I once heard a female professor of mathematics talk about an encounter she had with a senior colleague soon after taking her first faculty job. He told her that he didn’t think she belonged there because he knew for a fact that women weren’t good at math. Coming from a math professor, of all people, the reasoning is mind-boggling — surely he understood the basics of probability distributions. It could be true that on average women are less capable mathematicians than men and also true that this particular woman was more capable than most men, including a certain professor standing in the hall making an ass of himself at that very moment.

That’s the basic problem with believing that you’re smarter than a whole class of other people — it tends to make you stupid. That anecdote is my favorite example (and it’s just an anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt — I have no reason to doubt the woman who told it but I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory). It’s been on my mind because of the exchanges last week between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan about race and IQ. I have a second-favorite example, too, and unlike the first one it’s documented in fantastic detail. It’s been sitting on my hard disk for a long time, part of a collection of half-written blog posts that just gets more impressive every year. I guess now’s the time, finally.

The presumed fool in this story is also a woman, and the operating assumption is that she’s a scientific ignoramus. Not because she’s a woman, of course, but because she’s a feminist, which is a much better reason. Specifically — not that it really matters, because they all think alike — it’s Amanda Marcotte, prima donna of Pandagon. Feminists hold science in contempt and don’t even believe in reality, and you don’t need to know any science to see what a scientific ignoramus a person like that is.

Her opposite number is Jeff Goldstein, the guru who for 10 gleeful years has been serving glistening gobs of Protein Wisdom from a can. Just like Newt, he sounds like a smart person is supposed to sound, only you don’t have to be dumb to think that, just easily impressed. Like David Thompson, for instance, who’s our unreliable narrator, or something.

A lot of the story is a pretty typical episode of the echo chamber follies, just with an especially united front of willful ignorance. Goldstein ratchets the pretense up with a load of his patented intellectual spam. Meanwhile, Thompson takes the knee-jerk assumptions about who’s smarter up a notch, commenting that Goldstein “probably [has] quite a few IQ points” on Marcotte. So guess which one has a clue about basic evolutionary biology?

Once upon a time almost 3 years ago, Amanda Marcotte wrote a blog post about Nadya Suleman (“Octo-Mom”). She starts it by quoting a blogger who had assumed that “the desire to have children is a very normal, biological urge” and had then speculated that the urge had gone haywire in Suleman’s case. That’s not a biological urge, Marcotte counters — it’s socially constructed.

For David Thompson, this is just the kind of entertaining nonsense he’s come to expect.

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings - specifically human men - have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

When it’s the commenters’ turn to get their licks in, Thompson’s message is boiled down to its lowest-common-denominator essentials: Marcotte is an agenda-driven fool and her ideas are pure rubbish.

So when birds and bees feel the urge to have baby birds and baby bees, it’s biology. But when humans feel the urge, it’s a cultural construct. [posted by carbon based lifeform]

This is stupidity so high and rarefied that it leaves one gasping for breath. It is on exactly the same level as stating that the urge to find food is a cultural construct. [David Gillies]

Isn’t she self-nominating for a Darwin Award? [georgesdelaotour]

No, there’s nothing to think about. This woman is a notorious idiot, nothing she says is interesting or sensible or intellectually provocative, she’s the most predictable form of brainless, ideological zealot. [Amos (my emphasis, though, because what could be more perfect?)]

Unfortunately, if we ‘educate’ vast numbers of people beyond the level of their intelligence, we will get dross like that spouted by Marcotte and Freethinker. [paul ilc]

Ignorance can be a lot of fun in the right atmosphere, and Thompson is good at cultivating it. The idea that it’s biology when bees feel the urge to have baby bees is above and beyond, though — seems like “carbon based lifeform” may have watched “Bee Movie” and “Bugs Life” a few too many times. Exactly one person gets the basic biology right, but his mild comment that he’s “not sure there is a ‘reproductive instinct’” doesn’t seem to have left any impression [1]. Thompson may have had some doubts. He seems to be fishing around when he drops in a comment to say that Marcotte “seems to be claiming that the species’ inclination to reproduce (or become pregnant, or to parent or whatever) is real only as a malleable social construct.” And if he’s wrong, he suggests, it’s because of Marcotte’s “knotty and erratic thinking.” Bullshit! Her description of the biological inclination is just fine — there’s nothing knotty or even social-contracty about it.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence whatsoever for the popular theory that women are born with the urge to breed that’s as real as the sexual urge. It doesn’t make sense that we would have an inborn urge to have babies that is a separate thing from the urge to have sex—sex seems to be nature’s way to convince most of us, at least, to breed. Reliable contraception was only invented, relative to human history, about yesterday. We don’t evolve so quickly that a natural urge to procreate would have to evolve to keep us alive in response to our newfound ability to separate sex and procreation.

It’s actually Thompson who is imagining that humans are un-biological. Marcotte is insisting that the human reproductive drive is biological, i.e., the same as in every other animal. Unlike Thompson & Co., she understands that the only way to get an inborn, biological urge is to evolve it. The only way to evolve an “urge to have babies” is if that urge translates into the act of mating. But all that’s needed to get animals to mate is an urge to mate, and for hundreds of millions of years that’s done the job. Lady rabbits don’t sidle over to their partner, feeling somehow incomplete, and say in bunny body language, “Oh honey, I wanna have a baaaaybeee!” The call of the wild is “let’s get it on!” There’s absolutely no evidence that humans have evolved a different urge. What we’ve evolved is the ability to manage the urge, because we can make the conscious connection between sex and babies.

Marcotte’s piece has shortcomings, of course. Sex is not the only innate urge involved in human reproduction — unlike guppies, humans can’t just squirt the little suckers out, we have to raise ‘em up, too. And I agree with the general impression that she writes dogmatically about social constructs. It’s as if they were hashed out by a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room and handed down to posterity. As far as science goes, though, it’s not ignorance or contempt that stands out but matter-of-fact acceptance and the way it’s juxtaposed with uncritical articles of feminist faith — that’s how it looks to me, anyway. [2]

Thompson and his merry band of wankers are fixated on a dumb feminist, though, so they’ve airbrushed out any detail that might make you, like, stop and think “hmmm, maybe she’s right about that.” They’re left with a pin-up that makes them feel real smart, and when she says “social construct” and “patriarchy” it’s just… soooo… hhhhhotttt! Any sign that she has a brain would obviously spoil the fun.

It’s an awfully pathetic and mean-spirited way to get your ego stroked, but it’s not all scorn and derision in Thompson’s clubhouse. Down in the comments, he takes a moment to look up to someone he admires.

James S: Does Marcotte actually respond to criticism?

Thompson: [F]rom what I’ve seen,… if it’s realistic criticism and challenges her recurring assumptions (of which there are so many) then it’s very rarely engaged, and not well. If you browse the, er, exchanges of views between Marcotte and Jeff at Protein Wisdom, you’ll see that Jeff generally makes a point of engaging with criticism and specifics, sometimes at great length. Sadly, this favour isn’t returned. As I said, a visit to Pandagon is not unlike stumbling into some kind of church. It’s a gathering of the faithful.

James S: Wow. Anyone who proves her wrong is a sexist, racist hater.

Thompson: In fairness, there are probably quite a few IQ points between Jeff and Amanda, but the point remains that one of them engages with criticism in a serious (if sometimes mocking) way, while the other does not. Instead, she denounces unbelievers. Actually, it can be fun to watch Jeff fence with his more substantial critics. The exchanges with Professor Ric Caric leap to mind. … In many ways he’s like a smarter Marcotte and uses similar tactics but with, ahem, Academic Gravitas™. [emphasis added]

The really fascinating part of that, for me, is the way he sets Caric up as “a smarter Marcotte.” Any fool can look at the right-thinking people and the wrong-thinking people and figure out who’s smarter. But when you have two equally benighted individuals, what do you do? There are a couple of knee-jerk heuristics Thompson might have used, but maybe it’s a little more subtle and more personal than that. If the smarter one is “more substantial,” and if by “substantial” you mean that he produces a lot of text that lets our hero cut a dashing figure as he thrusts and parries, then the nod definitely goes to Caric.

From what I’ve seen, anyway, Goldstein thoroughly enjoyed his encounters with Caric. In July 2007, Caric presented a laundry list of all the deplorable things he’d found on PW and all of its connections to other deplorable sites, people, and ideas. Goldstein had no trouble answering and dismissing the individual points, and overall he was delighted with Caric’s disapproval, delighted to return it. A few days later, Caric was back with a conventional homily on racism, framed with a few sarcastic jabs at Goldstein. It was a perfect opportunity for Goldstein to play literary critic and expound his own iconoclastic philosophy of race. To be accused of bigotry by an certified Professor of Mindless Diversity is mother’s milk to Goldstein.

Maybe there have been exchanges like that between Marcotte and Goldstein. They’re natural adversaries, for sure, and in a tribalistic way they could be really useful to each other. What I found, though, is a one-liner Marcotte posted about a month after those exchanges with Caric:

The perfect person to deny that many conservative men act out of a sense of anxious masculinity is a guy who pulls his dick out 25 times a day to make sure it’s still there.

So you can see why “Academic Gravitas™” makes for a “smarter Marcotte” — unlike the real thing, it never draws blood. And it’s not like Goldstein is above this kind of thing. He’s happy to respond in kind in Marcotte’s comments and then with his own post. More recently he put Scott Eric Kaufman down as “an intellectual vagina” who’d birthed an “Asian gal’s ping pong ball.” It’s an amazing genital-racial metaphor, especially when you consider that the ping pong ball — some guy who sent Goldstein an obnoxious email — is presumed black.

Anyway, Caric is just a guy with a blog, like the rest of us peons. Goldstein and Marcotte are big-time bloggers, and there are good reasons for that — they’re both fluent, productive writers who project a strong personality, though their styles are worlds apart. Marcotte is general-interest magazine kind of writer — Newsweek, not The New Yorker. Aside from a bit of feminist lingo, maybe, and niche topics like skepticism, anyone who can follow The Daily Show can drop in on Pandagon and get what Marcotte is writing about. Goldstein demands more time and effort. His writing is a performance, it directs attention to the writer, and it’s full of arcane material that pulls you into his world. His style puts him in the center of a circle of readers who are focussed on his very conspicuous erudition, among other things. The impression of intelligence isn’t necessarily false, and if for some reason you had to guess his IQ and compare it to Marcotte’s, that’s probably the thing to go with. But the comparison is a lot more interesting than that. You can get a sense from their styles of the general character of the two writers, with the political slant and subject matter factored out — Marcotte is upfront, accessible, and unguarded while Goldstein is showy, manipulative, and entrenched.

Goldstein is a very gifted writer, though, no doubt about it. When he’s not being self-consciously intellectual, he’s a superb hard-hitting, mad-as-hell editorialist. He also has an impressive ability to generate baroque highbrow text that’s also impassioned and readable, and he can get a lot of verbal mileage out of a small idea.

Because for Limbaugh’s signs to acquire the meaning the Obama camp wants viewers to take away from their presentation, those signs must be entirely severed from their original intent. And it is only at that point - when the interpretative process is left up to the intentions of a receiver who has naught but the signifiers to go on, thanks to the dishonest and intentional removal of all the indexes to original intent that occur inside the signified context of the utterer (eg., metatextual clues signaling irony or parody; think of lines being lifted from Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and being used by Obama to suggest that Swift “wants to exterminated the poor of Ireland”), that one can argue that Limbaugh’s piece “means” what the Obama camp suggests it means.

