ShrinkWrapped

How to Debate: A Primer

Jay is more excellent than usual today:

Framing Israel

We know all the framing devices, from casting Israeli Jews as the last horrid conquistadors of the colonial epoch, to denying the millennia-long history of Jews in Israel – even the non-Khazarian Jewishness of Jews – to even the odious comparisons to Apartheid South Africa and, yes, Nazi Germany. To the Palestinian sympathizer who crosses the boundary into Israel demonization, these frames become the means by which to reshape, overlook, and discount all the facts that argue against their perspective. Case in point: a very recent encounter.

The blogosphere today is like a crossroads city in the ancient Levant. There are travelers and merchants converging from many lands, and if one speaks the lingua franca, one is able to do business in the vibrant market of multifarious experience. As it happened, a Twitter friend directed me to a post at Ethical Musings. The proprietor of the Musings blog is George Clifford, “an Episcopal priest, ethicist, and author” who was a Navy Captain in the Chaplain Corps during which time he taught “ethics at the Naval Postgraduate School and philosophy at the Naval Academy.” Clifford’s post, “Building in Israel and Palestine” was based around a video it offered from The Economist showcasing the photography and narration of Bruno Stevens. About the nature of Stevens’ advocacy journalism, you can read here. I was moved to comment at the blog.

His comment interchange with Clifford is quite illuminating.  When Jay is on his game he debates/argues extraordinarily well.  When I have some more time I hope to be able to re-join The Open Mind fray once again.  Until then, read his post and enjoy a master at work.

The Open Mind VII – the One and the Many II

Jay has now posted his response to my riposte.  As per our new rules, I will have another chance to address his arguments in a final post in TOM VII.  Interestingly, he has been unable to entice liberal commenters from other sites to join his side in the debate, although one e-mail writer confused my argument for his and promptly insulted him.  I appreciate Jay taking one for the team.  Comments here are closed; please leave comments at Jay's site.

All Previous Posts in this series can be found at The Open Mind archives.

The Open Mind VII – the One and the Many II

One surgeon declares the operation a success, the other is still to close up, and we shall have to wait until the anesthesia wears off to find out how the patient is doing.

ShrinkWrapped and I have already reached some agreements, and may reach more. However general, abstract, or theoretical they may appear to some, they are a foundation for speaking more meaningfully in discussion on more specific matters. To isolate four separate of Shrink’s comments and join them:

Without any affective connection, reason alone will be insufficient to redress injustice….

A politics based primarily on Affective ties can easily lead to a society that tramples on the rights of those whose hold on our empathy are minimal….

Yet we also know that a culture organized around reason alone can become even more monstrous….

In reality it is impossible to divorce rationalism and affectivity.  We need a synthesis of the two.

I completely agree. It was offered among the comments that I was presenting a materialist ontology. I was not. The first critique to be offered of Marxism as a program – rather than as an analysis and critique of capitalism – is that there is no should in matter. I was making the empirical observation, indeed, that affective connection, specifically empathy, is a fundamental element in our sense of responsibility to each other. (I further argued that technology, though it can and does produce contrary results, has historically increased the sense and reality of proximity to one another, thus increasing the sense of connection, thus increasing empathic response, thus broadening the sense of responsibility.) Whether empathic feelings should be acted on is a further and different question. I stated that the benefits of action matter.

Now we have, materially, the means, but politically the ends may be varied, unpredictable, and consequential.

That empathy and reason both are necessary to satisfactory ethical behavior I think is empirically undeniable. SW offered the obvious examples. In support of empathy it must be observed that Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao did not enact evil because of an excess of empathy. Sociopathology is not the product of excessive empathy. Large numbers of human beings will never be able, or care, to ratiocinate at a high order level of reason on ethical issues. In some instances, they will be guided by religious instruction, but even then, and when they do reason to their fullest capability, they will be checked and balanced by natural empathic responses. So too are most people who do resort to sophisticated reasoning. Certainly, however, there is no area in which reason is more required to guide and even counter the uncalculated impulses of empathy than the political, in both social and international policy.

My intended focus in this regard, though, was not the empathy, but the sense of connection that develops from a wider range of empathic response, and, precisely, what our reasoned response politically should be to that sense of connection: what the proper relationship should be between the one and the many. I suggested by my introduction that the answer to that question might reasonably be different now from what it might have been in 1789.  And I framed the discussion not just in ethical terms:

“Proper” here might refer to ethics, logic, practicability.

In some of the commentary, there was a jumping ahead of the theoretical discussion to warrant that we should not provide in social policy for variously characterized deadbeats, losers, and system gamers. I agree. But this is reasoning backwards and skewing the premises. Let us posit that there are some who are genuinely in need, or a need that is common in nature to all. What should be the relationship of the many to those few, each of whom, individually, is a one, or to that common need? Should not those genuinely in need, or that common need, be addressed,  or not addressed, on the basis of some settled understanding of the proper relation of the one to the many – in which case, what is that understanding? Given that no system of any kind is perfect or even near so, are we willing to tolerate any level of imperfection in the application of social policy? We must first address whether that concern even matters to the discussion.

The purpose of this effort, as articulated in “The Reopened Mind,” is not to argue the usual disagreements, not to presume what the other believes, or to assert what generic liberals or conservatives believe, but to seek the areas of philosophical or ideational agreement that Shrink and I may have and in that process sharply delineated the points of departure into disagreement between him and me. These points of agreement and disagreement may reflect more generally on liberalism and conservatism. They may reflect only on us. We have found an agreement already, and there is another.

