Telling Us To Go Away
Posted on October 11th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Robert Stacy McCain has missed something important here:
Brooks, then, has accomplished the neat trick of denouncing Republicans for abandoning a conservative intellectual tradition to which Brooks himself has never belonged, dragooning Kirk and Weaver from the grave as posthumous allies of the apostle of “national greatness.”
As I have made clear, there are a lot of problems with Brooks’ last column, but this isn’t really one of them. Brooks’ point in invoking Weaver and Kirk was simply that the conservative movement was in the first place a movement of scholars and intellectuals, and that conservatives seem today to be rather too willing to cheer on candidates who are not particularly interested in ideas or specialized knowledge. For all the reasons McCain outlines, Brooks could not credibly connect his ideas to Weaver and Kirk, but I don’t think he is trying to do this, nor was he trying to adopt them as forerunners of “national greatness” conservatism. Brooks and everyone else know that there is no common ground there. He is trying to make an argument that the conservatives who are praising Palin, for example, because she has good instincts but lacks understanding of policy matters and seems to have no particular appreciation for ideas are ignoring an important part of their own tradition. To put in Kirkian, or more accurately Newmanian, terms, conservatives now seem to have excessive admiration for the illative sense (i.e., intuition) at the expense of imagination, intellect and knowledge. Had Brooks invoked Strauss and Voegelin, there would still be a legitimate point here, which McCain’s characteristic reverse classism helps to make all the more powerful.
It is unfortunately rather typical that McCain would harp on the different educational backgrounds of Brooks, Weaver and Kirk, which does nothing so much as make Brooks’ point for him that conservatives have been ”telling members of that [educated] class to go away.” To listen to McCain, unless you come from a small or Southern town and go to state university there could be something wrong with you. It’s true that Brooks went to U of C, which did not use to be a mark of shame on the right. I grew up in Albuquerque and now go to the University of Chicago, and I agree with Brooks on almost nothing–what does that tell you? McCain consistently confuses his disagreement with the policy views of Brooks or, say, Ross Douthat, with his contempt for people who went to Ivy League schools to the point where he thinks there are the same thing.
Now that we are on the verge of an Obama victory, it has become a bit more common to deride the University and claim that Hyde Park is a fanatical left-wing preserve. To the extent that selective schools are largely populated by left-leaning students, and to the extent that the “educated class” is now predominantly left-leaning, this reflects a consistent failure of conservatives to compete for these minds and it is a product of the unfortunately very common preference to deride and dismiss the few right-leaning people come out of these institutions as prima facie incorrigible sell-outs. It does take a certain talent to alienate educated middle-class professionals from the party ostensibly dedicated to representing middle-class constituencies, but some combination of Republican incompetence in government and an apparent hostlity to the education these people have received have done quite a lot to bring this about.
Don’t take Brooks’ word or my word for it–just look at the election results from increasingly Democratic-leaning suburban districts filled with professionals who have no confidence in a party that celebrates hostility to expertise.
Filed under: politics
Boy, I hope an Obama presidency doesn’t make “University of Chicago” dirty words in conservative circles. I was an undergrad there in the late 1990s and the place is not at all some kind of left-wing caricature. It’s not even possible to list all the contradictory evidence, because there’s so damn much of it (e.g., with one mostly benign exception there was zero left-wing bias in any of the classes I took; I never felt marginalized or ridiculed for being a libertarian-conservative who voted for Republicans; it was considered self-evident that it was vitally important to study seriously the old-school Western canon, etc., etc.).
I still remember a professor of mine relating in class a discussion he’d had with a group of students who were rolling their eyes at Augustine for something they found anachronistic in City of God. He said, more or less, “This book has rewarded serious study for 1500 years–you should at least consider the possibility that the problem is with you, not with Augustine.”
Going there as an undergrad was a bit of a grind, and most of the faculty and students were (and, presumably, are) left-of-center in their politics. But there was a genuine love of knowledge and learning there that was totally separate from partisan BS. It would be a shame if Republican operatives start taking a crap all over the University of Chicago for no good reason. I guess, though, that if I’m expecting the facts or common decency to influence the behavior of Republican hatchet men then I’m bound to be disappointed.