I think Marcotte would just write something like this (the part in bold corresponds to the passage above): The two lines were sarcastic when Limbaugh said them, but there’s nothing to clue you in about that in Obama’s ad — the ad makes it seem like Limbaugh was being serious (and then she’d add something like, Good Work! Maybe Obama’s finally grown some ovaries!).

In the post I just quoted, Goldstein uses eight dense paragraphs to explain that deceptive out-of-context quoting is a “crass rhetorical trick.” That’s what it takes, I guess, to show how this commonplace principle of intellectual integrity is actually a profound manifestation of intentionalism. The bottom line, anyway, is that “once one understands intentionalism, one realizes that there is nothing else:”

we either appeal to the intent of the author in order to “interpret,” or we privilege our own intent, which is what happens when we refuse to allow the original signs to act as anything more than signifiers upon which we then graft our own meaning.

Goldstein takes this idea of intentionalism very seriously, as you can see. It’s one of his signature causes. He takes it personally, too. Look what happened when Scott Eric Kaufman wrote that Goldstein had “fully embraced” the theory of Ayers ghostwriting for Obama, when in fact he had only used the theory as a hypothetical in a “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency.” It was a gross misrepresentation of his intentions, and Kaufman did it knowing full well that “those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts.” Goldstein threw an epic temper tantrum, and who can blame him?

So naturally, when Goldstein criticized Marcotte’s “octo-mom” post he was careful to privilege her intent. After all, it’s a matter of basic critical integrity, as applicable to a loathsome enemy like Marcotte as to a friend like Rush. And after about 43 seconds of careful study, he realized that the primary, topical purpose of the article is to dismiss the notion that there’s a biological urge to have babies, first of all because it’s a myth, and second of all because it puts the onus of reproduction on women and their inchoate yearnings (he couldn’t help chuckling at the thought of a feminist trying to win an argument by invoking science).

Ha! Goldstein already knows all about social construct theorists and don’t need to bother with no stinkin’ text! And anyway, Marcotte’s post was predigested for him by his warmup act, Darleen Click, who realized that “no where would [Amanda] state something so positively about homosexuality or transgenderism… no, those aren’t subject to change at all, no social construct there. Heh.” (it’s so very taxing, you see, for Darleen to have Amanda all up in her head not stating things). When Goldstein stepped in with some thoughts about “Ms Marcotte’s (predictable) position,” he congratulated Click for the “nice gotcha moment.” “Social construct theorists like Amanda are often trapped by inconsistencies in their own arguments,” he notes, and then uses some big, bonecrushing words to trap her between one (predictable) position he misrepresents and another that he imagines. If there’s one thing those folks really love it’s a gotcha moment, and lack of evidence is no reason to miss out on the fun. Comments she left under her post suggest that Marcotte has a somewhat more subtle position on homosexuality — she writes that it’s still “real” even though “[it] has an environmental component” — but there’s no way Goldstein could have known about that. As far as the claims Marcotte really did make, Goldstein’s language is impressive but vague. He’s kind enough to clarify in the comments, though, and then he’s clearly wrong. [3]

Anyway, the important thing is the ultimate intentions of Marcotte and her social constructivist red army, which are “to seize political control by seizing control of how ‘meaning’ is determined.” It’s “a clear indication that the institutionalization of ‘response’ theoretics has progressed to the point where we must, indeed, either fight back or else become subsumed by interest groups bent on controlling ‘meaning’ by purely rhetorical force.” Goldstein is a formidable rhetorical warrior. Nobody is working harder to keep the world safe from the insidious spread of pernicious literary theoretics than he is.

He’s also an intellectual fraud, a billowing gasbag of pedantry, hypocrisy, and self-pity, and the perfect poster boy for the puffed-up but ultimately hollow cult of superior intelligence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised or bothered to find out that his IQ is quite high — it would just be more evidence of how little the number tells you about the quality of the product.

NOTES

1. ^ It’s not just because he gets the fundamental biological fact right that Rich Rostrum’s comment stands out. There’s also a tone of actual curiosity, as if there might be something of interest other than the partisan implications.

   I’m not sure there is a “reproductive instinct”. There are instincts and drives to engage in behaviors which lead to reproduction, and to care for young, but the process is too long and indirect to be reflected in a “drive”. Animals mate and produce young - but do they _know_ that mating leads to offspring? I don’t think so.

   As far as I know, only humans are capable of performing actions in conscious expectation of results that will not occur for a long time (such as planting seeds to grow food to be eaten several months in the future). I don’t see how such awareness could drive the development of an “instinct”, though it can certainly combine with the desire to care for children. Note that people will make very strong efforts to obtain adoptive children, even when those children are of a different race and thus not possibly the adopter’s genetic offspring.

   It’s not that case, by the way, that every other comment is the kind of pure strident stupidity that I excerpted in the post. As usual with comment threads, there are lots of tangents. I see the redoubtable Amac in there — a person who’s quite capable of calling out nonsense, but here he’s one of the tangents. There are also a couple of smart comments at the end that came in months later and weren’t part of the discussion/celebration.

2. ^ The most polemical parts of Marcotte’s piece, to my mind, are when she makes these cultural constructs sound like conspiracies, writing things like, “culturally constructed differences… exist to demean and oppress women” and “the mythological ‘biological clock’” is essentially “an effort to Other women” (my emphasis).

   It may or may not matter that she doesn’t include parenting with biology, and that’s the basic problem — who knows? Parenting is a very complex, long-term, and subtle thing, especially compared to sex, and I don’t see how the urges that guide us to raise our offspring (and guide our offspring to make sure they’re raised) could be so precisely targeted that they don’t have spillover effects. The fact that people choose to adopt and it works out is pretty good evidence of that. And when it comes to possible differences in the reproduction-related urges of the two sexes, the mammaries loom large.

   In spite of what Thompson and all the rest of them think, it’s clear from Marcotte’s blogging that she has an active interest in science and she’s fairly well informed. She identifies herself as a skeptic, too, so she regularly argues for evidence-based ideas and against faith-based ideas, and does it fairly well from what I’ve seen. I have the feeling, though, that the conspiratorial patriarchy is represents a faith-based core of feminist ideology that she hasn’t (or at least hadn’t) managed to confront. The process of social construction is surely more organic and more interesting than that. That’s how it seems to me, anyway, based on the diverse social systems of non-human primates and the work of feminist biologists like Sarah Hrdy.

   One symptom of Marcotte’s polemical thinking is indifference or intolerance of the inconvenient experience of other women. This was extreme in the wake of Marcotte’s notoriously vehement comments about the Duke lacrosse case. She was apparently unwilling to tolerate even respectful disagreement from other feminists, including one from Duke. The local perspective in a situation like that is more than just another opinion, and a commentator working from a distance needs to be open to it. It’s not the last word, but it’s the voice of experience and it usually complicates the picture. Marcotte, it seems, preferred to keep it simple.

   In the much less charged context of her “octo-mom” post, Marcotte is of course much more understanding. She acknowledges that some women experience a strong urge to have children and she wants to reassure them that she believes their feelings are “real.” Nonetheless, the way Marcotte sees it, these women have internalized a system that’s designed to demean and oppress them. It seems kind of patronizing, doesn’t it? This is a realm where a whole lot can be guessed but very little is known. There is no evidence-based explanation for the feelings those women have. The truly skeptical approach to the situation is to respect the unknown. The polemical approach is to collapse it down to a line of defense.

3. ^ This, from Goldstein’s post, is Darleen Click’s “gotcha” after he’s bloated it up with pseudo-erudition:

   Deconstructing — and so re-conceptualizing — the “social construct” that Amanda suggests was built up by patriarchal forces to trick women into thinking the desire to procreate and “mother” is a biological imperative is, to her way of thinking, good. Re-conceptualizing the “social construct” that tricks homosexuals or the transgendered into thinking that their behavior is biologically driven, on the other hand, is reductive, evil, and Christianist.

   In short, she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because it puts her in charge of deciding for everyone else what is right and what is wrong, socially speaking.

   He does manage to identify a desire to “mother” as one the things that Marcotte is writing off as a social construct. I don’t see why the word is quoted, though — a desire to mother seems like a pretty good guess about where that urge to have a baby comes from. It’s probably just verbal filigree (thus the quotes), since it goes with a “desire to procreate,” which is another version of the pseudoscientific thing that doesn’t exist.

   Responding to a reader, he summarizes his take on Marcotte’s position more clearly, and he manages to be more clearly and totally wrong, both about evolution and Marcotte. The puppeteering is shameless, too. In the post, it’s the fabricating of her supposed position on homosexuality and “she wants to have it both ways — and she wants this precisely because….” Then in the comment it’s, “when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune….” It become even more obvious that Goldstein is spouting pure bullshit.

   What Amanda is saying is that the evolutionary imperative to reproduce doesn’t really exist — that it is social construct. It is REAL, she concedes, but real as a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, and so adaptable to change by human will alone. In a sense, this is true: we can often constrain our biological insticts by way of agreed upon social contracts, and so create social constructs to militate against biological norms.

   But that’s not what Amanda means. Instead, she is arguing that there are no biological imperatives, only social constructs that act AS IF they were biological imperatives.

   This is nonsense, and as both Darleen and I (and others) noted, when pressured, it becomes obvious that Amanda would change her tune with respect to other biological imperatives as it suits her political needs.

Glenn Beck’s three-part exposé about George Soros last November (last year!) energized a whole lot of critics, and not just the usual suspects from the Left — one of the smartest critiques is on reason.com, home of the hard-headed libertarian. But Beck’s incoherent sprawl tends to defeat sober criticism and reduce it to outrage. Even Michelle Goldberg’s piece, with that great line about the “symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles,” gets a little lost in its outrage (no doubt I’ll follow suit). As usual Jon Stewart is a standout — with Beck, satire is probably the best and most cogent criticism (there’s a follow up, too, where Stewart puts on the glasses).

With this kind of high-profile media-celebrity-driven controversy, the follow-up sideshows can be at least as meaty as the main event. The one that I like is a kind of family sitcom starring Fox News chairman Roger Ailes as Dad and Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman as Mom. It’s great comic pairing. Ailes is the tough-talking corporate bigwig — an epic bullshitter who cuts himself infinite slack when he needs to cover his ass. Foxman is the soul of propriety. Glenn Beck is their wacky step-son — he may get out of hand sometimes, but like Papa Ailes says, at heart he’s “so intelligent and basically sensitive.” And then there’s filthy rich Uncle Rupert, but he doesn’t make an appearance in this episode.

We meet Ailes at the Daily Beast, being interviewed by Howard Kurtz. Obama comes up right away, of course (“Sipping coffee from a ‘Fair & Balanced’ mug, Ailes insists that his channel lives up to the logo in its treatment of the administration”). And there’s no avoiding Rupert Murdoch, whose $1 million donations to the Republican Governors Association and the Chamber of Commerce were, Ailes acknowledges, bad public relations, but also “his right” — “I don’t think anyone can tell him what to do with his money.” Probably Ailes would acknowledge that it’s also George Soros’ right to give $1 million to Media Matters so they can dog Fox News. All we learn from Kurtz is that Ailes is “still fuming” about it. He fumes about Jon Stewart, too, in the second installment, because Stewart “hates conservatives” and “makes a living by attacking [them] and stirring up a liberal base against it.” For Ailes, it turns out, the political is a personal insult, when it comes from the other side. [1]

But we’re really here to find out about Glenn Beck, and Ailes doesn’t disappoint. For one thing, he’s got a handy excuse for Beck’s “inflammatory outbursts, such as calling Obama a racist” — “everyone who ad libs for a living makes mistakes.” But he does “admit[] to asking Beck to watch his tone.”