Shrink asserts that “fairness” is the “crux of the matter.” I think rather that the crux of the matter is precisely the subject I raised – the proper relation of the one to the many, which certainly does significantly involve the issue of fairness, but not that issue alone. That is the ethical question. There are also the questions I raised of logic and of practicability, of efficacy. One commenter offered that

The questions that drive our politics need not be moral. What is going to promote prosperity? And more than prosperity, what is going to help create a nice place to live? A healthy environment? A vibrant culture? A future for my children? Lower crime? What is going to promote happiness?

Shrink argued,

I do not think it is sustainable or fair for anyone to pay more than half of his or her income to support others.  My effective tax rate in the most liberal of states, New York, is at or close to 50%.  This seems to me to be a reasonable cut off point for the state’s ravenous appetite.  In reality, higher rates of taxation have been shown to be counterproductive since they encourage those who are able, to devote their efforts toward minimizing their taxes rather than toward more productive endeavors.

Once again, I agree, and in agreeing I don’t suggest that the effective tax rate should even approach 50%. To reaffirm Shrink’s observations in slightly different words, I think it both economically and psychologically necessary that the majority of the reward for human effort go to the person whose exertions reaped those rewards. The twentieth century is an encyclopedia of exposition on that subject.

Now, with some agreement established, I will try to advance the subject a bit further. I focused in the last post on the idea that the one and the many need not be the opposing terms that so many presume them. It is a complex subject, so I’ll offer just two easy, even obvious examples. One is free speech toleration of every kind of opinion, even the most extreme and objectionable. This is an example of apparently privileging the rights of the individual over that of the group, the one over the many, whose immediate sentiment might be to quash the objectionable view. However, most Americans, most of the time, acknowledge that society, and the polity as whole, is improved by granting this protection to an individual, who may in his view have no like. The political health is enhanced and the protection is distributed to every other individual. In this matter, I believe there is no opposition between the one and the many.

I make the same claim regarding a social program such as Social Security – intended very specifically not as whole, sustaining pension or as wealth redistribution, but as the barest minimum safety net. It has, in fact, over many decades helped prevent millions of people from falling into a depth of old age poverty and destitution that was once a fearful prospect. It has, supplementally, helped many retired people live above the minimum level, in just some very modest degree of comfort. Commonly entered into and supported by the many, this is a program that saves or enhances most individual lives while promoting a culture in which some minimal, decent level of care for one’s fellows is part of the fabric of community.

Now, the former example is not economic, while the latter is, and it is in that area where tension between the individual and the group is more concrete. Several commenters referred in different ways, with objection, to the notion of government’s coercing our assistance to others. The nature of this coerced assistance was unclear – whether it operated on an individual basis, where any of us will more directly experience a sense of compulsion, or via collective, government program. In either case, the concern was unrelated to anything I wrote, other than to raise a question, but the interesting subject to arise from the concern is that notion of coercion.

I said in my first post that government is a form of community. Community is either, merely, a concept, an amorphous sense of connection – relationship – to others, or it is organized: an organization. Organizations are administered, and administrations become bureaucratic, and one can easily come to define the organization in terms of its bureaucracy and thus abstract from it, and conceptually abandon, the community that was its originating force. So it is with large scale government, not only on the national level, but often at the state and even city level, at which citizens will frequently feel a sense of alienation from the daily levers of power and decision making. Yet this is the requirement that representative democracy makes of us – that we conceive and understand that government is both, at the same time, the administrative bureaucracy that daily runs it, and a manifestation of community created and periodically, democratically, redirected by us.

That government may be democratically constituted and empowered to make administrative decisions without our constant participatory direction does not render those decisions coercive. Indeed, they are fully democratic. Democratic government may make decisions and pursue policies to which very large minorities passionately object. In constitutionally and well-grounded democracies such as the United States, such policies are not coercive. They are the product of democratic processes. It is even so – it not being the purpose in representative democracies generally that government be directed by plebiscite – that a majority of the populace might object to a policy, and still it would not be coercive if not in contravention of law. With sufficient profound displeasure, the unpopular policy can lead to democratic change in the government. All this is part of the democratic process.

So it would follow that if sufficient support was garnered through the democratic process to enact – or not to enact – policies reflecting a commons sense of the relation between the one and the many, such policies, or non-policies, would be neither coercive nor repressive, but an expression of the democratic will. Here, then, a disagreement. When Shrink writes that

the state…is based on consensus coercion and force

I believe he prejudices the discussion. When a group chooses by consensus to be governed by majority rule (which is implicit in the acceptance of the democratic social contract), the minority, as well as would the majority, distorts reality through the manipulations of language if it describes its governance as coercion. To abide by the terms of a contract is not to be subjected to coercive force as those terms are normally understood.

When Shrink states

Ultimately, although I believe the Conservative position that elevates the individual above the community is theoretically preferable to the Liberal position which privileges the community, either side taken to extremes is problematic

I have three reactions. The first is that he misrepresents the liberal position. The second is that given his terms, my bottom line is to agree with him, yet, third, I continue to believe that in many instances the opposition is a false one.

Finally, I note a couple of profound disagreements, profound, I think, because their subjects range far afield from the terrain on which some agreement was discovered. Shrink refers to me as a “principled Liberal.” I understand that he means this, personally, as a compliment, and I personally appreciate it, as I believe him, certainly, to be principled, but it is otherwise objectionable because the modification of liberal implies the notability of the modification, with the baseline being something other than “principled.”

