Beware Gerson
Posted on May 8th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Whatever else you want to say about Michael Gerson (and I could say a lot), he is just really, really weird:
A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions[bold mine-DL]; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.
More significantly, this passage is filled with more than a little irony:
It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.
But one of the points that David Kuo made in his book is that there were plenty of people in the Bush White House who shared similar laughs at the expense of these people, which is actually in some ways worse, since these are the people who voted Bush into office. Did Gerson join in the laughter? Maybe not, but he worked alongside people who viewed these people as rubes and pawns to be used. We await the Gersonian moralising against Bushian elitism, knowing that it will never come.
Filed under: miscellaneous, politics
The ironic thing is that Dukakis, for all his faults, is the one politician who would never ever stand around a cocktail party and laugh at rubes. He may be a misguided sanctimonious liberal, but he is a SINCERE misguided sanctimonious liberal, and he would be horrified at the impropriety of laughing at those “less fortunate.” Gore is probably the same way (Obama and Kerry I’m not so sure about). The snobbish attitude Gerson is talking about is something you find more among liberal academics , artists and blogger types, then among actual Democratic politicians. If Gerson thought about it for more than two seconds, he would see just how ridiculous the idea of Dukakis standing around at a cocktail party laughing at rubes really is. But I guess he’s not paid to think.
“I guess he’s not paid to think.”
He writes for the Post–I think it would violate his contract if he did.
In Dukakis’ case, I agree that it may be unlikely, but it’s hard to know. Something I am arguing in my next column is that people who come from a humble background, or in Dukakis’ case the background of an ethnic immigrant community, may be more likely to accept the condescending attitudes of their peers once they have reached a certain status level as a way of conforming to expectations and showing that they belong. One sometimes sees this among white Southerners who have risen to a high level and sometimes feel obliged to make a show of disdaining their ancestors or the attitudes of their parents. However, you have a point–sanctimony might trump condescension, especially if it allows the sanctimonious one to put himself in a position of superior status over the condescending one, which is more or less what Clinton did to Obama affter the “bitter” remarks.
Gerson probably didn’t actually join in the laughter so much as take credit for the laughter of others.