for the vice presidency, and has published a monster bestseller, and appears regularly on television, and will run for the presidency is a member in good standing of the American elite. Even lesser attainments of prominence and success confer the same loathed status. The anti-elitists in the Republican caucus in the House and the Senate, and in the conservative commentariat, and in the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute–they are anti-elitists in the elite….

The wisdom of a policy is not determined by its social origins. There is a distinction between populism and “the people,” though most populists do not want you to know it. The populism that bases its criticisms on a preference for one segment of the populace is merely another special interest, its denunciations of special interests notwithstanding. This does not mean that its criticisms are wrong; but when they are right, it is because their reasons are moral, not sociological.

But justice is not well-pursued by resentment. The anti-politician politicians who seek the favor of angry Americans are deceiving them, because anger is nothing more lasting than a political consultant’s contract. Emotions are stoked by elections and are spent by them. What remains after the great manipulation is the increasingly Sisyphean task of public reason, which is its own kind of insurgency.

What he said.

AJA

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 12:01 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

This delayed contribution of student photos from Uruguay comes from Michaela Reisinger, a fourth-generation pharmacist from Austria. Nearly everyone else on this travel photo workshop had been on multiple trips with Julia (and me), but Michaela was new. Smart, witty, and gregarious, a lover of good food and drink, she instantly became part of the gang. You might say Michaela is the Austrian as Italian. She had been to Buenos Aires before, where she has been studying tango for several years. When we left her, she had just found her apartment for a three-month stay of further dance study. One night in Montevideo Michaela lingered (with chaperon) at a milonga dancing tango until 5 a.m. She later explained to me the nature of the “come-hither” looks that are both effective and acceptable for a single woman searching for dance partners to cast at a milonga, and those that will have counter-productive, even comical results.

Here is Michaela’s account of her photos of the Umbandan seaside ritual I posted about earlier:

The pictures deal with the goddesses-offerings. There people bring flowers or something to eat, put it into small boats and send their offerings to the sea, hoping their prayers will come true. Also several enlightened people offer their straighter way to heaven. They are easily recognized by their dress code. To get these photos I followed the “boy with a flower” in the ocean as far as I could and was wandering later on.

Of course I could not resist the possibility to get my Aura cleaned and whitewashed again, because who knows what kind of dirt got caught over the years. I let it be done by and Australian woman. Despite that I could not really feel any difference. She gave me her business card secretly, whispering, if I want to know the real thing, I should call her. I really was considering that for a while. Then I saw her with several others consoling a pretty in pink. But to me it was more of an assault. So that’s how I felt being European; what must an American have thought?

To me the feast was very peaceful, despite a group of Brazilian healers, where the upper-upper-healer, looking like a white shrunken cowboy with an impressive black beard, was roughing up the believers a bit but he acted so fast that I was not able, despite all my skills I learned from Julia, to get one sharp photo. He is also one of the suspects I connect with the headless chicken I found the next day on the beach very nicely decorated. There was no blood-letting nor self-sacrifices, sorry.

AJA

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 11:56 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

I’ve been oppressively busy since the return from Buenos Aires and hadn’t a clue what I might have time to post about today. Yesterday, because the Jewel is beyond oppressively busy with some shindig she’s hosting, project ally and friend S drove me down to San Diego to collect Obelisk from its repair facility. (We’ve been, meanwhile, transient in a Venice Beach hotel, gazing always gladly at palm, beach, and Pacific.) The facility is just beside the Miramar Naval Air Station, and while S and I caught a quick lunch we declined every other minute to talk over the fighter jets taking off. These made not the mingled whine and roar of a commercial jumbo jet, but a piercing Ferrari howl that seemed synesthetically to envelope the sky.

During one delay in conversation, S and I both contemplated the assault on our senses. She spoke first when the sky was returned to us. What struck her, she said, was that anyone thought those jets could solve anything. What struck me was the difference in our thoughts. I had been trying to imagine the visceral experience of that ferocious speed and ascent. Somewhere in the brief elaboration that followed came the analogy of a guy coming after you. Kill him, said S, and then you have to deal with his family. Don’t kill him, I replied, and his family will be one of the worries you no longer have.