“He and I have had conversations and lunches where I say, ‘What the hell are you doing, man?’…Beck trashes Republicans every night. I’ve said to him, ‘Where the hell are you going to get your audience if you keep this up? You’re trashing everyone.’”

It’s funny, because when Ailes was talking about living up to “Fair & Balanced,” he bragged, “We are interested in the truth. We’re interested in two points of view; most networks aren’t.” So, those two points of view must be right (aka Republican) and wrong — that way you always know which one to trash. Any more than two and things would be too confusing. It’s a great system, though as I’ve browsed the shows I have yet to find Beck actually trashing Republicans.

Ailes waves off most of the criticism of Beck’s assault on Soros, except for the criticism from Foxman and the ADL, which he takes credit for softening. His little outburst about the Nazis at NPR brings in Foxman, too. In fact, softening Foxman’s criticism of Beck and apologizing for his own indiscretion ended up dovetailing very nicely. [2]

The ADL, which has singled Beck out a few times before [3], came down pretty hard on Beck after the second show in his series. Foxman wrote:

Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top. For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific.

A day after that statement was published, Beck produced a letter he’d received from the ADL a few weeks earlier. In it, Foxman thanks him for being “a friend of the Jewish people, and a friend of Israel.” Salon.com checked with Foxman and he said he still felt that way. It’s just that “there are certain things [Beck] doesn’t understand, which have led him to make insensitive remarks.” Reporter Justin Elliott explains, “The dynamic here is a tension between the ADL’s dual identities as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel advocacy organization.” Actually, the ADL seems to be quite a bit more complex than that, and the identity that’s played off against pro-Israel advocacy in this case is Holocaust awareness, where the issue isn’t civil rights, it’s accuracy and propriety.

That’s the tension that runs the Fox & Foxman family dynamic, for sure, and in the mid-November episode, it leads to a lot of apologizing. The first apology, in fact, is in that letter thanking Beck for his friendship to Israel. A mass mailing from the ADL had “inadvertently identified [Beck] on a list of celebrities who had made anti-Semitic statements over the past year.” It was “clearly a mistake,” and really the work of “an independent, third-party contractor”, but Foxman hoped that Beck would accept his “personal apologies.”

About a week later, it was Ailes’ turn to write a letter and apologize. He was going to write anyway, since “[he] wanted to follow up on the Glenn Beck situation with regards to George Soros.” But he also needed to clear the air about that unfortunate crack he’d made about the Nazis at NPR (this exchange of letters was reported by Michael Calderone for Yahoo News, and he didn’t just quote them, he posted scans).

This morning you might be receiving calls because I used the word “Nazi attitudes” to describe the NPR officials who fired Juan Williams. I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word, but I was angry at the time because of NPR’s willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough.

First of all, Ailes didn’t just use the “word” “Nazi attitudes.” He fired off a triple: “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism.” But like Beck he was just ad-libbing, and any reasonable person knows that words like “Nazi” or “racist” are bound to slip out now and then when you’re ad-libbing (or, as some people like to say, “speaking”).

Is it really possible, though, for a broadcast executive to be confused about the difference between firing and censoring? I doubt Ailes has any trouble keeping them straight when he’s the one doing the firing. Things might get ugly if he ever fires Beck or Hannity, though, since they suffer from the same opportunistic confusion as their boss.

Near the end Ailes gets around to saying he’s sorry.

I’m writing this just to let you know some background but also to apologize for using “Nazi” when in my now considered opinion “nasty, inflexible bigot” would have worked better.

Strictly speaking, between noting that he’s not just apologizing and sanitizing his insult, the main event takes about five words — “[I] apologize for using ‘Nazi’.” Foxman’s response, in a personal letter that was adapted for a press release, couldn’t have been more gracious, though.

I welcome Roger Ailes apology, which is as sincere as it is heartfelt. Nazi comparisons of this nature are clearly inappropriate and offensive. While I wish Roger had never invoked that terminology, I appreciate his efforts to immediately reach out and to retract his words before they did any further harm.

It’s sweet the way they kiss and make up, but as public displays of affection go it’s pretty nauseating. I mean, seriously — as sincere as it is heartfelt? Most of Ailes’ letter — when he isn’t chit-chatting about Rupert or flattering Foxman for his “heroic” judgment — is disingenuous grumbling about the abuse he and his suffered at the hands of a couple of rabbis. For all I know, it’s true that the rabbis “used [Fox News] in an unscrupulous manner.” But Ailes fudges a number of details in his favor. Or leaves them out, like the reason his people had to have a “cordial conversation” with the rabbis about the “sensitivity of the Jewish people.” It wasn’t “the use of the word Holocaust,” as Ailes implies, it was Beck’s on-air comment that Rabbi Simon Greer was engaging in “exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany.” [4]

And what does it mean that Ailes “retract[ed] his words before they did any further harm”? What kind of harm, and to whom? Clearly not to the executives of NPR — they’re irrelevant to this little transaction, other than the offhand re-insulting. I suppose that if being called out as Nazis did some harm to them, they don’t have anyone but themselves to blame. After all, NPR didn’t live up to its high-minded, taxpayer-funded ideals, and they victimized Ailes’ friend Juan Williams in the process. Fox, at least, has the guts to put its ideals up on a pedestal and mock the living daylights out of them — they don’t mince around pretending to be all objective.

In his letter to Ailes, Foxman explains that the problem with “Nazi comparisons” is that they “denigrate the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust.” So I guess it’s supposed to be those memories that are saved from further harm by the retraction. In theory I guess that’s fine. But Ailes isn’t worried that he’s denigrated any memories any more than he’s worried that he hurt the feelings of those weasels at NPR. He’s worried that Foxman “might be receiving calls.” And Foxman writes back that, yes indeed, he was getting “many calls this morning from those offended and disturbed by your use of the expression ‘Nazi attitudes’ in reference to officials at National Public Radio.”

So, that’s that. Everything’s straightened out and it’s time to roll the credits. Sure, Ailes is a bull in a china shop pointing at everyone else when stuff gets broken, and he never really figured out what he was apologizing for. But there’s nothing more endearing in a sitcom marriage than overlooking your partner’s peccadillos.

The denigration of memories was a driving concern in the larger controversy about Beck and Soros, and not just to the ADL and Foxman. “Glenn Beck may have thought he had an easy target in the controversial financier George Soros,” James Besser explained in The Jewish Week, “but he didn’t reckon with Jews who care about Holocaust remembrance and don’t take kindly to reckless charges being thrown into the political maelstrom.” The article concentrates on Foxman’s statement (quoted above) about how “inappropriate, offensive and over the top” Beck was when he mischaracterized Soros’ actions as a teen trying to survive the Holocaust. But Besser gets the same sentiment from other Jewish leaders, too, including Beck’s left-wing nemesis Simon Greer, and also from the Christian president of the Interfaith Alliance.

It’s natural that the outcry would concentrate on the claim that really hit a nerve. I certainly agree that the claim is reprehensible and deeply ignorant. But according to Foxman, it was “horrific” for Beck to make it “as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros.” So what about the “broader assault”? It’s hard to imagine that such outrageous character assassination wouldn’t be serving some very questionable purpose. In practice, though, the horror and impropriety of Holocaust denigration overshadowed any concerns about Beck’s larger message (sadly, this is what righteous sensitivities tend to do — short-circuit debate and criticism, or else turn it into an argument about “political correctness”).

Near the end of his editorial, Greer does get around to the way Beck “evokes anti-Semitic stereotypes from the ‘devaluer of many currencies’ to ‘advocate for one world government’ from ‘anti-American’ to ‘thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us.’” But it was Michelle Goldberg who developed the bigger picture. What she found was “a symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles” signaling an ideology that “tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain.” Even Beck’s title — “The Puppet Master” — is faithful to Nazi propaganda, which, as Goldberg points out, depicted Jews as “drahtzieher — wire-pullers.”

It’s not that Foxman isn’t attuned to these classic anti-Semitic narratives — of course he is. A little over a month before Beck’s Soros series, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez flamed out with a public display of bigotry. For Foxman it was a teachable moment, and he responded with an editorial about the resiliency of age-old stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Outbursts like Sanchez’s are easy to “shrug off” as aberrations in climate of tolerance, he writes, but they “do speak to what is unique about anti-Semitism and what urges all of us not to be complacent about the subject.”

Anti-Semitism shares with other forms of hatred a number of well-documented elements such as stereotyping, discrimination and fear of difference.

What has been the special characteristic of anti-Semitism and what goes a long way to explain why it has lasted so long, why it has been so lethal and why it exists in so many contradictory settings is the idea that Jews are not what they appear to be, that they are, in fact, secretive, poisonous, all-powerful and acting as a cabal.

As a result, since according to this view, reality is not what it seems to be, Jews can be and frequently are conjured up for all kinds of ills of mankind.

Here is George Soros’ five-step plan for taking over our country, from Beck’s first “Puppet Master” episode.

Let me go back to what I told you in the beginning. George Soros is creating a new structure through a Shadow Party. He infiltrates politics. He pulls the same play book out every single time. Ukraine, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Georgia and Slovakia. The same thing. Here it is step by step.

Step one, you form a shadow government. […]

Step two, you control the airwaves. Has he done that? Fund existing radio and television outlets or start your own outlets? We showed you this chalkboard yesterday. This is his media empire. NPR, FreePress, it’s all here.

Step three, you destabilize the state. […]

Step four, provoke an election crisis…. […]

Step five, stage massive demonstrations and you accuse opponents of voter fraud through radio and tv stations that you control.

So, let’s see. Secretive? A shadow party that “infiltrates politics” sounds pretty secretive. Poisonous? Maybe it’s not the best term for destabilizing the state and provoking an election crisis, but it’s not far off. All-powerful? Well, “you control the airwaves,” don’t you? Acting as a cabal? Yes, the whole scenario is massively conspiratorial. Overall, not a bad match with what anti-Semites believe the Jews are really up to, according to Foxman. Goldberg and Greer point out the same kind of thing (there’s a full rundown of Beck’s anti-Semitic stereotypes at Media Matters).

What Sanchez plugged into was “the age-old conspiracy theory about Jewish control of the news media.” And here’s Soros with “his media empire.” I have to admit that there’s a problem at this point — as media empires go, it’s kind of pathetic (but go to about 4:30 in the video at the top of the post — there’s more stuff on the chalkboard). So maybe it’s hard to take Beck seriously as a Jewish media empire conspiracy theorist, but I don’t get the sense that we’re supposed to judge anti-Semitic rants based on their credibility.

Here’s the real issue that separates Sanchez from Beck: “Anti-Semites never see[] Jews as individuals but rather as a coordinated group to serve Jewish interests against the interests of others.” Beck certainly treats Soros as an individual, and more importantly, as a person acting not for but against Jewish interests — unlike Beck, who can and does point to his consistent, vociferous support for Israel.

Goldberg acknowledges that it’s hard to read Beck’s intent as anti-Semitic. A prominent Jewish columnist she spoke with said he “wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as ‘as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.’” She wonders if Beck “waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently [and] picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance.” After reading Mark Lilla’s thoughtful perspective on Beck, I’m inclined to say that “the most gifted demagogue America has produced since Father Coughlin” wouldn’t just stumble into those waters, he’d be irresistibly drawn to them. Anyway, in general, Beck is not bothered by incoherence, and I don’t think it’s a big stretch for him to wallow in what Goldberg calls “the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism” and at the same time be a big supporter of Israel and the Jews.

