Leaving the Lunatics Behind - Megan McArdle
If the right ever wants to get back in power, it needs to start policing its lunatic fringe.
Which is applauding this:
Organizing Against WorldNetDaily | The Next Right
I think it’s time to find out what conservative/libertarian organizations support WND through advertising, list rental or other commercial collaboration (email me if you know of any), and boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce any further support for WorldNetDaily.
Which is connected to this:
Can We Have Buckley Back? | The Next Right
Conservatives are entirely within their rights to have public debates over who will publicly represent them, and who will be allowed to affiliate with the conservative movement.
And then there is “conservative” Conor Friedersdorf, Stacy McCain’s favorite chew toy:
Meanwhile, as promised, let’s deal with Conor Friedersdorf, who in the course of a single blog post, manages to take shots at:
- Human Events
- Fox News
- Sarah Palin
- Glenn Beck
- Rush Limbaugh
This, in addition to his long-running war against Mark Levin.
So…what the hell is going on here?? Why are the supposed “best and brightest” of the Young Conservative Lions suddenly waging war on scruffy “outsiders?”
I think the answer is pretty simple: They’re scared to death they are going to lose their influence to the wave of Tea Party, Blogger, and Other Barbarians trying to remake the GOP, and conservatism, in their own image.
These are the youngsters whose immediate intellectual forebears turned the Reagan Revolution into the Double Bush Moderate Joke, and squandered the conservative majority in the process of kissing the asses of the liberals with whom they hung out in Georgetown bars. (It’s a metaphor, kids -don’t try this at home!)
As I mentioned earlier, careerism and credentialism are as much a problem for the Right as for the Left. But the natural tendency of the professional kiddie-pols to set themselves up as intellectual and ideological gatekeepers for both movement and grassroots conservatism leads to these self-flagellating civil wars about the nature of “proper” conservatism. And frankly, these hothouse flowers wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the blast-furnace debates the Founders and Framers took for granted - not to mention the nature of political and ideological debate in the 100 years following their times.
No, I am not advocating for the notion that movements don’t need their intellectuals. But I am proposing that intellectuals, while valuable in the sense of providing the mental underpinnings for movements, tend to make lousy real-world leaders. As I also pointed out, without those rowdy mobs of grass-roots troops, the ideas of the intellectuals go nowhere. And when the intellectuals decide that their ideas - and their leadership - is wasted on the grassroots lumpenproletariat - then that leadership heads directly over a cliff, and takes the movement with it.
The truth is, these guys are terribly uncomfortable with the technologically-driven self-empowerment of the masses at large, and the paladins who wield real power in it. (Both Henke and Ruffini are experts in political technology - but I don’t think they’re thrilled with the Great Unwashed making use of their tools for its own purposes). They find the idea that a Rick Santelli or a Joe the Plumber can set off entire movements over which they, themselves, have no control appalling - heck, I doubt that Joe the Plumber even knows who Megan McArdle is.
And the less said about uncouth barbarians of talk media like Rush, Glenn Beck, Hannity, or the million hit marvels of the internet - Drudge, Malkin, all the rest - the better. All of this has the effect of siphoning power and influence away from the traditional sources - upper middle class high school politicians who attend excellent colleges and then move on into journalism and politics at the formal levels - and putting it into “untrained hands.”
No wonder they are worried about the likes of Joseph Farah and “birthers.” (Although why Obama is so shy about releasing his original birth certificate remains a mystery to me…) And they aren’t happy about the rest of Friedersdorf’s laundry list, either.
In the final analysis, their problem is a natural sense of elitism. It’s not their fault. They were raised that way in the way they raised themselves. Their own experience indicates to them they are the best and the brightest.
And elitism, per se, is not necessarily an evil thing. After all, half of all humanity is below average. I am an elitist myself. But the problems with elitism arise when elitists think their talents qualify them to control. And that is what this latest kerfuffle is all about: Who is going to control the conservative movement.
Which is laughable on its face, because if there is any one characteristic of American political movements, it is that they are not especially amenable to top-down control, and every time somebody attempts to do so, they fail, and the movement fails as well.
The most successful conservative leader of our era was Ronald Reagan. He wouldn’t have tried to drum Joseph Farah, or Rush, or any of the rest out of his big tent. But Reagan’s great genius was in aligning huge numbers of people with his own clear principles. He led, but he didn’t try to lead the grass roots where it didn’t wish to go.
And anybody who, like Ruffini, spouts crap like, “who will be allowed to affiliate with the conservative movement” is somebody who is heavily invested in the notion of control.
It won’t work. It never has. And it won’t this time, either.
UPDATE: T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII weighs in.
“When you find yourself in the doldrums, I want you to know that all of us in the conservative intellectual movement will be there to blow you.”
Heh.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Bravo - very well said. Reagan’s conservatism was a big tent, not a country club.