More significantly, Shrink writes

Obama’s malefic failure has been to destabilize that consensus.  He has not attempted to manage from the center, shifting the polity slightly further to the Left.  He has overtly attempted to govern form the far Left, abandoning traditional consensus positions and alienating more and more Americans by the day.

This throws us back into our very distant corners, where I will state that the only thing malefic in Obama’s presidency has been the reaction to it by his opponents. To anyone anywhere actually on the Left, the description of Obama as governing from the far Left is preposterous. Here it is like staring from the earth at a star three light years in the distance and another ten. From the earth, the Right, they seem very much the same distance away in the sky. The actual far Left is critical of Obama on multiple fronts, from his continuation of so many of Bush imperialistic war policies, to his significant retreats from far Left aims in health care reform, to his cooperative relationship with big banks and advocates of neoliberal economics and his excessive realism, in far Left eyes, on human rights issues. To anyone anywhere on the Left, Obama’s policies are mainstream liberal, with a foreign policy more hawkish than many mainstream liberals would prefer. And, of course, much of what Shrink describes as “traditional consensus” positions now were mainstream liberal positions in the past that at the time were declared by the Right to be harbingers of the socialism to come.

But then we knew these were not subjects on which we would agree. We have found agreement elsewhere, though, and maybe we can build on it to the departure points of our principled disagreements.

The Open Mind VII – the One and the Many

Jay Adler strikes first in this installment of The Open Mind.  As usual, comments are closed here and should be left at Jay's site.

The Open Mind VII – the One and the Many

Think of this as a consideration, inviting more consideration, based less on a claim than on a question:

what is the proper relationship between the one and the many?

“Proper” here might refer to ethics, logic, practicability. I have said more than once, perhaps at some point on this blog, that had l lived during the nation’s early years, I would have been a Federalist. That shouldn’t strike as surprising given my leanings. But here I correct myself. I think I have been wrong to say so. I think in saying so I have imposed my contemporary political self on another time and world, whereas other elements of myself would have felt much differently. (If all we are is our political selves, we are poor creatures.) One should not be – experience oneself – a Yankee in King Arthur’s court, but English; otherwise, why travel? Given what I know of my other selves, in the world of the founding, I now think it more accurate to think I would have been a Jeffersonian. Of course, many of us are some of each. I am. But why, projected back in time, the change?

Number 21 in my Principia Liberalis stated,

Technology increases affective connections, which are loosened by the distance that technology narrows. The greater the affective connection, the greater the sense of mutual moral responsibility. Notions of discrete and separable, autonomous individuality, neither responsible to nor the responsibility of others, are irreversibly challenged by population density and technology, and the increased effect of human actions on other humans. It is necessary to define what core autonomy need be protected, as an essential human good, but earlier stages of political relation, of individuals to each other, and of individuals to the commonweal, will not be recovered.

The Re-Opened Mind

After a fair amount of discussion in the last few weeks, Jay and I have decided to resume the Open Mind series.  We would like to see if it is possible to find areas of agreement and establish more clearly the limits of such agreement, preferably without too much and too rapid a descent into the depths of discourse that the internet seems to foster.  I suspect our areas of agreement are significant and many of our disagreements, if approached in a spirit of open-mindedness, will turn out to be less intractable than they seem when our viscera are involved.  In any event, it should be an interesting experiment.

Jay wrote this reintroduction below, complete with appropriate graphics; if you have comments, leave them at his site.  He will  be starting the process this week. 

As an aside I am wondering how Jay will be able to stay on the Left (and wonder what these terms mean any more) while still being a strong and eloquent supporter of Israel.   He has written some superb posts recently discussing the recent events off the coast of Gaza.  Don't miss Shame and Folly and  Obsessive-Compulsive Israel Disorder (OCID) and Mass Hysteria.

It has been longer than usual since the last Open Mind. Though the series has been quiet on our blogs, ShrinkWrapped and I have been in contact behind the scenes. We paused to review the Open Mind experiment and consider what might be improved. Improvement here means a process that is in some way educational. It explores ideas and sheds light on their nature and boundaries, even in disagreement – disagreement that can be strongly and still civilly expressed. Intellectual civility requires a focus on ideas and not personalities: its purpose is to understand even disagreeable ideas rather than simply reject them with a critical label. This is the spirit that was meant to motivate our exchanges, expressed in Shrink’s words to me, to which we often return, concerning

how two reasonably bright, reasonably decent people can disagree so significantly in their perception of reality.

In our reconsideration, we have thought that we might try to seek areas of agreement rather than the obvious points of disagreement. The latter are not likely to alter in argument, in which case, what’s the point, except the comfort of reaffirming one’s opinions? The new idea, instead, is that in finding some agreement, we would seek then the parameters of the agreement. From there, we would explore the points of departure from each other, hoping fully to understand the disagreement rather than simply disparage it. For instance, in considering the size of government, we would begin by establishing those functions of government on which we agree, and why we agree on them, and then apply the ideas inherent in the agreement to the reasoning for the emerging disagreement. We are going to attempt to have a civilogue.

We will increase the number of posts in each exchange by one: claim, counter claim, response, and counter response. This way each of us will have equal opportunity to respond, amplify, and clarify. We will not rush to respond, but extend the exchange over perhaps a couple of weeks. Each exchange will begin with a highlighted statement of the issue, like the affirmative statement or the resolution in some forms of debate, so that the issue of the discussion is clear and won’t be misunderstood, though we won’t restrict how the issue is stated in any formal way.

