Author Archives: Peter Levine

the wrong kind of liberalism

I yield to no one in my commitment to the core moral principles of the center-left. In fact, I will support radical ideas if I am convinced that they will work. However, nothing annoys me more than sloppy argumentation and bad faith on the part of people who vote the same way I do.

A case in point is Joseph Epstein’s “Mystery in the Heartland” from the Oct. 7 New York Review of Books. This is a review of Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that I have not read. (Thus my criticism is solely directed at Epstein, not at Franks.) The puzzle that Franks poses is why people in America’s very poorest county, which happens to be located in rural Kansas, should vote for George Bush by 80%. Epstein’s answer is that they hate and demonize “the latte-drinking, school-bussing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists, whose elders have been ‘soft on communism’ while they themselves coddle criminals, women, and same sexers, eat brie, drink chardonnay, support Darwin, and oppose capital punishment in defiance of the ‘moral values’ of ordinary, God-fearing, flag-waving, assault-gun-carrying Americans.”

Why should people adopt this picture of the world? According to Epstein, deeply cynical conservative elites have fooled them into it, most recently by following Goering’s advice at Nuremberg. Goering said:

people don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

Epstein invokes Goering’s spirit in his critique of conservatism. There is also a huge photograph of the Reverend Fred Phelps to illustrate his review (in the print version). Phelps is an elderly Kansas pastor who holds a “God hates fags” sign.

But Epstein thinks that the real problem is deeper than cynical elites and hate-mongering reverends. In times of peril, people always turn to fundamentalism, to absolute certainty and stark moral simplicity. In such circumstances, liberalism tends to lose, because, as Learned Hand wrote, the spirit of liberty “is not too sure that it is right. … [It] is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.” Liberals understand what Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

I wonder if it has occurred to Epstein that he is absolutely certain about the advantages of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. He is a perfect fundamentalist who sees his opponents as wicked and ignorant and his own program as self-evidently superior to theirs. On point after point, he fails to understand the minds of his fellow Americans or to concede any possibility that he might be wrong. Viz …

  • Pace Epstein, George W. Bush is no Herman Goering. To manipulate public opinion into a war against a cruel dictator, if that’s what the President did, is wrong; but it is not the same as seizing foreign countries and slaughtering Jews by the millions. Also, the Iraq war, whatever its motivations, has turned into a net political liability for Bush, who could otherwise run as the victor of Afghanistan.
  • The Reverend Fred Phelps is horrible. I refrain from linking to his site because I don’t want him to get extra points with Google. But even if he is personally dangerous, he is completely marginal. His Anti-Defamation League profile notes that many of his “congregants are related to Phelps by blood. His wife, several of his children and dozens of his grandchildren frequent the church.” This is not a man with a mass movement behind him. On the contrary, his views contradict the explicit principles of evangelical Protestantism. Using his picture to illustrate a critique of conservatism is like appending a photograph of Fidel Castro to a critical article about liberals.
  • Epstein thinks that Kansans have been snookered into privatization of electricity and Social Security and rollbacks of the capital gains tax. I’m against those policies, too. But we ought to ask whether Kansans have good reasons to support what the center-left has offered them as alternatives. Is it possible that they don’t want to pay taxes–or even ask rich people and corporations to pay taxes–because they distrust existing public schools, welfare systems, and regulatory agencies? Maybe it’s not people with glasses of chardonnay who worry them, but bureaucrats and public employees who patronize them and shut them out of public institutions–and deliver mediocre results.

    • Surely a liberal in the tradition of Learned Hand would start by asking what’s wrong with liberalism, before he excoriated his opponents in such a way as to make his side look completely blameless.

    memories of high school

    I graduated from high school two years after A Nation at Risk (1983). Although my friends and I had some fine teachers, the curriculum and standards were pretty slack back then. As I recall, we rarely had to bring homework home; it could be done during the lunch break. However, there were two good things about my schools in Syracuse, NY. First, the population was split almost exactly 50/50 between African Americans and Whites. That was fairly unusual in those days, and extremely rare today. Last year, I helped some students in Maryland to conduct an oral history of race in their high school, and they found that the late-70s was the high point of integration.