And speaking of country clubs - check out An Ill Wind is Breaking For Our President
A brief off-topic complaint about the coverage of the allegations: Why doesn’t anybody link to the text of the actual bill in question? See? H.R. 645 is right here, and probably other places too! www.wnd.com actually gave its title and call number (or whatever the name of the “H.R. 645″-style name is), but no link!</rant>
Back to the topic you wanted to discuss:
The advantages of intellectuals come in areas where
Without the first, no amount of thought will get you anything good, since humans are almost as “Garbage In, Garbage Out” as computers. Without the second, building up an intellect isn’t worth the time, effort, money, etc. since the correct result can be achieved simply by trying it and seeing what happens.
Our current “elites” have more-or-less assumed that their logical models are sufficiently accurate and efficient, when it’s quite likely that no model yet exists; indeed, there’s no reason that such a model would have to be computable, even if it does exist. Remember the halting problem? Which do you think is harder: computing whether or not a Turing Machine will stop, or computing what millions of humans will want/need/do?
Granted, part of the reason why intellectuals make lousy leaders is because they take a very long time to reach conclusions — they have to inspect their intellectual models and calculations very carefully (and those calculations don’t just happen in an instant, either). Because of this, while intellectuals are attempting to find a more-perfect solution, another leader can start implementing a less-perfect-but-probably-good-enough solution. Our current “elites” are attempting to implement the LPBPGE solutions, while attempting to convince us that they’ve already given their models proper intellectual inspection.
Frankly, I think for most problems our politicians want power to fix, any reasonable logical model will take too much time, money, and data to achieve a useful degree of accuracy or precision. I think the best thing to do would be to decentralize problem solving attempts, so the best results can be arrived at experimentally.
I spend a fair amount of time reading and commenting at crookedtimber.org, home of the most throbbingly intellectual leftists on the web. Those guys argue forever about the most absurd crap, splitting every hair on beasts like Just War Theory and Rawlsian whatever-it-is. They seem to believe it’s possible (and desirable) to organize society according to principles so abstruse you need a post-graduate degree to have ever heard of them.
This is why I say conservatism is anti-intellectual: one essential premise is that government “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed”. How the hell can you consent to something you don’t understand? Most people (including most of the smart ones) can’t or shouldn’t be bothered with doctoral-level philosophy. None of our political candidates really gets this stuff either. So the socialist argument basically boils down to “we’re really smart, just trust us”. All they ask is absolute power over everything.
Conservatives don’t need intellectuals, at least not much. All our important principles were worked out a long time ago, and are pretty simple to express. Sure, they’re “simplistic”, and they don’t solve everything. But this is government we’re talking about, not Heaven On Earth. Government isn’t supposed to solve everything. When a self-styled conservative engages leftists on their own terms, arguing from sociology or wonking out, he’s not a conservative any more. And college-age kids, left and right alike, are nothing but a gaggle of egomaniacal punks out to Save The World. Combine all that and you have a truly pathetic creature.
Effective conservative leaders will be the ones who Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Well, sure, but if that becomes the case, who needs all the highly educated products of the Ivy League and their ilk, whether on the left or the right?
Which is, of course, what they all perceive as being a real problem.
From Musical Mountaineer:
Bingo. Small government, low taxes, ordered liberty, Constitutional originalism. [Some overlap]
Not too difficult, not much “intellect” needed — just an understanding of history and of human nature.
Oh, and in CrookerTimber’s favor: they once voted my old website as “Worst Blog on the Internet.”
Coming from them, it was a high honor indeed.
Re Musical Mountaineer: What do the CrookedTimber.org folk think about unsolvable problems? Personally, I think anything that wants to consider itself an intellectual should have their nose rubbed in enough recursion theory for it to realize that there are things which are impossible to compute by definition.
The Keep It Simple Stupid, is indeed the mantra of conservatism. And Yes, the basic tenets of conservatism was developed a long time ago. That is both the strength and the weakness of the movement. Its simplicity is what is attractive to the populace as a whole. It is understandable. But the Populace also wants problems solved. So they also buy into simple solutions to problems—which usually means that the solution causes a whole set of new problems. As our society continues down the path of mounting complexity, the problems facing it become more involved, and call for more complex solutions—solutions that simple minds, like mine cannot fully comprehend.
As I watch the unfolding drama of politics in our world, I see only a relatively few logical outcomes. The most logical appears to be a movement along a path from a modern statist oligarchy, to socialism, to the fall of American hegemony.
Mr. Quick,
I’ve responded to your post here. Thanks for the lively exchange.
Cheers,
Conor Friedersdorf
That’s the last thing that the intellectual elite of any stripe will admit to. They really believe they should be in charge, and whenever they have been in charge, they mucked things up royally.
It’s quite a contrast with the Revolution. Jefferson, John Adams and Franklin were part of the intellectual elite of the time, while Sam Adams and Thomas Paine were among the rousing bloggers of their time. they knew their roles, and understood that they needed the Ethan Allens and Washingtons to lead.
I guess politics has gone Hollywood: the actors aren’t content with their roles, they want to direct and produce.
From Conor’s response:
First, a brilliant title. Thanks.