While the exchange between Shrink and me on a chosen topic will end after four posts, we hope readers will continue their comments long after the date of a last post, and do so in the spirit of inquiry rather than of declaration. We hope the commenting will take place in a manner we will seek to represent ourselves in our posts. We hope that participants will support the claims they make with reasons and evidence. We hope that participants will respond directly to challenge questions and to counter arguments intended to test and explore their claims, rather than merely restate their claims. We hope that participants will explore and discuss the ideas actually presented in the posts and comments, and not argue against generic conservatives or liberals, or against reformulations of ideas represented as something other than what they originally claimed to be.

We hope to do better.

The next Open Mind begins Monday.

The Open Mind VI: The Last Word

All Previous Posts in this series can be found at The Open Mind archives.

I appreciate Jay's admission of insufficient diligence in making his allegations about the Tea Parties:

In the matter of the alleged slurs and spitting at the congressman, I have not the slightest difficulty now recognizing and acknowledging that I relied on media reporting that was not sufficiently corroborated to be reported as fact. I could enumerate a host of standard blogging excuses, but why bother. If I had sufficiently checked the reporting before my post, as I have since Shrink’s post yesterday, I would not have posted that particular material.

I have thought for a good long while that my readers and commenters are some of the smartest people around.  To my mind they did an excellent job refuting Jay's efforts to attribute racism to the Tea Partiers and, by extension (since he is convinced that the Tea Parties are the spawn of the Republicans), the Republican Party.  The idea that Republicans are inherently racist is part of the core beliefs of a great many of those who refer to themselves as Liberals.  Having grown up a Liberal, surrounded by Liberals, my sample size may not be statistically significant, but it is large. 

Nonetheless, in the spirit of open inquiry, I will address Jay's challenges.

Well, now, I’ve written before to the point that it is almost venerable Republican tradition to think the republic in peril at the hands of Democrats, but how matters have reached, indeed, an unhinged extreme. Why would we conclude otherwise from the recent Harris poll reporting that 57% of Republicans believe Obama to be Muslim, 45% that he was not born in the U.S., 45% again that he is a domestic enemy of the United States, 42% and 41% respectively that he is racist and anti-American, 41% again that he wants to take dictatorial powers, 38% that he is “doing things that Hitler did,” 22% that he wants the terrorists to win, and the Late Night Top Ten number one reason that Republicans are unhinged: 24% that Obama is the anti-Christ.

A quarter of the Republican Party believes that the President of the United States is the anti-Christ.

For the record, I do not think that Obama is a Muslim; I believe he is an American citizen born in Hawaii; I do not think he is a domestic enemy of the United States; I do not think he is a racist but do believe he is a racialist; I do not think he is anti-American but do think he is anti-American exceptionalism; I suspect that, like many politicians (and Tom Friedman), he would like to be able to govern by diktat but do not believe he plans on instituting a dictatorship; I do not think he wants the terrorists to win; finally, I do not believe Obama is the anti-Christ.  I also believe that his policies are very bad for the country and unsustainable, but that would be a topic for a different episode of TOM.

I remain disappointed in Jay, however, because I do not think his evidence cited is in any way meaningful.

I believe that Maxed Out Mama addressed this point in one of her comments, but allow me to reiterate: the aforementioned Harris Poll is nonsense on every level.  If you don't believe me, perhaps Newsweek would be a more acceptable source:

Obama Is Not the Antichrist—And Nobody Really Thinks He Is

There are two major problems with the Harris poll that found 14 percent of Americans think President Obama may be the antichrist and has some Dems freaking out.

The first problem is question design and survey format. The poll started by telling people "Here are some things people have said about President Obama" and then asked them to agree or disagree with a series of pejorative statements—from "Obama wants the terrorists to win," to "Obama may be the antichrist." Respondents were not given a set of alternative statements to consider. As ABC's award-winning pollster Gary Langer explains, presenting the questions like that practically guarantees a skewed result. "‘Some people have said' is a biasing introductory phrase," he writes. "It imbues the subsequent statements with an air of credibility—particularly when you don't note that others say something else."

Using such biasing phrases, and giving respondents no alternative premises to consider dramatically enhances what statisticians call "acquiescence bias"—a tendency in survey respondents to agree with all the questions asked of them, especially when respondents are in doubt. Acquiescence bias is particularly pronounced in surveys that employ truisms (like, "do unto others as you would have done unto you"). But it also creeps up with inflammatory statements (like "your president is the devil").

The second problem is sample selection. The Harris poll relied on people who signed up to participate in an online survey regarding negative opinions of President Obama in exchange for cash and prizes. A slew of studies have shown that offering people gifts in exchange for filling out an online questionnaire does not produce a random sample—the gold standard in polling. People who opt in to such surveys are a self-selecting bunch and because of that, their opinions and attitudes are not representative of the population at large.

In fact, surveys based on nonrandom samples are so notoriously unreliable—as Langer says, they "lack the theoretical underpinning on which valid research is based"—that the official policy at most news organizations (including The Washington Post and The New York Times) is to ignore them. Not a bad idea.

This does not mean there are no Americans who believe nonsense.  I recall multiple surveys suggesting that up to 25% of Americans still don't believe we landed on the moon.  There is a large body of Americans who believe that AIDS was invented by the government to kill black people.  That group includes Barack Obama's former Pastor.  That many Americans will believe nonsense is unremarkable and not particularly significant since the various nonsenses thus believed crisscross the body politic.  It does mean, however, that citing such a survey as evidence of anything is unhelpful in a discussion which aims to find areas of reality to agree upon.  We may never agree in our opinions but we should be careful to maintain a reasonable standard of proof for our allegations, which goes back to my initial objection to Jay's post and his second challenge.