Somewhere around the time S and I are having this conversation, Shrinkwrapped is posting What Are You Willing to Die For? When I get to reading it, I begin to misread it. Misreading is an important concept in both literary studies and psychoanalysis. In the latter, mistakes of all kinds are eruptions of the unconscious to the surface. In the former, the misreading authorizes the text, separating it from the presumed intentionality of its inscriber. Of course, the reader is participating in the misreading, but the text has allowed for it and so assumes that authority, from which follows various possibilities, including claims that the meaning of a text is unstable.

Shrink’s true end in his post (as I now read it) is to inveigh against the cognitive egocentrism of Western elites as they project their expectation of rational decision making on others who may not themselves partake of it. Shrink is here thinking of Islamists, particularly Iran. The set up for this argument lies in some preliminaries about the depth of conviction in true religious belief, and the willingness to die arising from the dictates of that belief – and this is where, at the start, I misread the post.

Shrink appears – still, to me – to be making a case, at the start, against the atheistic secularism of modernity. From this condition follow the beliefs that reside too shallowly in progressive elites for those elites to be willing to die in the name, and for the propagation, of those beliefs. Thus, you see, modern progressive elites cannot comprehend the fatal – diplomatically irrational – convictions of adherents to Islam. However, this end is not clearly in sight at the beginning of the argument, and I anticipated – part of the act of reading, and of misreading – that the failures of true conviction (that to which you will commit your life, or its loss) inherent in secular modernity was Shrink’s real subject. Thinking this, I was already conceiving, as I read – and not as a good thing, you can see – all of the fraudulent and phantasmagorical beliefs and convictions for which, out of religious (and ersatz religious) faith, so many people have given their lives over the millennia. However, the presence of this impulse in the faithful to commit their very lives out of deeply held religious conviction is offered as an apparent hallmark, later in the post, of the Mullah’s irrationality, while it is identified first as a moral deficiency, for its lack, in Western progressive elites.

Curiously, one can find a similar argument in, of all places, the writing of Slavoj Zizek. I mentioned in Politics and Shame Zizek’s odious “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” posted to the internet within days of 9/11. In it, he states that “we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one’s life[.]” Zizek doesn’t make the distinction in this assertion between elites and ordinary folk that SW regularly pursues, so the response to Zizek’s moral blindness – the hundreds of thousands, or more, of just American soldiers who have given or risked their lives in recent decades in no selfish pursuit, but in commitment to some belief or other – needs no proffer to Shrink, whose family is fulfilling the military commitment for several.

Still, it’s an interesting convergence of perception, about the flabbiness of Western moral character, from such far-flung positions on the political spectrum. Zizek offers another fascinating insight into his moral nature elsewhere, in his preface to the Zizek Reader, where he offers, “[W]hat I find theoretically and politically engaging in the religious legacy is not the abstract messianic promise of some redemptive Otherness, but, on the contrary, religion in its properly dogmatic and institutional aspect [emphasis added].” Of course, this is exactly the element in religious faith we should most abjure, very significantly because it does lead people to commit their own, and sacrifice others’, lives.

As I headed all this, however, it is prequel. I suppose because Shrink and I are now engaged in these debates, we’ve developed some kind of Jungian collective phenomenon, because some of these are themes I had already planned to address in the Open Mind V, coming Monday.

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 3:05 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

The Long War Journal – All Headlines

While conservative critics are gazing in the mirror, and the others are looking elsewhere, the Obama administration is waging real war.

Adam Holland – Ron Paul website mourns anti-Semitic author

A new crack sprouts in Paul’s pot’s spout.

Barry Rubin, GLORIA Center – Why Isn’t There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Of Israel’s critics

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s’ peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel’s agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government’s peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip….

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Mark Athitakis, American Fiction Notes – Rereading

Very curious. Other than the commitment in time, would we question viewing a painting again, replaying a song, attending the revival of a play?

AskPhilosophers – On Material Cause

Or, for that matter, what’s the material cause of Bullshit

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 10:40 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Uncategorized.