I have a hard time accepting the idea that Rick Sanchez’s stupid, self-pitying rant on satellite radio is, for Foxman, a firing offense but Beck’s hours of prime-time conspiracy mongering isn’t worth a second thought. He still trades on the image of a nefarious and all-powerful Jewish financier. It seems to me that his efforts to portray Soros as the anti-Semitic son of an anti-Semitic mother just add a new level of monstrosity to the stereotype. It’s true that his variations on the theme don’t target the Jews as a body, they target one Jew who has set himself decisively apart from the tribe. For the rest of the cast — the dark mass of co-conspirators — Beck has “progressives,” “radicals,” “socialists,” etc. instead of Jews. It’s an easy transposition. If the issue is unadulterated hatred for the Jews, then I guess Beck gets a pass. He certainly doesn’t get one, though, if the issue is bigotry, intolerance, and extremism.

I suspect that a broader critique of Beck would be a hard for an organization like the ADL to pull off, though. The one blogger I found who argued against Goldberg, for instance, saw nothing in her article but an accusation of anti-Semitism. He’s not exactly wrong, because the accusation is hovering throughout and she never disavows it, but still, he completely misses her point (no surprise there — he was deeply uninterested in getting it in the first place). Is it possible to make a broadly convincing case that a person who doesn’t mind Jews is nonetheless trading in vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes? Maybe not, or not without generating a lot of confusion and ill-will.

So, given the range of things that the ADL is supposed to care about, I don’t think it’s obvious what Foxman should do or say about Glenn Beck. But from what I’ve seen it looks like the role he’s settled into, sensitivity trainer for the Fox boys, is an awfully cosy arrangement — I’m not sure that he cast himself very well. But as Beck said, “no one is a bigger defender of Jews and Israel than me.” If you’ve got that, how bad can a little dog whistling be?

NOTES

1. ^ Ailes is especially offended by the sanctimony of Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity — satire is fine, “but don’t give me a social speech on the steps of the Washington Monument” (that’s Beck’s job). But I bet the real issue is that “Jon Stewart and his merry band of TIVO-ing staffers” watch Ailes’ network too damn closely. They tend to catch the mistakes, whether they’re committed while ad-libbing or editing tape.

2. ^ Actually, it’s not clear what part Ailes would have played in getting Foxman to soften his criticism. The ADL press release is dated Nov. 11. The next morning Beck’s people posted their letter from the ADL thanking Beck for his support. It seems like that’s what generated the softening, which was confirmed by salon.com before noon on Nov. 12 (according to the timestamp on the article).

3. ^ Searching the ADL website for “Beck,” this is what I came up with:

   • In May 2007, Foxman wrote, “Glenn Beck’s linkage of Hitler’s plan to round up and exterminate Jews with Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness of global warming is outrageous, insensitive and deeply offensive.” It was in response to this claim:

     Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world.

   • In May 2009, in a civil rights post entitled “Pundits, Bloggers Blame Immigration for Swine Flu”, an ADL analyst wrote that Beck “used airtime during his April 27, 2009 radio broadcast to discuss the alleged propensity of ‘dying’ Mexicans to ‘flood [the] border.’”

   • The Nov. 2009 special report “Rage Grows in America: Anti?Government Conspiracies” singled Beck out as “fearmonger-in-chief.”

     Though much of the impetus for anti-government sentiment has come from a variety of grass-roots and extremist groups, segments of the mainstream media have played a surprisingly active role in generating such segment. Though a number of media figures and commentators have taken part, the media personality who has played the most active role has been radio and television host Glenn Beck, who along with many of his guests have made a habit of demonizing the Obama administration and promoting conspiracy theories about it. Beck has acted as a “fearmonger-in-chief,” raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government.

   • In July 2010, the ADL expressed concern that Beck was indulging in the anti-Semitic canard that the Jews killed Jesus.

     The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) welcomed a clarification from Glenn Beck for remarks on his July 13 broadcast on Fox News Channel where he made reference to the death of Jesus, including the comment that, “Jesus didn’t come back from the dead and make the Jews pay for what they did.”

4. ^ The primary reporting on this meeting and dispute between Fox News and Rabbis Simon Greer and Steve Gutow is again by Michael Calderone, who got ahold of “an email Greer sent to key supporters and allies of his organization.” Perhaps that’s the “cheap press release” that Ailes complains about.

   The first stage of the controversy (summarized by Media Matters) started in mid-April — Greer wrote an editorial attacking Beck as a “con man.” Near the end of May, Beck shot back, saying that Greer was engaging in “exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany.” Greer responded right away to call Beck on his ignorance. Soon after that, Gutow sent a letter to Rupert Murdoch and a meeting was set up between some rabbis (3, actually) and Fox News executives. Both sides, it seems, thought that the meeting was cordial and productive. Greer eventually got a letter from Beck that wasn’t an apology but it “felt like a peace offering.”

   When Greer talked to Calderone, “he said that Ailes and Cheatwood agreed ‘that the use did cross a line’” (use, I guess, of the Holocaust). This seems to be the part the pissed Ailes off. It’s the clearest point of dispute, anyway. Fox News senior vice president Joel Cheatwood told a reporter that “he and Ailes did not agree that Beck crossed the line with his ‘death camps’ comment. ‘We absolutely stood behind Glenn Beck 1000%,’ he said” (yes, that’s the way it was reported — one thousand percent).

   Presumably, if Greer had “quietly work[ed] with us to solve the problem internally,” as Ailes commented in his letter to Foxman, nobody would have had to know how many percent they stood behind Beck.

   Greer’s reaction to the Soros series was an editorial entitled “Glenn Beck reneges on promise to rabbis”.

The grim reality is this: the biggest gains in educational achievement for minority students, especially African Americans, occurred in the 1970s. With the exception of a few years at the turn of the century, progress has stalled nearly everywhere, despite all the hope we’ve put in charter schools and in fads like a much-touted but now-discredited New York experiment (one of the more absurd manifestations of our faith in markets), offering cash incentives to families whose children regularly attend classes.

Why did the racial gap narrow so much in the ’70s—and why has it stalled since? It’s not because the ’70s was a period of great educational innovation. Instead, it was the one moment in recent American history when there was still political will to support educational integration. Around the country through the mid-’70s, school boards, state departments of education, and the federal government supported plans to desegregate schools.

Many of those plans were voluntary: some were court ordered. The road to integration was bumpy—I don’t need to recap the whole busing brouhaha here (except to remind you of Julian Bond’s famous reminder that white folks had no problem putting their kids on buses in all-white suburbs: “it’s not the bus, it’s us.”) Even if it wasn’t a panacea, when it was tried, integration worked. But it wasn’t tried for long.

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Choose the best answer to complete this sentence: According to the author of this passage, all but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow would be pleased because…

A) the achievement gap between black and white students hasn’t narrowed since the ’70s.
B) plummeting public support for integration has allowed some school districts to resegregate.
C) the idea that black children will be uplifted by mere exposure to white children strikes some black parents as racist.
D) the Supreme Court recently struck down school integration plans, even when they’re voluntary.

I hope the answer is obvious. But I took out the author’s second to last sentence (I also left out a parenthetical plug for the book The American Dream and the Public Schools). Here’s the full final paragraph:

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Based on the redacted text, the answer to my pretend SAT question is B. Both A and C are vaguely plausible but misconstrue the overall thrust and D comes out of nowhere. D becomes a plausible answer when the sentence I took out is put back in. But is the author — University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue — singling out just the court decision for hypothetical praise? It seems to me that he isn’t, that what would please a bunch of moldy old segregationists would be the fact of continued segregation, which in Sugrue’s narrative is reinforced and extended by the court decision.

According to KC Johnson, though, Sugrue is actually “branding the Roberts Court with a Jim Crow brush.” Well, not a brush, exactly, because how do you brand with a brush? What Sugrue is really using is “extraordinarily charged rhetoric.” Johnson made the claim in a post last August on Minding the Campus, and he has no trouble backing it up — he just lifts the two sentences that make his point and ignores everything else (I’ve quoted about a third of Sugrue’s piece).

The core of Johnson’s argument, if you can call it that, is a piece of precision typecasting. He introduces Sugrue as a “serious scholar” who’s produced “first-class work on important topics” — he’s “hardly an academic crank.”

Nonetheless, two recent items from Sugrue have been, to put it mildly, striking. First was his participation in the “Crying Wolf” project, the scheme to pay graduate students and younger professors to produce “research” that conformed to the Wolfers’ political agenda.

Then came this assertion, at Ta-Neishi [sic] Coates’ Atlantic blog: “And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.”

Though he didn’t link to the decision, Sugrue presumably was referring to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, in which the Roberts Court struck down a Seattle school-assignment scheme…. […]

People of good faith can, and do, disagree on the merits of the Parents Involved decision. It was, after all, decided by a 5-4 vote…. But could any fair-minded observer seriously maintain that the decision would satisfy “all but the most hardcore advocates from the Brown v. Board days”?

Just as a matter of form I’d expect something like, Sugrue, guest blogging at the Atlantic, wrote a piece lamenting the declining fortunes of school integration. His focus is mainly the Obama administration and the public at large, but he takes one wild jab at the Supreme Court: “And more recently, the Roberts Court…” (I don’t actually think it’s a wild jab at the court, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of Johnson’s post). Coming from Johnson, though, the context-free attack quote is nothing new or surprising. In the closest parallel I know of from the lacrosse case, a nine-word quote is used to show one-sidedness when the message, in context, is exactly the opposite. The one distinctive piece of information Johnson mentions as he frames Sugrue’s quote is the name of the host blogger (it’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, though). Why, of all things, choose that?

Johnson treats the quote as if its meaning is self-evident (it’s not *) but to understand its significance you need to know about the author. You don’t need to know very much, though — just two things. On one hand, he’s a fine scholar who’s written, according to Johnson, “one of the three or four best books currently in print on 20th century American political culture.” On the other hand, his name recently appeared on the list of advisers to this highly questionable “Cry Wolf” project. The contradiction unmasks Sugrue as a particular campus character — the impeccable scholar who, after so much time in the mind-numbing bath of far-left groupthink, has no idea what counts as reasonable in the real world. Bill Chafe is probably the closest counterpart in Johnson’s Wonderland at Duke. But for an example of a professor whose critical intelligence goes out the window when he goes partisan, it’s hard to do better than Johnson himself.

Perhaps Johnson’s easy certainty that he’s ferreted out a cryptic campus radical is an honest reflection of his experience in academia, and it’s hard to argue with experience. Whatever the source of his convictions, though, what he’s articulating is the well-worn logic of a demagogue exposing dangerous subversives. Most of the work is done by the assumptions about the hypnotic effect of groupthink on the left-wing herd. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of milking a tell-tale quote for all it’s worth. It’s easiest to pull off if you believe, and it looks to me like Johnson is totally convinced that the couple of lines of Sugrue’s that reached out and grabbed him are deeply revealing and also completely disconnected from the text they’re embedded in.

The post about Sugrue seems to be an attempt to flesh out Johnson’s claim, in an earlier post, that the participation of scholars of Sugrue’s caliber in the Cry Wolf project “illuminates the depth of the corruption in the contemporary humanities.” The project got a flurry of attention early in the summer, when Andrew Breitbart got hold of an email requesting proposals (read it here). The goal outlined in the email is to build a library of “policy briefs” that could be used to construct counterarguments when conservatives try to shoot down progressive initiatives by “crying wolf.” Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the flap, which was kind of hot for about a week and played out mostly on Breitbart’s Big Journalism and Minding the Campus (at least that’s what I’ve found of it).