But as to evidence regarding the Tea Parties, the following are the product of about twenty-minutes of googling, and are from Tea Parties nationwide. And I omitted much I might have included.

From there, a large number of pictures of people holding signs followed.  In my original post I linked Zombietime for one of my data points.  I chose to link to Zombietime, rather than the myriad of other options available, because when Zombie posts pictures from demonstrations, he typically posts multiple photos from the same demonstration; each demonstration is the subject of its own post.  Granted, he chooses to post pictures from anti-war demonstrations that are populated by the extremes but there are many of them and they tend to characterize the tenor and beliefs of the demonstrations thus posted.  In addition, Zombie labels each photo that he posts, with a date, time, and place.  In contrast, the photos that Jay pulled off the internet do not even contain such minimal context.  Are the protesters Larouche supporters, not central to the Tea Party?  Are they agent provocateurs, a not unknown possibility, one even discussed in blog posts on the left?  Are they isolated lunatics?  There is no way of knowing.  To suggest that the photos are representative of the Tea Parties may not be disingenuous but the pictures are hardly dispositive.  GaryK and many others who have attended Tea Party events have reported seeing no such offensive signs, or if such were sighted, they were rare outliers.  In addition, while some of the posters would be clearly offensive to most people, others are merely nasty or funny and pointed; some could only be found racist in those observers who have a super-sensitive 'racism" detector.  There may be some overlap in these categories.

In my challenge to Jay I tried to incorporate links to original sources so that any reader could follow the links and make up his own mind about the commentary by the linker and the substance of the original source.  I do not think Jay followed that rubric in his post and I am not only unconvinced of his thesis but worry that he believes he has proved his point in the absence of anything approaching significant evidence.  I would hope we can agree on certain minimum standards of evidence in future debates.

I have no doubt there are racists and haters on the Right.  Some of them may have hitched themselves to the Tea Parties.  But I do not think the 48% of Americans who support the Tea Parties (Rasmussen Reports) are primarily motivated by racism or hatred.

The Open Mind VI: Riposte and Counter Challenge

Jay Adler has posted The Open Mind VI: Riposte and Counter Challenge.  As always, comments to his post should be left at his blog.

The Open Mind VI: Riposte and Counter Challenge

I played little league baseball. I hit for average, still more for power. I was even on a couple of championship teams. After the second championship, our coach recruited the best players from our league and put together a new team for entry into the PONY League. That was it. At fourteen, I discovered I couldn’t hit high school level fast balls, or curve balls either. After a few miserable multi-strike-out games, I was benched. My baseball career was over.

Fast forward to my twenties and softball, in a corporate league, and in friendly games in Manhattan’s Central and Riverside Parks. The latter were my favorite, on a field dropped below the main walkway level, right along the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. On Little League fields a homerun was basically an inside-the-park dash after lofting one over an outfielder’s head. But here there was a wall, twenty-five feet high, with another foot for the rail on top. One day, I lived my dream. I sent a big fat one higher and farther than I ever had in my life: rounding second base I got to do a Kirk Gibson fist pump, with a hop-skip jump in the air, as that baby descended behind the wall into Riverside Park like the moon goin’ down over Yosemite.

Which is to say I like softballs.

In the matter of the alleged slurs and spitting at the congressman, I have not the slightest difficulty now recognizing and acknowledging that I relied on media reporting that was not sufficiently corroborated to be reported as fact. I could enumerate a host of standard blogging excuses, but why bother. If I had sufficiently checked the reporting before my post, as I have since Shrink’s post yesterday, I would not have posted that particular material.

Let’s be clear, though, about what the circumstances are and what I’m acknowledging. The allegations haven’t been disproven. Of course, it is no one’s obligation to disprove them. There is no obligation to prove a negative. That’s not the way it works, and that is why I shouldn’t have posted what I did in the way that I did. However, I have now watched and listened to the available video, which is not lengthy, and amid the general din of shouting no one is in position to claim what any of so many individuals might or might not have uttered.

Where does that leave us on this one matter? It leaves us with the accusations, the people who made them, the people about whom they were made, and our own differing inclinations to lend credibility. Shrink quotes Andrew Breitbart. There are probably four and a half billion people on the planet whom I find more credible than the snarling, sophomoric Breitbart. In contrast, John Lewis and Barney Frank are people who have earned, in my eyes, a lot of props. Though anything is possible, I am disinclined to believe they would lie in this matter. Undoubtedly, they don’t get the same credit from Shrink. We are left with nothing dispositive. These are matters, one hopes, not of prejudice, but of political inclination, which we all have, and which suffuses all of our perspectives.

It is far too much in the nature of these left-right debates to generalize and simplify. For instance, I do not deny that some of the issues that upset Tea Partiers are matters of great and genuine concern. Many people who are not Tea Partiers are concerned about them too. The national debt and budget deficits; an extraordinarily costly federal program, in the form of the stimulus; the bailout of banks, investment houses, and mortgage and insurance companies, as well as auto companies, all of whom were either the cause of our financial crisis or simply businesses that deserved to fail – all are justifiably matters of great concern, even to people who may have supported those acts as necessary if problematic measures in historically difficult circumstances. But in all this we return very quickly to the issue of credibility.