    Secondly, I had several friends and classmates who were intensely intellectual, and specifically interested in the moral aspects of politics and public policy. In addition to me, three others are philosophy professors today, one is an economist who teaches public policy, and one is a lawyer who writes about American history. We wasted plenty of time back then, but we also spent some of the hours that today we’d have to devote to homework reading good books for fun and arguing about what we’d read.

    We mostly read different things, of course. But philosophy of science was popular, and most of us read Thomas Kuhn and Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind’s I). I think the most popular fiction included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and anti-totalitarian political novels by Koestler, Malraux, and Orwell. More than one of us read Solzhenitsyn, although I certainly didn’t finish any of his novels. Mid-twentieth century American fiction was still influential: Faulkner and Hemmingway, especially. I read a lot of Freud’s case studies. I didn’t read much political commentary, but others subscribed to The New Republic and everyone read the New York Times, although I cannot remember how regularly.

    Five years later, I enrolled at Oxford for a doctorate and discovered that the University offered very few graduate seminars, no qualifying papers, and no exams. However, there were many intense graduate students, and we organized ourselves in informal seminars. Once again, I missed the benefits of a rigorous and demanding curriculum, but found that free time can be deeply educational if your fellow students push you.

    why the questions were good in Friday’s debate

    Commentators are saying that the Missouri citizens who asked the questions last Friday did a good job. They tend to note this with a tone of pleased surprise or patriotic piety. (“You see, ordinary American folks can do almost as well as professional reporters when the stakes are high.”) My take is different. I think ordinary people will almost always ask better questions than professional journalists, not because Americans are particularly thoughtful and well-informed, but because reporters have been trained to avoid the most obvious–yet vital–questions.

    It’s extremely useful to ask candidates what they would do about a given problem in the future. This type of question is hard but obviously fair. It elicits information about knowledge and competence, values and priorities, and policy choices–in short, the “merits and measures” of public figures (to quote James Madison about what the press should report).

    I count eight questions asked last Friday that were essentially about future policies. (Several more touched on the future while also mentioning character or past decisions.) In contrast, when President Bush gave an extremely rare White House press conference last April, the professional reporters who confronted him asked virtually nothing about current or future policies. Instead, they asked questions about the President’s personality that cemented their reputation as the hostile “liberal media” without actually giving Bush any difficulty at all. If you are asked, in effect, “Why are you so stupid?” then you don’t have to show any knowledge or address any difficult problems. You can just say something polite but forceful, and the reporter will look rude and biased.

    It doesn’t occur to ordinary people to ask that kind of question. And the reason is fairly simple. They are trying to make up their minds about whom they should choose in November. Thus they need to know about candidates’ “merits and measures”–period. In contrast, journalists are trying to tell a story about the electoral conflict, the horse-race. For them, the interesting questions are: Who’s down and who’s up? How will candidate A reply to the charge made by candidate B? What tactic will A use? How does he intend to campaign from now on? What does he say about B?

    A question or two of this type would be OK, but reporters’ relentless attention to the horse-race cheapens politics, lets incumbents off the hook, and makes professional journalists distinctly worse than other people at conducting political interviews.

    Continue reading →

    Derrida (the death of the author)

    Jacques Derrida died on Friday. All the obituaries I have seen have fundamentally mischaracterized his thought and the movement he inspired, ?deconstruction.? (The Times gets the biographical facts right but avoids defining deconstruction by stressing its obscurity.) I found Derrida annoying when, as an undergraduate, I watched him sign students? t-shirts and then cross out his name to put it ?under erasure.? I criticized him in my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (pp. 175-181). After I finished that book in 1992, I ignored him. So did many others, for he became increasingly irrelevant?a fate that may have bothered him much more than angry criticism. So I don?t think much of Derrida; but we ought to associate his name with views that he actually held, not with the vaguely Marxist (materialist and historicist) opinions that are often pinned on him.