When Patrick Courrielche broke the story, he called the email RFP “a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.” And he thought his readers might be surprised that there’s a cerebral side to the labor movement. Labor unions “have always been considered” (by “[m]any conservatives and libertarians,” that is) “the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the ‘persuasion of power’” — “a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers.”

The next day, Kurt Schlichter outlined how the project would threaten the tax exempt status of the project leader’s institution. Like his Big colleague Courrielche, he also used his first paragraph to make it clear that he was dealing with wrong-headed people with an unsavory project.

The ‘Cry Wolf’ leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent ‘research’ he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for.

This is just what you’d expect from a media conglomerate run by a man who “want[s] it to be in the history books that [he] took down the institutional left” — he’s no Arnold B. Truthington of Accuracy Lane, nor are his writers. That’s not to say that no legitimate issues were raised in the dozen-plus pieces Big Journalism ran about Cry Wolf — some of Schlichter’s points might have merit, for instance. But he and Courrielche are up front about their Big Bias, and I appreciate that — it saves me the trouble of trying to sort the truth from the fantasy and fabrication.

Big Journalism isn’t all slick polemic, though. There’s also room for a plain-speaking Tea Partier like Liberty Chick. And it turns out that the less you know about actual research at actual universities, the more clearly you can see how vastly catastrophic this thing is.

A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.

In fact, these “so-called scholars… intend to ‘undermine the credibility and arguments’ of those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints to theirs” (**). Liberty Chick misses their even wilder claim, that they’ll do it with 2000 word “policy briefs” that are “well documented and scrupulously accurate.” Everybody knows that real Americans who love their country (and the First Amendment) undermine their opponents with poisonous rhetoric and brutally edited videotapes. These so-called scholars, it’s clear, must be stopped, or else.

The critics with university connections aren’t quite so scattershot, they’re a little smarter about context, and they raise some plausible issues on the margins. Basically, though, the two with the most to say were happy to cry wolf along with Breitbart. The way Erin O’Connor reads the Cry Wolf email, it’s asking researchers “to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work.” For KC Johnson, the bottom line is that the project “imperils academic integrity” (or at least “little doubt exists” that it does — these things have to be properly hedged). It’s “faux scholarship” based on an “Alice-in-Wonderland conception of what constitutes academic research,” since the conclusion is preordained, and of course with these shifty leftists it’s always Wonderland one way or another.

Is it really so hard to tell the difference between original, peer-reviewed research in the social sciences and a policy brief that draws on that literature? Apparently these critics believe that it is. It’s hard to tell, though, because they never get real about what they expect the Cry Wolf briefs to look like and what sort of scholarship would be scrambled or undermined. Their case is strictly pie-in-the-sky — “disinterested scholarship,” “academic integrity,” “academic freedom” and the “search for truth.” Vocabulary notwithstanding, they’re either as starry-eyed as Liberty Chick or they’re playing dumb.

They also failed to get real about the intermixing of scholarship and partisanship, something that no writer on Minding the Campus can claim to be ignorant about. The site is a wing of the Manhattan Institute. According to a New York Times piece they proudly quote, the Manhattan Institute’s VERITAS project is in the business of “finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas….” (my favorite part is that they’re hoping to bring back “a triumphal interpretation of American history” — it’s not so much about the issues, I guess, as about the poor old boys’ battered egos). I’m not bringing VERITAS up because it’s equivalent to Cry Wolf — it’s not at all. Other conservative initiatives might be — Inside Higher Ed has a little about that. All I want to suggest is that if the institute really believes in “offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university” and all that other high-minded stuff on the “About Us” page for Minding the Campus, they’d put the issues in context and they’d put their cards on the table. Most of the time, from what I’ve seen, the site is just a mild-mannered cousin to Fox and Breitbart, far more interested in rhetorical leverage than anything else.

On Cry Wolf, though, O’Connor was the main academic water carrier for Breitbart (she’s not on Minding the Campus but on her own blog). After about a day of following the story on Big Journalism she was wondering why all she heard from the rest of the academic world was “thunderous silence.” When were the institutions involved going to distance themselves from the “blatant political advocacy work” and “initiate disciplinary proceedings”? It was like she was taking her cues from Liberty Chick, who feared that the Wolfers “risked discrediting the entire educational sector as a respectable source for research.” All that for a mere $50K! That’s a lot of bang for the buck. VERITAS couldn’t even manage to buy triumphalism at Cornell for $50K.

* Who do you end up with when you take the “advocates of Jim Crow” and set aside “all but the most hardcore”? For me that calls up the folks who voted enthusiastically for the likes of Orville Faubus and George Wallace — a whole lot of very ordinary white southerners, including a number of my relatives — and excludes the ones who were willing to bomb a church. It seems to me that Sugrue’s “extraordinarily charged” rhetorical flourish is highlighting the irony of all that water under the bridge — four decades worth — and so little to show for it. Beyond that, all I see is the uncontroversial claim that segregationists would be pleased by segregation. (go back ^)

** Actually, the Cry Wolf organizers are more specific about whose credibility and arguments they hope to undermine. It’s not “those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints,” as Liberty Chick writes. That would be so mean, to pick on people for views they just happen to hold. It’s “the organizations and individuals who use such dire social and economic prognostications to thwart progressive reform” that they’re going after. (go back ^)

One of the most entertaining little sideshows to the ‘08 election was the one about Bill Ayers writing Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. All the shouting about how Barack Hussein is really a Muslim was (and is) revolting and stupid and the birth certificate business was (and is) unimaginably tedious, and of course stupid as well. At least with Ayers and Obama there’s a real story. Plus I lived in Hyde Park in the early 90s and I like to imagine that I was just a few blocks away while past terrorist and future president were busy palling around.

Jack Cashill is the man behind the theory. In the last few weeks of the campaign he produced a steady stream of articles about it for WorldNetDaily.com (there’s a handy list on his website — it seems to be growing, too). Each one is written in perky little paragraphs, many of them nearly identical to the perky little paragraphs in an earlier post, but there’s usually something new, too. Cashill is quite the salesman — his pitch has the mesmerizing feel of an infomercial, and almost as much depth.

As he reaches out to the media and to experts who might help build his case, the literary quest — a diligent search for Ayers’ fingerprints in Obama’s book — becomes a story within a story. There’s a turning point on Oct. 23 and you, dear reader, are practically a co-conspirator. Cashill “despaired of breaking this story beyond the Internet and talk radio” but then “a seriously can-do congressman intervened,” and suddenly “we are running sophisticated data-driven tests at two separate sites.” Maybe there’s a real chance to “somehow penetrate the battlements the mainstream media have built around Obama.”

Cashill returns time and again to his correspondence with Patrick Juola, an expert in literary forensics. What he learned from Juola was that no “data-driven computer analysis” would give him a definitive result, and so his best hope was to persevere with the “good old-fashioned literary detective work.” There is, as Scott Eric Kaufman points out, a rich tradition there — thanks to just that sort of sleuthing we know that “the plays of William Shakespeare were written by Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, or Edward de Vere.” (Kaufman has had a great time with this story. If you want a good laugh you should read his posts — this one links to most of the other ones).

Ultimately, though, Cashill decided the old-fashioned detective work wasn’t going to do the trick: “there was a general feeling among people interested in this story that the public would need the confirmation of science, and not just from one source.” And of course what he found, as the title of the post says, is that “Science points to Ayers authorship of Obama’s ‘Dreams’”. This is what science sounds like:

“Using the chi-square statistic,” observes one professor, “Obama’s and Ayers’s books were indistinguishable, while Obama’s book was easily distinguishable from books by other authors.”

[…]

“Under the Q-value statistic,” argues one university-based analyst who tested “Dreams” against Ayers’ 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” “segments of ‘Dreams’ consistently compared as well with ‘Fugitive’ segments as it did with other segments of ‘Dreams’ itself. In contrast, ‘Dreams’ compared poorly with other documents.”

Like Mark Twain said, there are “three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As if the work of the “systems engineer,” the “professor,” and the “university-based analyst” weren’t enough, Cashill mentions “a fifth stylometric analysis, soon to be released, this one from a British scholar of international repute…,” and that’s where the story starts to get really interesting. With the election approaching and the Obama juggernaut still cruising out front, a man named Bob Fox with $10k in hand approached Peter Millican, a Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University. Negotiations fell through when Millican and Oxford University Consulting insisted that the results be made public no matter how they came out. A couple of days before the election, Millican told his side of the story in The Sunday Times. He pronounced Cashill’s “science” to be extremely unimpressive and added that “[he] was left with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter.”

As he went down in flames, Cashill shook his fist and shouted, in so many words, “Curse you, Oxford don!” It was about 2500 words, actually — half of them blustering through his version of the Millican-Fox transaction (“No, bro, you have dissed too many of my homies to get away that easily”) and the other half regurgitating the “literary” pitch one more time. Like they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Besides the bad taste in his mouth, Millican got the results of the analyses that had already been done. He’s set up a page on his web site to go over the details. At the beginning and the end he considers some of Cashill’s literary and impressionistic observations, dismissing each one in an understated, donnish way. Near the end he takes up Cashill’s offer to “bet my house against Millican’s mailbox that the gifted writer Ayers wrote” two passages in Dreams he singled out. Millican responds, “I hereby accept the bet. Let him put up, or shut up.” I don’t know if Cashill ever put up, but he certainly hasn’t shut up.

The really good stuff is in the middle of Millican’s exposé, when he looks into the “science.” There are all sorts of obvious and fatal flaws, but the most blatant problem is the controls — the things that Cashill breezily refers to as “books by other authors” and “other documents.” The specifics are a whole lot less impressive:

Second stylometric analysis.
Claim: “The Ayers-Obama matching shows a measurable and substantial effect. It is easily and objectively distinguishable from comparison to a third document. … the initial data presented is highly suggestive that these two documents share large portions of authorship.” (that’s Cashill via Millican)
Control: Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published in 1885.
Millican’s bottom line: “[T]he word-length frequency correlations are not remotely close enough to be ‘highly suggestive’ of co-authorship…. Nor does the ‘easy and objective distinguishability’ from Grant’s Memoirs count for anything: it isn’t the least bit surprising that two memoirs written at the end of the 20th century have more in common than one written over a century before.”

Third stylometric analysis.
Claim: Comparisons of word frequencies on a small and a large set of words, using software written by Millican, shows that Dreams is more like Fugitive Days that like the control.
Control: Free Air, by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1919.
Millican’s bottom line: “These analysts found that Dreams was more like Fugitive Days than Free Air in some respects, but that of course isn’t surprising at all (given the difference in genre and vintage). If we add more realistic controls, then the apparent similarity — which isn’t even impressive to start with — entirely disappears, as shown by the following “Principal Component Analysis” graph….” (the graph is about 2/3 of the way through Millican’s web page). “Again there is nothing to link Obama with Ayers. And all the evidence so far examined if anything points against there being any close link between them.”

So, thanks to science you can rest assured that Obama’s book is more like Ayer’s book than it is like a novel written in 1919 or the 1885 memoir by the man supposedly buried in Grant’s tomb. In his Sunday Times piece, Millican notes that the Sinclair Lewis novel was used as a “‘random control’” because it “just happened to be easily available on the web.” He also describes Bob Fox as “sincerely interested in getting to the truth” — I don’t think he’d have gone to Millican if he wasn’t. I suspect that for many of the people involved, the project wasn’t cynical and calculating as much as it was starry-eyed and inept. As far as Cashill himself is concerned, I don’t know.