Obviously, credibility is an issue on the right and the left. For liberals – for me, as I, personally, am the subject of Shrink’s post and of his challenge – credibility is denied by timing. I have heard many conservatives and Tea Partiers say that they were concerned about the debt before Obama took office. That may be – it has been a growing threat since the Reagan tax cuts and defense buildup thirty years ago – but it was only at the very advent of the presidency of the first Black president, whose citizenship, legitimacy, and loyalty to the nation were immediately attacked, that for some people the issue became a matter of mobilized hysteria. For some people, too close a relationship between the centers of political power and of financiers and business interests – historically a hallmark of Republican and conservative government – became a threat to liberty only under the first Black, and Democratic, president. Healthcare reform, a policy matter of understandable philosophical difference, was willfully misused to distort the political atmosphere beyond even the norm: “death panels” was a malignant lie that will haunt the Republican Party through history. And if we were to credit the characterization of the new health care legislation by conservatives and Tea Partiers – as a policy as fully government-run and deprivatized as they claim, which it is not remotely – then we would have to consider that most of the other “democracies” of the world, rather than simply having the wrong kind of healthcare systems, are already freedomless, Nazi states lost behind, not an Iron, but a hospital room curtain.

Shrink quotes Walter Russell Mead about populist movements. In the same post, Mead tells us

That doesn’t mean that everything populists want works out.  Andrew Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States caused a depression in the short term and then left the country with a lousy, crash-prone financial system for the next eighty years.  His immensely popular Indian Removal Act that sent the eastern Indian tribes to Oklahoma was no triumph of justice and compassion.  And while a later generation of populists gave women the vote, it also brought in Prohibition.

Even on Mead’s own terms, these were no minor errors. Populisms are manifested in various levels of our combustible passions, which are not that by which our founders believed we should be governed. It may well be that with the deeper vision of greater distance we will see a connective tissue between the Tea Partiers and the Perot inspired movement that actually got as far as an organized Reform Party, and that political force actually influenced two elections. But it had no comprehensive, coherent, and sustaining philosophy and program distinct from its discontents, so it faded.

We did know, however, honestly, what was the originating force behind the Reform Party besides the sum of its unhappinesses. In contrast, everything in the origination and sustenance of the “grassroots” Tea Party movements has dishonestly masked their true nature, from the promotion and media manipulations of Fox News to the professional background organizing of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks to the California political operative Sal Russo’s Tea Party Express. Even the Tea Party Patriots, which positions itself as the true grassroots anti-Tea Party Express, has as a leader and its public face Mark Meckler, who has a substantial background working for the Republican Party.

All of this undermines credibility, and, rather than – curious term – prejudicing me, as Shrink puts it, disposes me against the Tea Party movement, as, in the matter of credence granted, Shrink is disposed for it, and against, apparently, the claims of John Lewis and Barney Frank.

Disposition, too, leads us to read the same polls differently or to pick and choose our polls. Here, from Marc Ambinder, is some analysis of the latest Gallup poll.

Gallup’s new survey of the Tea Party movement is instructive for what it didn’t find: the movement does not encompass Democrats, including independent-leaning Democrats, or more than half of true Independents. In other words, the 28% or so of adults who say they’re Tea Partiers are very much likely to vote Republican when the chips are down.

Pay attention to terminology: it’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

So Shrink challenges me:

Either find me some evidence that violent or racist threats are a regular occurrence at the Tea Parties (or have even occurred at the Tea Parties) or retract your comments about the unhinged Republicans and re-evaluate your own prejudices that lead you to so easily believe such scurrilous charges.

Well, now, I’ve written before to the point that it is almost venerable Republican tradition to think the republic in peril at the hands of Democrats, but how matters have reached, indeed, an unhinged extreme. Why would we conclude otherwise from the recent Harris poll reporting that 57% of Republicans believe Obama to be Muslim, 45% that he was not born in the U.S., 45% again that he is a domestic enemy of the United States, 42% and 41% respectively that he is racist and anti-American, 41% again that he wants to take dictatorial powers, 38% that he is “doing things that Hitler did,” 22% that he wants the terrorists to win, and the Late Night Top Ten number one reason that Republicans are unhinged: 24% that Obama is the anti-Christ.

A quarter of the Republican Party believes that the President of the United States is the anti-Christ.

Consider that the Harris organization would even think to pose that question.

I believe the evidence is in that despite the healthcare reform he so disfavors, Shrink will be doing booming business in the years to come.

But as to evidence regarding the Tea Parties, the following are the product of about twenty-minutes of googling, and are from Tea Parties nationwide. And I omitted much I might have included.

.

Now, I have responded to Shrink’s challenge. I have admitted an error in judgment and I have provided, I think sufficiently under present circumstances, evidence of the nature I and others attribute to elements of the Tea Party movement.

I have my own challenge in response. Far from any prejudiced inclination to judge people, parties, or issues rather than give them due consideration, I think any reasonable perusal of the sad red earth will demonstrate that I depart from liberal orthodoxies in multiple areas, thinking issues through independently, to what I believe are reasoned conclusions, regardless of where they take me. I challenge Shrink, then, to tell us from which among the findings of the Harris Poll he departs. I challenge Shrink, and his readers as well, to share with us what positions they hold on significant issues in which, rather than prejudging matters in a doctrinaire manner, they depart from conservative or libertarian doctrine and think independently.

The Open Mind VI: This is a Challenge

All Previous Posts in this series can be found at The Open Mind archives.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan 

Since the passage of the Healthcare bill, a new meme has taken root in the base of the Democratic party, amplified by their echo chambers in the Mainstream Media and the blogosphere.  According to this thesis, the Tea Party movement is primarily composed of  violent, and potentially violent, racists and radical right wingers.  The initial impetus for the propagation of this meme within the MSM was the post-victory march through the Tea Party protesters by a group of black Congressmen:

Tea Party Protests: 'Ni**er,' 'Fa**ot' Shouted At Members Of Congress

Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock.

