Tag: anti-intellectual

I didn’t go to Harvard. You know, I went to the school of hard knocks.

Scott Brown, describing his time in the urban hellscape that is the Medford campus of Tufts University. Later in life, he took on the mean streets of Boston College Law School. Chestnut Hill is about to get real.
Also worth noting that Harvard tuition is ~$39,849. Tufts: $42,962. Warren’s actual alma mater, University of Houston? That would set you back $9,211.

Watching Christine O’Donnell debate Chris Coons last night, we were struck by how sensible a person like O’Donnell can seem, given our brain-dead political norms, if she has been prepared in a few modest ways. O’Donnell tossed off familiar claims about “supporting big government,” “raising taxes” and “supporting the special interests” (along with a few specialized inanities about having once been a “bearded Marxist”). But our discourse has been so dumb for so long, it truly sounded, by American norms, like she was making real statements.

Bob Somerby, getting it exactly right.
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!

Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.

Christine O’Donnell, on Evolution theory.

Why We Fail

Jonathan Chait looks over Paul Ryan’s economic proposals, notes their direct and admitted lineage to the pop-philosophy of Ayn Rand, and the worshipful treatment it receives at the hands of many in the right, including Ryan himself. He furthermore folds in the lunatic ravings of Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism, which makes the stunning, transitive “discovery” that American liberals like social programs, the Nazi party was made up of National Socialists, thus American liberals are Nazis) and opines:

They’re written by people who don’t understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme.

[…]

The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.

Um, no. We are not talking about any lack of understanding here, unless you count “willful lack of understanding used towards cynical goals” as falling under that rubric. If anything, they understand liberalism all too well. The work of Jonah Goldberg et al. is entirely predicated on making fantastical statements with little or no logical underpinning in the cynical hopes of selling a few books to the choir. Period. No different from Ann Coulter or, for that matter, Glenn Beck, though his brand of hucksterism veers more towards that of a TV preacher hawking prayer rags than actual “political thought” insomuch as you can call the Goldberg-style spew “thought.”
Their weapon is precisely in understanding that the Left will dutifully take these ideas up, just as Chait does here, as though they are seriously offered, based on serious thought, are entirely legitimate points of view, and thus worthy of serious discussions and/or use as the basis of policy negotiations going forward. By doing so, the Left signals that, far from being abject lunacy, these are the points of discussion and arguments for the political class, and thus are the goalposts ever moved rightward.

It’s the logical fallacy of “when did you stop beating your wife?” writ large, and the right uses it relentlessly and with disheartening effectiveness. Say: “Well, the Democrat isn’t a Nazi because…” and you’ve already lost, no matter how the thought ends; you’ve implicitly agreed that there is some reason to make a Democrat/Nazi connection and/but here are the rational arguments against such a thesis. This is horseshit. Induce laughter at the mere idea, the immense foolhardiness of it all, and you’ve won. Same idea goes for Palin, and all the rest of this anti-intellectual crowd. They must find themselves automatically marginalized from “Washington Society” until such time as something rational emerges from their festering maw. More than anything, they crave the attention. That is why it must be removed.

That the progressive or liberal thinkers in this country continue to entertain Goldberg et al. as rational, serious contributors to the dialogue of this country going forward is precisely how you lose. I agree that you can’t just ignore them, but you must never, ever imply that there’s even a grain of truth to what they are saying; they must, therefore, be made objects of derision. Their output is, after all, utter foolishness. You may as well let reports of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News drive Medicaid policy and coverage limits. As Rachel Maddow recently noted:

They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what’s-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive. It wastes a lot of time, it won’t work, and ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.

When these folks move to stop efforts to “sand off the roughest edges” they are not moving to compromise. They do not begin with “the best intentions.” They are moving to destroy, utterly, the progressive position and are willing to do so by any means at hand; and, they are not embarrassed. They don’t care how they look in the process, because their treatment thus far has shown that how it looks won’t matter. Not long-term. This is why they never apologize, never compromise, and never even bother to negotiate in good faith. It is because they fear no reprisal of any kind. So there’s no cost to these actions.
You, the progressive, must be prepared to move as ruthlessly. That the left’s first impulse is, inevitably, to find the “serious person” middle-ground is precisely why the country ends up with policies far to the right of the position of most Americans on any given issue. That this policy is then called “centrist” is precisely what is systematically making it harder and harder to even “sand off the roughest edges,” precisely because yesterday’s far-right position is today’s tomorrow’s “sensible, centrist compromise.” And, to add insult to injury, recent history has found Democrats coming to the table already having given away anything resembling a center-left policy; thus, any “compromise” made to push a bill through only results in de facto GOP legislation. Which, of course, they proceed to filibuster anyway.

The Democrats have got to start re-framing everything, every issue, soup to nuts. It won’t come easily, and it won’t be a short term project. Yes, this will also mean doing politically uncomfortable things like prosecuting Bush administration law breakers. But, more to the point at hand, it means screaming out every hour of every day of every week for the next decade or so, relentlessly and unavoidably, the moral, intellectual, and ultimately patriotic bankruptcy of the right. The American people need to be so sick of hearing about this stuff that they want to cry. Then, a few years after that, we’ll find that the polity have quietly and progressively become inoculated to the sort of brazen bullshit routinely peddled today such that they will simply not listen to it anymore, will react negatively and automatically to it, and the various outlets of today’s noise machine will gradually find themselves ignored. Accordingly, the right wing noise machine will cease to exist. Simple demographic shifts in the country will help, but the Left must act as well.
You can see faint instances of this in the last election. Noun/verb/9.11 and several other right-wing memes simply didn’t hold sway over voters anymore; all the while, users of these levers were made to look all the worse as the public finally saw at least some elements of the emperor’s new clothes. Unfortunately, those changes came about organically or accidentally for the most part. The Democrats need to see to it they begin to come about systematically.
This means message discipline. Part of the problem of the W-induced Democratic tidal wave was that it returned the Democrats to control before they had spent sufficient time in the wilderness to hone their message, to feel, deeply, the fierce urgency of now such that, when power came, they acted. Ezra Klein, commenting on Democratic resistance to using reconciliation to finish health insurance reform legislation, notes:

At this point, Democrats have passed health-care reform bills through the two legislative chambers charged with considering them. The president stands ready to sign the legislation. The roadblock is that 41 Republicans have sworn to use a parliamentary maneuver to obstruct any effort to smooth out differences between the bills. It’s pretty clear who’s stepping outside the traditional workings of the process here. Yet Democrats have allowed the other side to make it look like they’re the ones who are bending the rules! It’s completely astonishing.

It’s not astonishing, Ezra, it’s simply how things are done by the Left in D.C. today. Everything, and I mean everything that progressives get up to in this country needs to be aimed at this long term goal: re-framing the tenor of the political discourse in this country. Nothing in the near term matters as much as resetting the frame for political discussion back to where it was pre-Reagan. Nothing. You start with the lowest hanging fruit: jobs, bankers, Wall Street. The GOP literally has no defense to offer in these arenas. Make them pay for it.

I’m left fearing the future of America’s leadership on the world stage of science and technology.
This leadership, as any historian will tell you, drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide – almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. This is indeed what the far right know-nothings are toying with every time they make temporary political hay on their various anti-intellectual screeds; sadly, Tyson points to an outcome as predictable as it is inevitable. The wages of this sort of systematic denialism of empirical reality are secondary and tertiary status in research and, by extension, our national economic output and potential. Please do check the trend lines of global academic citations of North American science vs. Western European if you doubt me.