Whether it’s the number-crunching or the old-fashioned detecting, a lot of Cashill’s sleight of hand is a matter of context, or the lack of it. For instance, he makes a big deal about the way both Ayers and Obama riff on the difference between “education” and “training.” If you can’t think of any similar passages from another writer, well, it’s hard to say why it’s not significant. So maybe it is, and if you really want to be convinced, the door is wide open. On the other hand, if you did a search and found all sorts of other writers making a similar point in similar terms, the Ayers-Obama parallel would quickly lose its charm. But who’s going to take the trouble to do that? (Kaufman, of course, though not on this particular point) Cashill sure as hell isn’t — he needs to keep your head in a little fishbowl with just the incriminating texts, where all sorts of things are plausible. In the stylometric analyses, the control is the context. It’s a reference point, and the trick is to put it outside the fishbowl — way, way outside, so from there the bowl is just a dot on the horizon, and boy is it hard to see any difference between those fish!

More than that, the essential trick — the secret to Cashill’s success, such as it is — is to write for people who really, really, really want to believe. If you’re in the target audience, keep in mind that the analysis by Chris Yavelow is quite a bit different from the others. Millican finds nothing impressive about it, but he does allow that it’s “the only one of the four that stands any chance of providing any basis for a more substantial case.” So keep the faith!

In fact, I know what you need to do. Head on out to Highway 61, where I’m sure you can be very easily done. Look for Mack the Finger or Louis the King, over by the “forty red white and blue shoe strings/And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”

Kaufman’s first piece about the Cashill hypothesis generated one of the oddest flame wars I’ve ever seen (keep in mind, though, that I mostly live under a rock). In it he mocked Jeff Goldstein, prime mover of Protein Wisdom, for taking up Cashill’s hypothesis and running with it. Goldstein’s vehement response is so strange and embarrassing that I can’t resist picking it apart. Here’s a quick recap:

1. Goldstein muses over the implications of the Cashill hypothesis. He notes first off that “[t]he charge of having one’s memoir molded into literary shape by an unrepentant domestic terrorist… is a serious one — and I do not wish to present the accusation lightly.” And he doesn’t. He writes “disinterested observations that flow from an exploration of language, the narrative process, and the differences in gradation between the author as historical figure, the author as author, and the author as ‘author.’” It’s like some late-night undergraduate effusion of fermented carbohydrate wisdom — very, very heavy:

   For if Bill Ayers has indeed ghostwritten at least portions of Barack Obama’s memoirs, as some are alleging, then it is fair to say that the “Barack Obama” of those memoirs is more even than a construct: he is at least partially a fictional character, given that it is “his” words that ostensibly create “him” — making it follow that, if the words creating him are not his own, then “he” is really a kind of living literary portmanteau, a blend of influences, an ontological hybrid insofar as he exists publicly.

   […]

   If the charges are true, and Obama’s memoirs were in fact written by Bill Ayers, at least in part, than it is clear that at least in part, Barack Obama is a creation of Bill Ayers….

   On that meta level, “Obama,” as we’ve come to know him through his memoirs, is more Ayers than he is Obama.

2. A few days later, while he was having some fun at Cashill’s expense, Kaufman took a quick swipe at someone else. If you follow the link, you find that the someone is Goldstein:

   If, however, you only use Cashill’s juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things you already believe about Obama, then you’ve fully embraced the Cashill Doctrine.

3. Fun ensues when Kaufman’s post is picked up by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Goldstein is affronted that he has to “deal[] with readers of the online Atlantic” — these are people who clearly don’t appreciate his “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency” as a weighty work of pure literary criticism, and not only that, they have the gall to doubt the sincerity of phrases like “as some are alleging” and “if the charges are true.”

   Worse, though, is that thanks to Kaufman he was getting “unsolicited, uninformed letters” like this one, from “someone calling himself George.” Here’s the first third of George’s letter:

   He can’t be shook bitches…keep it coming. Behind closed doors he is laughing at all you pathetic needle dick motherfuckers. In your eyes he couldn’t possibly be smart enough to write his book. However, there is no denying that he is still slowly squeezing the life out of that grimy, decrepit, fish belly white, warmonger. What’s next—Obama did not graduate from Columbia, or Harvard Law. Obama was not president of the Harvard Law Review. It’s all a sham Harvard and is lying on his behalf. He is not really running for president. It’s really some white dude in black face.

It’s presumptuous of George to finger Goldstein as a person who wants to turn Obama into “some white dude in black face.” The ghostwritten-by-a-terrorist story would surely be just as attractive as a political land mine and, for Goldstein, as an opportunity to crank out some scare-quoted profundity, even if the “author” was white. And the politician as a figurehead controlled from behind the scenes is an old plot line that doesn’t need any racial subtext.

But Goldstein’s gripe isn’t really with George, it’s with Kaufman, who wrote that Goldstein “fully embraced” something when really all he’d done was to flirt ostentatiously with it. In particular, he hadn’t said anything about the evidence, except in the comments on his first post, where he was skeptical about one point. It’s a legitimate complaint that’s hard to pick out of the turgid rhetoric — I didn’t really get it until I scrolled way down to where Goldstein explains it to an especially conciliatory commenter.

Whatever the reason, Goldstein goes to extraordinary lengths to foist onto Kaufman the full responsibility for George’s email and any other ignorance inflicted on him by Atlantic readers. To do that he has to make assumptions that are wilder and more insulting than any of George’s (SEK = Scott Eric Kaufmann).

I also noted that SEK, rather than excerpting any of the post in which I purportedly suggest “all the unsavory things” I “already believe about Obama,” merely provided the link and his inaccurate and dishonest description, knowing, as he must by now, that those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts, especially those from villainous “right wingers” who, by the Atlantic’s lights, are the kinds of “low-info voters” who have no business pretending to engage in literary criticism. On my preparedness to do so I’ll let my record stand — while noting that I don’t miss the irony of those who have long been in favor of “democratizing” interpretation and sounding the death knell of authorial control in favor of an ascendancy of “interpretive communities” suddenly pretending that one needs some kind of special political sensibility in order to properly engage in textual pursuits.

The best part of that is the irony he doesn’t miss, which sounds like the answer to a final exam question in a freshman survey class. Goldstein, in a fit of really highfalutin’ foolishness, is confusing Kaufman with a whole school of thought, one that’s betrayed its own bomb-throwing manifestos. Further along in the post we learn that this insufferable pedant is Goldstein’s inner “literary critic.”

But because leftists like George are driven by outrage, emotion, and a decided lack of intellect — and are steered in a certain way by betters like SEK, who, after the revolution, will assume the role of the elect — I am in fact confronted by such idiocy and self-righteousness, which, were I to allow the literary critic in me to come out once again, is suggestive, I’d argue, of a kind of hamfisted paternalism and projection, much as one might expect from those who pretend to champion the Other (the unspoken acknowledgment being that the poor dears can’t be expected to champion themselves!) while not even fit to wipe their own asses.

Goldstein had already described “the likes of George” as “people who haven’t the capacity to read and understand on their own, but who rather rely on ‘specialists’ like the folks at the Atlantic, or SEK, to do their misreading for them.” So he may not be convinced that Obama is the creation of Ayers, but he’s definitely convinced that the likes of George are the creation of the likes of Kaufman.

In the post Goldstein mostly writes around both George and his obnoxious email — perhaps Goldstein figured his readers already knew what to think. There are a few comments that are a little more direct, and they take up a theme that’s near and dear to the hearts of culture-war conservatives: their brave defiance of the PC lynch mob. Goldstein pops up to say, “I’m as guilty as George for pointing out George’s guilt. WAIT FOR IT!” Protein Wisdom deputy blogger Darlene Click seconds: “Criticizing him makes you a racist/sexist/genderist/yadda yadda yadda.” I don’t think she read very carefully, though. It’s true that George sounds kinda black, but Goldstein criticizes him as a leftist, which is not a race, sex or gender. Does Click really think that Goldstein is so hypocritical that he’d write George off as “some white dude in black face,” an idiot being led around by the nose by his betters?

Goldstein does seem to want to prove that he doesn’t take a backseat to anybody when it comes to genital references. After all, “Needle dick motherfuckers” is so conventional. He’s got something much more original, and while he’s at it he throws in a racial stereotype that’s as bizarre as it is gratuitous. Check out this PC-mob-defying bravery:

“GEORGE DOES NOT REPRESENT US! HOW DARE YOU USE HIM AS AN EXAMPLE!” — SEK, forthcoming.

preemptive answer: he represents one part of “you”. And you, as the intellectual vagina to his Asian gal’s ping pong ball, represent another. Deal.

I’m sure it’s just because I’m being too literal, but my mind boggles at the metaphor of a male vagina giving birth to part of himself. You have to admire the double-layered insult, though — Kaufman is not only a feminine body part, he’s a pathetic one. No doubt a real manly intellectual, when he becomes a metaphorical vagina, can pass an Aryan broad’s bowling ball.

Anyway, no abuse from the PC police was forthcoming, or at least it’s not in the comments. And there was no “HOW DARE YOU” from Kaufman, though he dropped in several times for some textual slicing and dicing.

In the end Goldstein does a fine job of making George look like a class act. Both of them indulge freely in mindless generalizations about the opposition, but George is at least forthright about it. He’s gleeful but not particularly vindictive and his insults are generic, though I guess you’re always free to take it personally if you want. He’s fairly specific about who he’s talking about, too — “Talk Radio, Fox News, … your right wing blogosphere and … your professional liars like Bill Kristol [and] Glenn Beck….” The usual suspects, in other words. For Goldstein there’s just “the likes of George” and their “betters.” The idiots like George also “seem to think themselves entitled to hurl their venomous, imbecilic rants at any who displease them.” When it comes to venomous, imbecilic rants, though, Goldstein is peerless.

In one sentence the ACLU’s demands that unsavory techniques be banned from questioning suspected terrorists. In another, the ACLU urges putting the feet of the President of the United States into a flame to force him—torture him, if necessary—to do what they want.

Interesting, huh!?

This came to my attention because of President-elect Obama’s interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday. In one section, George asked about that pledge—the one the ACLU is willing to betray its core civil libertarian values to make him live up to—to close Guantánamo. [my emphasis]

So, if the ACLU turns up the heat—maybe they’ll target Obama with another searing ad in the New York Times, but there’s no telling what extremes they’ll go to—it’ll be (yet more) proof that the ACLU is a quivering mass of hypocrisy, perfectly comfortable with torture when it suits their purposes. Don’t worry about Obama, though. He’ll already have his nose to the grindstone (the way the shit’s gonna hit the fan, it might be a blessing in disguise). I doubt he’ll even notice the hot feet.

According to his biographical blurb, “Rich Galen has been described as ‘what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.’” I don’t know about philosopher, but he’s a hack, for sure. A hack with a self-deprecating sense of humor—the piece I just quoted starts with a personal anecdote that’s amusing enough. But if that nonsense about feet to the fire is meant as a joke I can’t find the wink.

I’m stumped as to why Galen would make such an inane claim. I don’t actually believe that the explanation is that he’s stupid, though he may think that his readers are. His editorials also run on Townhall.com, and the general feeling in the comment thread there is that it’s not possible to overstate the perfidy and ignorance of the ACLU. Within that worldview, one commenter manages to turn Galen’s point into something that sounds vaguely rational:

“Feet to the fire” is obviously a figure of speech but its not an idle threat when it comes to the lengths the ACLU will be willing to go to get what they want.

Right after the election I listed a few of the wacky paranoid theories that were circulating in what what Michael Bérubé recently dubbed (“politely”) the “low-information conservative constituency.” Here’s one I hadn’t seen before, from Galen’s comment thread. Scotch Indian “would not be shocked to see [Obama] pass an amendment so he can run for more than two terms.” Not so fast, replies wbheff—“he might not even bother to ‘pass an amendment’.”