    Derrida claimed that certain prejudices, which he called ?logocentric,? are to be found in ?all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading or interpretation? [Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), p. 46.] These prejudices include a preference for the world over language, for reality over fiction, for sounds over letters, for the signified over the signifier, and for masculinity over femininity. A classic deconstructionist reading of a text involves (a) demonstrating that the text presumes these dichotomies and (b) calling the distinctions and value-judgments into question. For instance, one might very plausibly argue that Dante combines irrationality, verbosity, femininity, and falsehood in the figure of Francesca da Rimini, whereas God is male, rational, silent, and true. Drawing attention to this dichotomy would be deconstructionist criticism.

    Derrida went beyond standard deconstruction, however?starting at the latest with Glas (1974). He knew that any argument against logocentrism would itself be logocentric, just because it would be an argument. He wanted to get outside a form of thinking that was, according to him, universal. To achieve ?exorbitant? effects (ones that went outside the normal orbit), he played with styles of writing. For example, Glas consists of two parallel columns, one inspired by Hegel and the other by Genet. Hegel was a great systematic thinker who could incorporate all alternative views within his comprehensive system. Criticizing Hegel would be playing the philosopher?s own game. So Derrida analyzed a completely different author in the same book, discussed disgusting bodily functions, stretched puns beyond any reasonable limit, and said, in effect, ?Philosophize this.?

    Everything depends upon the universality of the ?logocentric? prejudices that Derrida identified. If they are omnipresent and important, then Derrida was engaged in a radical project of some interest (but of doubtful value). I think, however, that calling the West ?logocentric? was a massive oversimplification. There are binary oppositions in our thinking, but also trinities and unities. Some of us believe that written text is merely a representation of sounds, which are ?primary?; but others disagree. If the thinking of the West is deeply diverse, then there is no way out of its ?orbit.? In that case, Derrida invented a rather easy game for himself: escaping prejudices that plenty of people had always disagreed with. Some deconstructionist readings are trenchant and plausible, but Derrida?s own works mainly look ridiculous.

    Jack Balkin has a nicer take, as does Michael B?rub?.

    should the draft be an issue?

    In our recent poll with MTV (pdf), we found that 78% of young Americans oppose a draft, but 32% think there probably will be one. Graffiti and posters on my campus suggest that there is a pretty widespread rumor that Congress is considering a conscription bill. The root of the rumors may be Rep. Charlie Rangel’s legislation to start a draft. Rangel is a liberal dove who sees universal conscription as a way to spread the burden of war to wealthy people and reduce the chances of foreign interventions. Republicans scheduled a vote on Rangel’s bill on Tuesday so that they could kill it (in a 401-2 vote) and try to end the draft rumors.

    I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, young people have concerns about a possible draft, and those concerns are not foolish. If politicians seriously debated the issue of conscription (and more generally, who should serve in uniform), they would respond to young people’s concerns and perhaps increase their interest in politics. Furthermore, there are serious arguments in favor of conscription, as summarized in my Institute’s Quarterly (pdf).

    On the other hand, I personally believe that there is zero chance of a draft. I know that the Pentagon is having difficulty meeting its recruitment targets, but only by a few thousand people. There are 3.5 million 18-year-olds. To increase recruitment by drafting a large proportion of the young population makes no sense. To draft only one in fifty thousand would create a “negative lottery” and undermine morale in the military and society at large. It would be far cheaper to increase the bonuses for signing up or lower the eligibility requirements a notch. To be sure, we could face a draft after a massive terrorist attack on US soil; but then conscription would be the least of our problems.

    I’m somewhat unwilling to respond to youth concerns by demanding a public discussion of the draft, if there is no real prospect of conscription.

    (Rock the Vote has been pushing the issue, but in a generally responsible way. See this page.)

    Update: Matthew Yglesias cites even higher levels of concern about the draft among young people (51%) than we found and argues that there’s a real risk of conscription if Bush is reelected. Yglesias is young enough to be called up, so no wonder he’s worried.