Preceding the president's speech to a gathering of House Democrats, thousands of protesters descended around the Capitol to protest the passage of health care reform. The gathering quickly turned into abusive heckling, as members of Congress passing through Longworth House office building were subjected to epithets and even mild physical abuse.

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely shocking to me," Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. "Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday... I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins... And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus."

Surprisingly, despite the presence of a great many video cameras and cell phone cameras, no video of the event in which the offending words or behavior could be discerned were ever produced.  The lack of evidence has not inhibited many people from perpetuating the stereotypes.  To my disappointment, Jay Adler joined in last week:

“And You Know That It’s Right…”

Following up on yesterday’s post on the untethering of the GOP from reality, we have

Timothy Egan, The New York Times – “House of Anger“

Having welcomed Tea Party rage into their home, and vowing repeal, the Republicans have made a dangerous bargain. First, they are tying their fate to a fringe, one that includes a small faction of overt racists and unstable people. The Quinnipiac poll this week found only 13 percent of Americans say they are part of the Tea Party movement.

ABC News and new media everywhere – “House Democrats Face Violent Threats After Health Care Vote“

Rachel Slajda, TPMDC -”It’s The Democrats Who Are Fanning The Flames of Violence” say House Minority Whip Eric Cantor

by talking about the threats against them.

Jay concludes:

And I wonder how many of those who flirt with insurrection through its rhetoric, or maybe just spit at heroes of the civil rights movement and call them nigger, or prove themselves faggots by calling Barney Frank a “faggot” before putting the bit back between their teeth – I wonder how many of them are just so, so upset because Obama “palled around with terrorists” that they’re ready to do something about it, by God.

Lock and load.

My initial reaction was probably a mirror image of Jay's.  (Obligatory disclaimer: I have not attended any Tea Party meetings or demonstrations but I have tremendous sympathy for the baseline position of the Tea Partiers, ie our government has grown so large as to threaten our fundamental liberties and only a smaller government, that can pay its bills, will be able to safe guard our liberties.)  I doubted that "my side" would have stooped to such a counter-productive low.  Certainly there are always loose cannons in any crowd but the use of the racial epithet that is one of the "third rails" of American discourse seemed unlikely to me. 

My second reaction was to recall the too-numerous-to-count attacks on George W. Bush in the latter part of his Presidency.  BusHitler was only one of the common assaults on decency that was a regular occurrence at anti-War demonstrations.  (Zombietime has helpfully collected an extensive documentation of death threats against Bush during his Presidency, death threats that were remarkable for how unremarkable they were.) However, the argument that "your side did it, too, and worse" hardly excuses the kinds of verbal assault that the Tea Partiers were accused of. 

My next response was more productive.  I decided to look for actual indicators of violent rhetoric and actual physical attacks.  In the space of a mere 45 minutes I noted a number of items at Professor Reynolds site:

LEFTIST ISSUES death threats to Palin on Twitter. Have these people no decency?. No decency at all?

Posted at 8:19 am by Glenn Reynolds  

 A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE: Leftist death threats against Bush at protests.

Then, of course, there was Craig Kilborn’s “Snipers Wanted” moment.

Posted at 7:44 am by Glenn Reynolds  

MORE ON THREATS TO REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS: Jim Treacher has the audio of the Jean Schmidt threat.

Posted at 7:26 am by Glenn Reynolds  

OK, maybe Glenn was cherry picking. 

HARRY REID SUPPORTERS ATTACK TEA PARTY BUS!… Update: Breitbart Attacked!

Black Dem Rep. Who Was Reportedly Spit on by Tea Party Protester: I Never Claimed to Have Been Spit on Intentionally, Others Are Making the Claim on My Behalf, Refuses to Confirm it Happened..(Update) He's Full of Shit...

NH Dem Likes To Shoot Conservative Republicans

PROVOCATIVE, CONFRONTATIONAL RHETORIC FROM JAMES CARVILLE AND THE DCCC

There sure are a lot of threats going around the airwaves these days and few of them seem to emanate from the Tea Party.  But wait, didn't Jay link to some provocative rhetoric from a Republican Congressman?

“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”

Should an honest observer conclude this is a hyperbolic statement of political intent or an incitement to attack and kill one's political opponents?  As you consider your response to that question, consider this statement:

 ‘If They Bring a Knife to the Fight, We Bring a Gun’

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

The comment drew some laughs and applause.

[As an aside, George W. Bush had many faults, but he at least had the grace to refrain from the kinds of personal, petty exchange of epithets that Obama seems to revel in.  A President should never respond with an attack on an individual or group of citizens who are merely exercising their right to free speech; Obama has done just that, repeatedly, during his tenure and it is unbecoming of a President, and potentially quite dangerous.]

It is now two weeks since the initial attack upon the Tea Party movement.  The accusation that  a Tea Partier spit on a black Congressman has essentially been retracted.  No evidence of the "n-word" has yet been found on any of the videotapes of the supposed incident, leading  James Simpson at American Thinker to wonder about projection:

The Left's Ludicrous Accusations against Tea Partiers

It is a long and lucid article which includes a long list of violent attacks against Republicans and Conservatives by Liberals and Leftists.  A corresponding list of attacks by Conservatives and Republicans against Leftists and Liberals is non-existent, and not for lack of effort by the MSM.