Barack Hussein Obama, President for Life. Those folks have really got his number. Once he’s sworn in on Lincoln’s Koran, just hours from now, all bets are off.

Some of my favorite bloggers have found a new font of conservative self-parody—Big Hollywood. I might as well bandwagon along for a minute. There’s a choice post over there written by Evan Sayet, “simply the best political comedian working in America today,” according to FrontPage entertainment critic David Horowitz. Sayet doesn’t waste any humor on his “unified field theory” of a comic-book menace called “Modern Liberalism,” though. He’s not just a stand-up guy, he’s a Thinker, and he starts his think-piece on Bruce Springsteen with some intellectual heavy hitters.

The “culture war” that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell’s phrase, a “conflict of visions.” Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy—in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues—and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the “Constrained” and the “Unconstrained” and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the “unconstrained” vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the “constrained,” or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I’m saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Sowell recognizes that, at its most basic level, this conflict of visions revolves around what one believes to be man’s innate nature. Is it, as the Neo-Liberal believes, that man is born good and then corrupted by the institutions of society or, do the Conservatives have it right and man is born with a dual and conflicting nature—capable of good and evil and everything in between—requiring cultural forces to help him tamp down the darker side and cultivate the good within?

I think it’s safe to say that Sayet is a Springsteen fan, though he never says so outright. He admires Springsteen’s lyrics for what looks to him like a conservative vision of humanity, but that vision seems to be at odds with Springsteen’s “Neo-Liberal” politics. So far so good—some very fine criticism has started with that sort of realization. But the disconnect could be Springsteen’s doing, or it could be a sign that Sayet hasn’t got the “Modern Liberal” thing as totally figured out as he thinks. Is his one-dimensional test really such a foolproof way to sort the “Conservatives” from the “Neo-Liberals”? Is Springsteen’s all-American working-class liberal mindset really captured by a second-hand cliché from 18th-century France? Those are two obvious questions he might have asked, and I’d say the answers are no and no. But if Sayet knows anything, he knows right from wrong. The only way to solve the puzzle is to split Springsteen down the middle. His right half—the one with all the poetic vision—is one-hundred percent Republican. His left side—the Beverly Hills liberal poser—is clueless about what the other half is doing. That’s not the same as a half-and-half blend of “Conservative” and “Neo-Liberal.” That would be like a cross between an elephant and a donkey, and what could come out of such an encounter but a bloody mess?

Maybe Sayet meticulously questioned all his assumptions before he settled on his Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde theory of the Boss. I doubt it, though. There are no signs in the article of a reflective, self-critical mind at work. He spends most of the piece cherry-picking the conservative message from songs like “Thunder Road” and “Long Walk Home.” The lyrics never stood a chance. Sayet’s interpretive efforts got the full treatment from performance critic Scott Eric Kaufman. As usual, the show is entertaining and educational.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell and cherry picking, I noticed when I was on Townhall.com that, like Galen, Sowell is a regular columnist there. Now I can see why he appeals to Evan Sayet. The piece of Sowell’s that caught my eye is titled “‘Intellectuals’”. As you can probably guess from the scare quotes, the word is used scornfully throughout. You might think that’s an odd thing for Sowell to do—with a PhD in Economics from Chicago, a raft of books authored, and a high-profile position at a major think tank, what is Sowell if not an intellectual? But in this little piece of mindless pandering he earns his share of the scorn that he pours indiscriminately on his class. I guess that counts as practicing what he preaches.

“‘Intellectuals’” is a reaction to a New York Times column—Nicholas Kristoff wondering if Obama’s success is a “step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.” Sowell found it “hard to know whether to laugh or cry” about what he seems to have read as a rose-colored paean to intellectuals and intellectualism in politics (that’s not what it is, but never mind). To put Kristoff in his place, Sowell leans unimaginatively on the old trope about how superior common sense is to book learnin’. I think what he has in mind, really, is left-wing book learnin’. He jumps from a few specific cases of leftist intellectuals getting things hopelessly wrong—they’re not hard to find—to this gross generalization:

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century—far more so than ordinary people.

RIght after that passage he paraphrases William F. Buckley’s far more incisive way of making more or less the same point—Buckley famously said that he’d rather be governed by some regular folks from the Boston phone book (“the first two thousand names,” according to Wikiquote) than by the Harvard faculty. I wouldn’t want to be governed by the Harvard faculty either, so I guess Buckley had a point. Whether those “regular” folks who have gone through life getting called first for everything would be better, I’m not sure. The choice that Buckley offers doesn’t bear close examination, but the message is clear and memorable, and that counts for a lot. On the other hand, Sowell’s book (The Complete Idiot’s Feel-Good Guide to Dangerously Misguided Intellectuals and the Ordinary People Who Could Have Set Them Straight) could be written and written and written again. Playing a game of mix-and-match with “intellectuals,” “ordinary people” (whoever they are), and “things,” you could tell just about any story you wanted to. (Back in September, Roger Kimball explained Buckley’s zinger in multisyllabic and historic detail and then patted himself on the back for his slavish devotion to the caricature and his Buckleyesque enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the “cruise missile aimed from Middle America” at the intelligentsia. Roger Kimball, there’s Buckley’s true heir. Screw the low-life son.)

Just for fun, let’s look at how intellectuals and ordinary people have scored on some recent controversial things. I’ll starting with Barack Obama. We don’t actually know how things will turn out with him, so I can’t score anyone. What I can say is that it will be hard to score. Some ordinary people seem to think he can walk on water. Others figure he’ll trample the constitution and make it impossible to buy an American flag. I checked in with some of that latter group earlier in this post, by way of a Townhall.com comment thread. They are much more likely Sowell readers than the Obama enthusiasts, and in “‘Intellectuals’,” Sowell effectively blesses their petty anti-intellectual prejudice. It’s not the most contemptible performance like that I’ve seen, but it’s nothing to brag about.

How about the global financial meltdown? I think that’s still pretty fresh in everyone’s memory. It seems to have caught most of the experts with their pants down. Are experts the same as intellectuals? Some of them must be, and almost all “experts” are “intellectuals.” As to ordinary people, thank goodness they knew enough to avoid dodgy mortgages they couldn’t afford or a whole lot of them would be up shit creek now without paddles (but with lots of intellectuals, and in a pinch, you know… it just might work). And not so long ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was another thing. Some of the neocons around Rumsfeld, guys like Wolfowitz, had intellectual pretensions and advanced degrees, and true to form, they had it figured woefully, criminally wrong. Now the liberal intelligentsia kept saying “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”, but like they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As for ordinary people…

(photo: Shawn Duffy)

It so happens that Tenured Radical just put up something about Obama and “The Return of Educated People.” so there’s another favorite blogger to add to the mix. She even included a YouTube clip of Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land.” Unfortunately “the video has been removed by the user.” I found another clip of the same performances.

You know that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all singing “Kum bah yah” like pod people. Maybe the least we can do for the other side is to chip in for liquor and anti-depressants.

I was in Seattle for Reagan’s re-election, and had moved to Chicago a few months before the 1988 race that gave us our first four Bush years. For most of the time in between I was studying music at CalArts, the avant-guarde school that Disney built at the northern edge of LA’s sprawl, where it was slowly surrounded by the clean-cut and conservative cul-de-sacs of Valencia. The land of fruits and nuts, as a friend of mine used to say. It was a Reagan-era kind of place.

Chicago—Hyde Park, in fact—was a huge change. There’s no getting away from politics in Chicago. It’d been a year since Harold Washington’s sudden death, but the city was still battling through the aftermath. I was still there four years later, and that time I finally got to vote for the winner. What I remember most clearly from ‘92 isn’t Clinton, it’s Carol Mosley Braun’s run for the senate. People I knew in the neighborhood were involved in her campaign, I think. We were all thrilled that she won—too bad things didn’t go as well once she got to Washington. I guess by that time, Barack Obama was circulating in the neighborhood and teaching at the U of C, not that I had a clue.

I was in Boston for Clinton’s re-election, and down here in North Carolina for the Bush v. Gore debacle. God was that depressing! And in many ways the 2004 election was even worse. How could such a bungling idiot get re-elected? Canada never looked better, but I consoled myself that if Kerry had won, it’s likely he’d have been a weak president who’d have to absorb Bush’s catastrophic mistakes and would likely absorb a lot of the blame as well. Better, maybe, for Bush to keep stewing in it, and it seemed pretty clear that he’d thoroughly discredit himself if he had four more years. He did just that. Too bad all the rest of us are stuck in the hole, too.

After Bush won in 2000 I felt like I understood what the people who loathed the Clintons had gone through for 8 years. Just the sound of that Texas drawl on the radio and I can’t turn the thing off fast enough. It’s a gut reaction, and I’m sure Bill Clinton’s voice can do the same thing to a lot of Republicans. And for many people I know, and to some extent for me, too, there was an apocalyptic feel to the Reagan victory, and even more to Bush II. It was a show of political force from hordes of people who apparently wanted to bulldoze life as we knew it, and it wasn’t clear what was going to stop them. Fortunately the complicated business of running a country slows down even anti-government administrations.

Anyway, I have some sympathy for the people who are feeling alienated and anxious in the face of all this whooping and hollering and talk of change. When you’re stuck on a ship, it’s not a good feeling when someone you don’t like or trust takes over the wheel. It’ll be tough having to listen to President Obama holding forth from the bully pulpit, and having to listen to all the ridiculous and obnoxious stuff his supporters and fans will come up with. One consolation, if you voted for Bush, is that your guy is leaving a huge mess, and it’s hard to see how Obama will have the time or money to enslave the white race, or whatever. So no need to let your imagination run away with you. If it’s already run away, and you’re convinced that Obama is Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the US, that he didn’t write his own book, that he’s a Marxist, that you better stock up on American flags because pretty soon you won’t be able to buy one, etc., etc., here’s what I’d suggest:

Grow up, folks! Get a grip! There’s lots of real problems—go find one!

In the mean time, I’ll be enjoying myself. It was nice to be able to vote for the winner back in ‘92 and ‘96, but this time it’s a whole lot sweeter. Even though I had a feeling from the beginning that Obama would pull this off, it’s still hard to believe it actually happened. An articulate president who’s seen the world from many angles, from the ground up, and reacts with curiosity and intelligence? A president who’s as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton and has self-control to boot? A president who’s broken through the most symbolic of racial barriers with the grace and confidence of a man who has nothing to prove about how black he is or about how black he isn’t? A president who projects the best qualities of the two countries that have shaped my life, America and Kenya?

It’s too much.

Here’s a timely message from Sam, the American Eagle. (hat tip)

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. When high-minded ideals are coupled with low-minded rhetoric and feeble, agenda-driven reasoning, it’s the practice that reveals the intentions and integrity of the critic far more than the preaching. David Thompson is a peripheral example, KC Johnson a more central one. What the practice suggests is that an ideologically balanced campus would be like one of those TV shows where liberal and conservative pundits try to shout each other down. It’s a mindset that offers nothing of value to academia’s pool of intellectual diversity.

