The American people have caught on to their scam, and resent their arrogance and condescension:
For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.
The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.
This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.
Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren’t progressive enough. But it’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They don’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology. Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.
He shouldn’t use the word “progressives” without scare quotes, though. There’s nothing progressive about their agenda. Or “liberal.”
Time for them to misappropriate a new label.
Mead. Great takedown of Greenberg, but I can’t seem to read him all the way through anymore without getting the record needle screech.
It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent and hard work to a greater say in the nation’s affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap colleges rather than political science in expensive ones.
THEY would claim it’s the CREDENTIAL. And maybe talent. But “hard work”??? That is completely anathema to them.
One way of encapsulating the aims of people drawn to figures like Sarah Palin is to say that these are people who want adult America to look more like high school, with intellect less highly regarded and rewarded, and people smarts and character counting for more.
We have a community organizer as commander-in-chief. What could be more “high school” than that? I’ve got no problem with intellect. And suggesting a disconnect between that and character is just wrong.
To understand the populist anger that seethes in a significant portion of the electorate, policy wonks and political intellectuals need to go back to those dark adolescent days and think about the resentment and anger they sometimes felt when the social hierarchy seemed hostile and unfair.
Well, I have anger, but I don’t characterize it as “populist”, or “adolescent “. Or related in any way to “social hierarchy”. If that advice is directed at the current crew, I’d say go ahead. Whatever came out of it couldn’t possibly be worse than what’s being produced today. And there might even be some entertainment value in it.
In light of the ‘tipping point’ theory of tea party dominance, I think certain core assumptions about progressivism need to be popularly challenged.
This Mead article compares the progressives to ‘smart kids’ and the populist surge against them as the ‘jocks’. That may explain some of the tea party spirit, in particular as it relates to the specific popularity of people like Sarah Palin, but it does not explain the tectonic shift in American political ideology that is now occuring.
Progressivism is the result of a certain kind of education. ‘Liberals’ claim that their ideas are objective and based on the highest level of evidence. But that’s not so!
One could get into the particulars of it – we could discuss positivism, Kant, or any other such root philosophical cause. Ayn Rand did a great job pointing out the significance of this. Regardless of the veracity of her particular conclusions, she was right about one crucial thing: philosophy and epistemology are as critical to the interpretation of and reaction to ‘evidence’ as the evidence itself.
The modern university system is the last remaining medieval institution in our civilization. It operates with systems of tenure, credential, rank, orders, hierarchies. Such a system of ‘knowledge production’ would inevitably favor epistemological systems that values truth more for the role it serves in ranking people. In other words, truth is approached from the point of view of burdens of proof that can determine who is most ‘correct’ within that system. Positivism is a natural fit for this. From Kant to modern positivism, there is some sense of an acontextual ‘real reality’ which is the standard against which purely intellectual rankings are determined.
But… knowledge is contextual. In the case of humanity, it is contextual to human values. These values are, ultimately, determined by individual humans.
If you had a system of knowledge production that was perhaps more market based, it would value discoveries that provided contextually valuable gains to civilization. But alas, our academies are lost in pursuit of some Platonic ideal that they already admit is beyond our ability to know…. What is the definition of insanity again?
And so ‘truth’ in society is determined by these lunatics, people who are convinced of the certain scientific fact of AGW yet disdain the ‘epistemic closure’ of people who are willing to entertain the diverse opinions of many experts, holding firm only to core human values (like faith and family).
Unfortunately, institutional academia possesses a near monopoly on intellectual capital. For example, it should be easy to prove that FDR’s policies were economically disasterous, and the 1947 spending cuts saved our economy. Some early studies have begun to do this rigorously. But the ‘truth’ of Keynesianism is accepted because of philosophical value conclusions before there is a chance to devote the labor of strong minds to the study of the subject.
This brings me to the point of my long comment. Progressivism is the product of the instituational framework of modern academia. We need to reform that institution with a focus on philosophy and core values. Over time, the evidence that supports the classically liberal point of view will be more rigorously established and progressivism will have almost no credence in the marketplace of ideas.
Ideas matter to people, even the uneducated. Ideas control the reaction to materialistic history. What has happened with this ‘tipping point’ is that as more people become more educated (majority 8th grade educations to high school to college) and as ideas spread more freely (internet), you get a ‘crowd-source’ of intellectual capital that can somewhat compete with the establishment. But we cannot rely on ‘indie’ knowledge forever. At some point, we need to read a little Ayn Rand prehaps, and think about radical institutional and intellectual reform in higher education.
I just read the first comment and have something additional to say.
In my view, high school drama isn’t some adolescent peculiarity, but rather a reflection of the natural social condition of man. Brown-nosing is more important to people than true worth.
It’s funny, I just watched “Cowboys and Aliens” as well as “True Grit”. Both featured socially unfavorable characters who proved to have true inner worth where it counted. Because of the role of the cowboy as archetypically American, I was led to think very deeply about what this meant vis-a-vis my experiences in high school and indeed adulthood.
I almost wonder if our public school system does not unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally considering Dewey and progressive education theory) condition people to worry too much about social pecking order and ‘being cool. The ultimate ‘uncool’ type in my generation is the awkward ‘homeschooled kid’. Yet the ‘homeschooled kid’ is the most honest and objective type.
Ironic how the indifferent cowboy has been appropriated by those obsessed with how they are viewed by others….
I’ve been a victim of a couple adult social hit-jobs. As a smart and confident introvert, I’m a threat I guess. I have value to the group, but don’t give any credence to the existing pecking order.
In these situations, the bully is not the bully. The bully is the people who fear the guy at the top. You can see it in their eyes: incredible fear of appearing ‘weird’ or, rather, ‘unfavorable’.
And, extrapolating this overdrawn metaphor to society at large – I think most anyone would agree with me that people are taught to be skeptical of or even fear unconventional thought. But, I feel that there is a much more insidious effect of this fear. Stifling open debate on the public stage is one thing, but when you have a people who are constantly afraid of one another’s unknowable expectation, you have a people who lose all their dynamism.
Our public arena has been dominated by the left since the New Deal, but Americans themselves have gone on being American. That is changing.
So, in conclusion, let’s reform lower education as well.
I don’t think it’s an intellectuals against the jocks thing. That’s just what they want you to believe. The intellectuals — or rather, the pseudo-intellectuals who tended to dominate things like student government — were allied with the jocks — who were usually the school stars due to the ridiculous elevation of high school sports in America to something close to sacred — against the average student (who both groups used like servants or cattle) and any kid who didn’t “fit in” — a designation which included real intellectuals. This high school dynamic has passed into American political and cultural life, with obvious effects.
BTW, despite her sporty background, Sarah Palin always struck me as the type of average, bright kid that the high school power groups I outlined above will put up with as long as they “know their place.” They are not, for example, allowed to seek entrance into any politics higher than the local level. This is why the the chattering classes were so outraged when McCain picked her for a running mate. It’s okay for a “mundane” like her to rise to the level of governor of some out-of-the-way state no one “important” goes to, but one step from leading the nation, a seat that Our Betters had long marked out for one of their own? This could not stand.
How about we start calling so-called “progressives” the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Promotion_of_Virtue_and_the_Prevention_of_Vice_(Saudi_Arabia)