I find your points interesting about the perceived political leanings of the educated. I went to a fairly liberal college, U of Wisconsin, and I don’t think I met one intelligent conservative. Because of this lack of contact with non-liberals, I assumed that conservatives had nothing to offer in terms of political dialogue. This was obviously a fallacious assumption, as yourself, Sullivan, Culture 11 and Douthat actually seem to have your shit more together than most left of center writers. If their was more representation in Universities smart conservatives, I feel that it would be great for the country, as we could actually intelligently debate, discuss and listen to our opinions in a productive way. Instead we have the bs dialogue about “Obama being an Arab” and “Palin being an idiot” and we get nowhere. I do hope that the aforementioned ‘really smart’ conservatives get traction in the movement, so the country can have two serious parties resolve the tough issues of the future.
McCain barely graduated from Annapolis. What makes you think he can grasp what you’re saying?
Ironically, in my business (law) Chicago is often viewed as a conservative school, because of conservative and libertarian professors (and former profs) like Richard Epstein and Frank Easterbrook!
I have a very hard time swallowing your/Brooks’s presumption that the modern “conservative” movement was EVER, in terms of political appeal, based on intellectual rigor as represented by Kirk, Weaver, Strauss, Vogel, or for that matter Buckley or Friedman. The Goldwater-Reagan faction of the Republican Party was and is the one that (literally) warned that Medicare would bring the end of freedom in America; the one that opposed extending the vote to black people; the one that always promised tax cuts to voters, and large increases in military and police funding, while accusing Democrats of being fiscally irresponsible; the one that pretended from the start that the economic ideas that led to the Great Depression (and the Panics of 1857, 1873, 1892….) could be gussied up by new equations that promised stable prosperity and reality would conform to them.
In 1964 as now, the Goldwater/Reaganites were the ones who promised to keep the foreigners and the negroes and the IRS and the uppity feminazis from keeping the hardworking white man down. Even if there was a lot more to the ideas — I’ve read Buckley, Friedman, and Rand and got my economics degree largely from right-wing professors and I don’t think there is, but I admit I’ve not read Kirk/Weaver/Strauss — they all too frequently floated into public view in the form of violent rage. Few of the 1960s race riots were started by black people, after all. Nixon was a smart man, but his reassuring snarl was often aimed at the academic elite, and Barry G. talked of letting the (hypereducated) East Coast float out to sea.
In other words, there’s not much new to see here. You and most of your magazine colleagues are my favorite conservative writers around (along with Douthat), but you’ve always been too smart for the class.
Attacks on the east coast elite and pointy-headed liberals have been a staple of Republican politics since the 1950s (remember McCarthy?). The party has a long history of anti-intellectualism and faux celebration of the common sense of “ordinary” folks. While there is a conservative intellectual tradition in this country, represented by the thinkers you mention among other, its ideas have never been part of mainstream Republican thinking, which, in the past couple of decades, has degenerated into a few basic talking points: tax cuts, deregulation, consumption, and “family” values (as long as those values don’t interfere with the first three priorities). The extent to which the conservative thinkers of today do not understand that unrestrained global capitalism undercuts both families and traditional values is the extent to which conservatism, or what passes for it, has become a deeply impoverished tradition.
Daniel:
I’d be interested in your views on the consequences to the GOP of a McCain victory in the upcoming election. Inasmuch as he has chosen to take the anti-intellectual ‘culture war’ approach, and there is a slender possibility that he might actually win, I would suspect that such a victory might actually re-inforce the authority of the various neocons/nut-jobs currently running the party (and the McCain campaign). I suspect that a defeat this year is actually a necessity to start rebuilding a more balanced and participative GOP. Cranky old white guys and Jesus-freaks are not really the basis for long-term electoral success, but a victory this year will cement them in the role of GOP core constituency.
In 1964 as now, the Goldwater/Reaganites were the ones who promised to keep the foreigners and the negroes and the IRS and the uppity feminazis from keeping the hardworking white man down.
Say what?
So opposition to title IX (for example) places me in the category of keeping uppity feminazis down, I suppose…?
Does opposing the great society program do the same?
What about opposing the fed, which was a main cause of the depression, not any free market problems.
Come on now, if you are going to debate, do it seriously.
“What about opposing the fed, which was a main cause of the depression, not any free market problems.”
Oh, J*s*s. Even Friedman’s critique of Fed actions in 1929-32 was basically that they didn’t pump in money fast enough (i.e., that they left it too much to the free market).
This is another reason why intellectuals have been deserting the GOP - really, all that the GOP has to offer is 1950’s or 1920’s ideas, with freshly updated verbage to cover them.