In his column in the Cornell Daily Sun, Gabriel Arana criticises conservatives on his campus for dwelling on denounciation and symbolic resistance to what they see as the dominant culture instead of offering intellectually engaged alternatives. (hat tip)

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has—at least during my time here—failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

The editorial was in response to the announcement of a $50k grant from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to help launch Cornell’s new Program on Freedom and Free Societies. Arana’s objections aren’t with the program, they’re with the rhetoric coming from the Fund’s executive director, David DeRosiers. And he isn’t alone—even the Program’s point man on campus, Prof. Barry Strauss, distanced himself from DeRosiers’ rhetoric (“…I wish they had consulted me about their summer update. I would have told them that I respectfully disagree with much of what they say.”). Here’s a sample:

Veritas identified Cornell as one such university that prides itself on diversity, but lacks the intellectual kind, stating in its update, “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism.” Cornell, over the last forty years, has neglected traditional learning offerings such as Western society, thought and economics, according to the statement.

“The idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses],” said DeRosiers. “To teach courses that have gone out of style. They have had a focus on race, gender, class—and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils. It’s more to the fact that they’re only receiving a diet of such things—they’re being malnourished.”

According to Arana, the sweeping claims about the curriculum are easily rebutted by Cornell’s course catalog. That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the apparent determination to fight excess with excess by “bring[ing] back triumphalism.” Triumphalism? I can’t imagine a self-respecting humanities professor promoting the idea—maybe that just shows how deep the grooves of liberal bias are in my brain. But if triumphalism is seriously part of the program, it seems like a shame to put the West back in it’s rightful position at the apex of history and just stop there. Might as well put mankind back in his rightful place at the apex of creation, too—“intelligent design” is ready and waiting. And with science out the window, why not go whole hog and bring back geocentrism, too? That would be some potent triumphalism—America at the center of God’s universe. With a little of that in the curriculum you might just moderate all those America-hating zealots of oppression studies right out of existence.

• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.


“Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

From the comments posted after the article you can get a pretty good sense of how that went over, or google “Robert Brandon” Duke stupid for a broader sample. Reflecting on the remark after “two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described ‘conservatives,’” Brandon said, “In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context.” In writing, at least, the remark strikes me as arrogant and not very funny, and I’m not sure that even sympathetic readers picked up much humor. But as a smoking gun in the crime of liberal bias the remark was very much appreciated—the Google search above calls up a little feeding frenzy of critics who were, on the whole, remarkably uncritical and opportunistic in their approach to such a useful quote. Recently it’s cropped up again as part of a minor farce.

[Here’s more about Mill’s theory of conservatives.]

It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) that Brandon’s comment is just a pretentious version of the kind of reflexive, snarky put-down that each side of the political spectrum is constant throwing at the other. It takes a pretty shallow or self-serving perspective to assume that it’s deeply revealing of how he approaches decisions or interactions involving conservative students or faculty. That’s the sort of spin you’d expect from a partisan rag, and sure enough Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing for the National Review, put Brandon’s remark on her list of “five of the most outrageous campus incidents of the last academic year.” Her paragraph about it ends with a little idle speculation: “So why aren’t there more Republicans in academia? Maybe it’s because even the capable ones have been kept out, by the likes of Robert Brandon.” Unless she did a whole lot more investigating than it seems, she’s in no position to make generalizations about “the likes of Robert Brandon.” She has an uppity liberal-professor sock puppet who can mouth the words, though, and that suits the National Review just fine. But here’s one from a professor, Erin O’Connor, and she doesn’t do much better: “It says something about a department—if not the university as a whole—when its leader will come right out and say that the reason there aren’t more conservatives teaching college is that conservatives are stupid.” The claim about his department is especially empty. Other than the emphasis on philosophy of biology it looks like a pretty traditional philosophy department. It’s not clear how you’d find out if the chair’s comment about stupid conservatives really says something about them. It would definitely take some work, so why not just say it?

It’s a tedious and often disingenuous habit to treat attempts at humor, even those that bomb, as revelations of the real beliefs that the joker would otherwise deny or keep under wraps. All the conservative tut-tutting about Brandon’s remarks suggests that feminists aren’t the only ones who can’t take a joke (I’ll hand that off to the fabulous Nellie McKay at the end of the post). Joke or not, a quote relayed by a reporter is not the same as a first-person written statement. If Brandon had written the bit about Mill and stupid conservatives in an op-ed, presumably he would have made sure that his meaning came across in print, and it would make sense to treat it as a serious opinion. He may well be arrogantly clubby about the predominance of liberals in the humanities faculty, or he may be inclined to bullshit when he gets a question that he hasn’t thought much about, or he may have been blowing off steam after reading the ravings of some fringe professor pushing “Intelligent Design” as science. There are plenty more possibilities—I don’t know Prof. Brandon so I’m not suggesting any particular interpretation. My point is that the quote got the play that it did because it was useful—it’s actual significance is uncertain but was probably vastly overstated by his critics. It doesn’t say much for the seriousness of the cause of “intellectual diversity” that a glib remark to a campus newspaper has to be overinterpreted and oversold to make the case for it.

When it comes to using quotes for impact, with little regard for either their significance or their context, KC Johnson is hard to beat. About a year and a half after Brandon made his infamous comment, Johnson used it in an editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a critical look at the explanations and justifications given by the “academic Establishment” for its leftwards imbalance. In retrospect it reads like a warmup for the anti-academic crusade he piggybacked on the lacrosse case—the narrowly-framed issues and boilerplate rhetoric were ready and waiting for the “listening” statement to come along. The editorial is a mix-and-match of quotes framed as evidence of bias but otherwise largely unanalyzed—The Cigarette Smoking Blog (!) has a handy list of some of them. I haven’t checked to see whether there’s any of the misrepresentation that he indulged in while writing about the lacrosse case. But even without digging through his sources it’s clear that he makes no meaningful distinction between George Lakoff speaking to the New York Times, Brandon joking to a student reporter, and some random professor blogging about who’s “f-ing smarter.” They’re treated as equally significant and representative—a fair sign, I think, that Johnson’s main interest is in what sounds good and makes points for his side.

Brandon’s quip about conservatives being stupid is circulating again because of a little farce that Inside Higher Ed recounts in a recent article—“In Culture Wars or Duke-Bashing, Do Facts Matter?” They didn’t to Edward Bernard Glick, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple University, when he wrote an editorial that ran in the Jerusalem Post and, with a somewhat different ending, on the website American Thinker. It’s an especially cranky and slapdash version of the formulaic rant about how everything’s going to hell (aka the academic declensionist narrative). Evil Bender goes into the gory details of Glick’s “logical fallacies, lack of evidence, lack of proper attribution, and… burning desire to pin all of society’s ills on the academy.” What I find interesting is that what drives the reasoning (such as it is) is assumptions about the people responsible for the decline.

He brings the anonymous bad guys on stage as protesters at the ‘68 Democratic national convention in Chicago. “[W]hat did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses.” Safe from the draft, they whiled away the Vietnam war lowering academic standards, and when the war was over they had nothing better to do than get tenure and transform the university into “the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society.”

Thanks to this takeover by ignorants, college graduates these days are “well trained, but badly educated”—they’ve been trained “to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past” in an intolerant atmosphere in which “politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge,… logic, and critical thinking.” When it comes to Darfur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Muslim hatred,” gas prices and the energy supply, they have everything completely wrong. The professors responsible for all this miseducating don’t make much money but they get “huge psychological incomes in the form of power.” They “shape the minds of their students” and control hiring, promotion, tenure, etc., so naturally they pack the faculty with like-minded comrades. (Facetiously, I think, John K. Wilson flips the point about income on its head—it’s the liberals who are stupid for going into such a low-paying profession).

Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, a department chairman* was asked in an interview on NPR if his department hired Republicans. He answered (I paraphrase from memory): “No. We don’t knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not.”


If I were a in his field, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.


*Correction: The author initially identified the speaker as the chairman of Duke’s psychology department. This was an error of memory. The author and American Thinker apologize to the chairman in question and to readers for this error.

That’s the end of the article, and he really outdoes himself—not only casually misremembering Brandon’s remark but also slipping in a gratuitous suggestion of anti-semitism, a pat on his own back for bravely carrying the torch for some very conventional subjects, and a wonderfully inadequate correction. If that’s any indication of the quality of his work, it wouldn’t be his politics that kept Duke from hiring him.

[July 18: I pulled the above quote about a week ago—between July 11 and 14, I’m guessing. As of a day or two ago, American Thinker had lopped off the ending and expanded the correction. Today it’s reverted to what I quoted. Gotta wonder what’s up with that.]

Glick’s editorial reads like a feeble parody of Alan Kors’ much more articulate meditation “On the sadness of higher education” from a couple of months ago. Kors gives an especially eloquent account of the academic values he first encountered as an undergraduate, while Glick honors what’s been lost only in strident negatives. But both of them pin the decline on a bunch of ideologues who apparently have nothing to say for themselves that’s worth listening to. For Glick, it’s wild-eyed, wooly-headed “Marxists.” For Kors, it’s “careerist” administrators who have “given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics.” In both cases it’s an intellectual cop-out—dismissive characterization in place of an argument. Johnson has given himself the space to take a more creative approach—misrepresenting, exaggerating, and “perfecting” the “race/class/gender extremists” on the Duke faculty to suit his self-righteous crusade. It’s as if, after playing the same video game for two years, he’s still perfectly content on level one, where he can effortlessly mow down the gangs of slow-moving evildoers.

I don’t dismiss concerns about intellectual diversity on campus (“ideological diversity” would be a more accurate term, though). The self-appointed conservative advocates of it—the ones I’ve been coming across—seem to be much more intent on discrediting and denouncing the left/liberal Establishment than on making a case that they represent valuable diversity. They suggest the opposite, in fact, with their willingness to cut corners intellectually. But I know of two professors who, by example, make good cases for the conservative contribution to intellectual diversity. The first is Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor at Duke who, during the lacrosse scandal, managed to be a voice of moderation while also speaking up for the lacrosse players and questioning the judgment of some of his colleagues. He seems to have been among the first to notice Glick’s sloppiness, and there’s a series of posts on his blog that traces his investigation. When he calls it “another unfortunate case of distortion being touted as fact in order to oversell a point…,” I’m guessing he’s looking back to the self-serving distortions that have been a staple of lacrosse-case debate (it’s all too easy to find the same thing elsewhere, of course).

Farther from home, there’s Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Penn State and the subject, along with his wife and professional collaborator, April Kelly-Woessner, of an engaging profile published in The Chronicle of Higher Education early this year. With respect to the debates about intellectual diversity, what sets both conservative husband and liberal wife apart is their committed empiricism—they don’t just debate their disagreements, they go out and do a study. One of their studies documented an effect, generally negative, of professors’ overt politics on students’ engagement and appreciation. Another found that differences in interests and personal values seemed to go a long ways towards explaining why liberals are more likely to pursue PhD studies than conservatives. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it’s a refreshing change from dogma and tribalistic rhetoric.

Woessner also defies the conventional wisdom from the Right that surfaces, for instance, in most any comment thread where academic political bias is in play. For instance: “I was a university faculty member for 14 years and I can absolutely confirm what happens to faculty when they have a difference of opinion with the prevailing groupthink.” I don’t doubt that some people are effectively drummed out of academia for not toeing the liberal line. It’s sure not Woessner’s experience, though—he says “he never confronted intolerance in the classroom. Even some of his most liberal professors went out of their way to solicit his views.” That may not be typical or even common—I really don’t know. I do know that some of us are thrilled to have students who are willing and able to articulate a perspective that contrasts or conflicts with our own.

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer—more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise—it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up). It seems to me that many of the advocates of intellectual diversity are much closer to Glick than Gustafson, too ready to engage in all-out rhetorical warfare, letting the ends justify the means. A little more leading by example might be nice.

Speaking of people who can’t take a joke, Nellie McKay has something to say…