The lack of substantiation for the "n-word" incident has led Andrew Breitbart to offer a challenge:

Barack Obama’s Helter-Skelter, Insane Clown Posse, Alinsky Plans to ‘Deconstruct’ America

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

The proof that the N-word wasn’t said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed, is that soon thereafter — even though the press dutifully reported it as truth — Nancy Pelosi followed the alleged hate fest, which allegedly included someone spitting, by walking through the crowd with a gavel in hand and a shit-eating grin on her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred the Capitol Police would have been negligent to allow the least popular person to that crowd – the Speaker – to put herself in harm’s way.

That crowd was a sea of new-media equipment. Not only were tens of thousands people armed with handicams, BlackBerrys and iPods, so also was the mainstream media there, covering every inch of the event. Why did not one mainstream media outlet raise the specter that perhaps a video would exist to prove the events occurred? I am still dealing with the same press telling me we didn’t prove that ACORN was aiding and abetting criminal activity because we “did not provide enough audio and video evidence.” (Insert laugh track.) Is there not a blatant double standard at play here? Nancy Pelosi tipped her hand that race was a central part of her strategy. She invoked the Civil Rights Act and compared it with the universally reviled health care bill. Her caucus is doubling down on the civil-rights rhetoric. There are no coincidences.

...

I smelled a rat so I offered at first $10k five days after the highly publicized alleged incidents happened. How could we be five full news cycles into this major controversy and not have any evidence? In fact, the existing footage showed the Congressional Black Caucus walking and never once moving their heads toward any “racist outbursts.” Is it conceivable that all of them stoically walked by the N-word as it was hurled 15 times — as they were holding up cameras to convey they were suspicious of the crowd to begin with?

We are now two weeks since the bill was signed and the $10k reward jumped to $20k in a day after it was mentioned on both Hannity and O’Reilly. At the Searchlight Tea Party event last weekend I upped the ante to $100k. [Emphasis mine-SW]  So where’s the evidence? Ken Vogel of Politico covered this story and said calls to Rep. John Lewis — one of the originator’s of the N-word storyline – were never returned.

Go to Breitbart's site for the accompanying videos; they are enlightening for what is not seen or heard, ie evidence of violent or racist threats.

SO, here is my challenge for Jay.  Either find me some evidence that violent or racist threats are a regular occurrence at the Tea Parties (or have even occurred at the Tea Parties) or retract your comments about the unhinged Republicans and re-evaluate your own prejudices that lead you to so easily believe such scurrilous charges.  While searching for the evidence, you might spend some time as well checking out how a smart liberal makes his case in the lair of "the enemy" without smearing the Tea Parties:

How Juan Williams Advances Liberal Ideas in Appreciating Mainstream Message of Tea Party Protesters

In their remarkable spirit of tolerance, the folks at the taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR)

. . . has asked Fox News not to identify its news analyst, Juan Williams, with NPR branding when he appears on Fox News because of outrage among its largely liberal listener-base.

That was just too rich.  A radio network which leans left on the taxpayer dime upset that one of its commentators appears on a private TV network that supposedly leans right.

And Williams is himself no conservative.  But, before these lefties begin their belly-aching, they should actually watch their NPR colleague on FoxNews.  Personally, I find his presence there one of the best things about the network.  Simply put, he’s a very smart liberal who engages his conservative counterparts.

You might also want to take the time to read Walter Russell Mead's rather brilliant exegesis on the tea parties, in which he places them firmly within the American tradition:

Do Soldiers Drink Tea?

At the tea parties here in glamorous Queens we make sure we serve genuine Devonshire clotted cream with the scones and we keep our pinkies carefully extended while lifting the delicate porcelain cups to our lips, but a very different kind of Tea Party has my friends in the upscale media and policy worlds gravely concerned.   To hear them talk, all the know-nothings, wackadoo birther wingnuts, IRS plane bombers, Christian fundamentalists out to turn the US into a theocracy, the flat earthers and the racists have somehow joined together into a force that is as politically formidable as it morally and intellectually contemptible.  These Tea Partiers, I am frequently told, are ‘reactionaries’.  They long for an older, safer and whiter America — a more orderly place where their old fashioned values were unchallenged, one in which ethnic minorities weren’t in their faces, gays weren’t demanding acceptance, and in general life looked more like “Ozzie and Harriet” and less like “South Park.”

I’m sure that description fits some of the people at some of the Tea Parties, but I think it misses the point.  Yes, the Tea Partiers represent something very old in American life and in some ways they want a return to traditional American values, but the traditional American value that inspires them the most is the value of revolutionary change.  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.

For completeness, here is one more from this morning: [HT: Instapundit]

Suicide Watch at DNC HQ: Four in 10 Tea Partiers Independents or Democrats

Go ahead, Democrats and your media lapdogs, keep insulting and smearing the tea partiers. Come November your obliteration will make 1994 look tame by comparison. Of course they'll probably just scoff at this poll and just continue to dig a bigger hole. I say have at it. 

It turns out that the MSM-Democratic slime machine now includes a great many Independents and Democrats among its "victims."

The Open Mind V: the Language of Conceptual Clarity

As has been established, Jay gets the last word.  Comments will be closed here and should be left at Jay's blog:

The Open Mind V: the Language of Conceptual Clarity

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.

The Open Mind V: Riposte

Power to the People!

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?

The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White

Jay Adler has returned from his extended vacation and returns to the Open Mind fray with a new post, complete with pictures!  All comments should be left at his site, and all previous posts in this series can be found at The OPen Mind archives. 

The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White

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.