A Quick Rebuttal | Politics | The American Scene
I’m sorry, but it is in your eyes that those you excoriate fail your “basic tests.” And while you may eschew control, I note you skipped lightly (so lightly it never made the final cut, though it did support my argument about the issue of control - or fear of its loss) over my cite of Patrick’s line about “who will be allowed to affiliate with the conservative movement” as being evidence of that very urge to control. Finally, it appears to me that your various quarrels with Limbaugh, Palin, Fox, HA, and Levin are primarily over issues of style, though you might not conceive them as such, rather than the deep issues you claim to represent.
I’ll charitably mark down your misunderstanding to my lack of writing skill, rather than any intention on your part to abjure “Intellectual honesty, arguing in good faith, and refraining from deliberately misleading others.”
But the fact is that in the circles you frequent, all of the above are, indeed, regarded as scruffy outsiders from the self-anointed intellectual mainstream of conservatism. Moreoever, they obtain their influence, in large part, via their interactions with the grassroots, rather than the conservative mandarinate. Now, you ascribe to them - in almost cartoonishly sweeping terms - what boils down to bad faith. They “lie to and manipulate the grassroots” for their own - what? Evil purposes? Personal enrichment?
Your review of Levin’s book is a case in point. You argue that Levin’s definition of statist is erroneous at its core, and therefore
The obvious question would then have to be, “If so, then why do you think Mark Levin is doing such terrible things?” But you never openly answer that one, you just leave the dead fish of unspoken but apparently intentional evil (on Levin’s part) lying there on the table, stinking.
It never crosses your mind that you may be suffering the basic misunderstanding here, in that you misapprehend that the liberal project cannot succeed without a powerful state to force people to do things they do not wish to do - like financing many of the projects liberals hold dear, not just for themselves, but for everybody, whether they wish them or not.
This holds true all the moreso for the goals of the more radical left. So it doesn’t really matter that the black secretary or the young mother doesn’t understand that she is a statist in desiring the state to grant her her wishes, she is still a statist, and still dangerous not only to her own liberty, but the liberty of all. Levin reserves his most vitriolic ammo for the knowing statist, but this doesn’t let the unknowing statist off the hook. In fact, it is the second variety, marshaled and manipulatied by the first, that may be the most dangerous threat of all. It is certainly the threat Levin sees in the Obama/Democrat agenda - and that I, frankly, saw in the Bush agenda.
The nature of government, of the state, is relatively simple: It is force. Now, this is not necessarily all bad all the time. But it is dangerous. And the more force government is permitted to wield, the more dangerous government - the state - becomes to the liberties of the individual and the people as a whole. As you well know, the Framers understood this, and did all they could to keep the state as small and weak as they could, within the limits of what they saw as its absolutely necessary duties. And in fact, much of the history of statism in America has been the ceaseless attempts ever since to unravel those restraints initially placed upon the state by the Framers.
None of the projects of those Levin numbers as statist - that is, those projects that would hand more and more power to the state to do more and more things statists believe are good, by whatever metric they use to define that term - can be accomplished without turning the state into Leviathan. By the way, “conservatives” (sneer, not scare, quotes) who advocate handing great power to the state to enforce their social preferences on themselves and their fellows are also statists in every sense of the word, and Levin does become logically inconsistent when he tries to skate around this fact.
Yet your review of Liberty and Tyranny entirely disallows for honest disagreement over the nature of the state and, consequently, statism. You simply pronounce Levin misguided and wrong, and do so using terms that are semantically loaded in such a way as to leave the impression that Levin is also evil, or stupid, a devil or a dumbass.
I’m not absolutely certain I can describe the peroration of your review as being intellectually dishonest, arguing in bad faith, or deliberately misleading to your readers, but I fear it skates close to the edge.
As for your blanket denunciation of “Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Fox News, and Human Events,” this is so ludicrously broad-brushed I can’t even figure out how to engage it. Are they all evil, all the time? Only part of the time?
And this doesn’t even get into their motives for whatever level of evil you ascribe to them.
Back to you. And please call me Bill. Surely by now we must be friendly enough for that.
What do the CrookedTimber.org folk think about unsolvable problems?
I’m not sure they think about them at all, in the sense that you mean. I don’t recall any arguments about computability.
I think, though, that their worldview doesn’t acknowledge the concept of intractable problems. They are incredibly cavalier about the inherent conflicts and imperfections in the human condition. They don’t really consider whether human nature might pose some kind of limit on their imaginative schemes. They build castles in the air; any sophomore can see the edifice has no foundation, but if you point that out, they react as though you farted in the elevator.
(Kim, I remember when CT voted your website the worst. Someone over there was complaining about your terrible attitude towards Africans (Let Africa Sink), and I said, “you know, Kim is African”. They actually did not know that.)
tant pis, Mr. Quick, but it is Game Ovah.
It is waaaaay too late to police the fringe.
The intellectuals have mostly left the building.
Consider Murray’s Kael graphic that he meant to poke fun at the pointy headed intellectuals that are wholly the property of the left.
Now consider….who teaches at colleges and universities….who are culture creators?
These people….the EXTREMELY LIBERAL people.
Who are culture consumers?
EVERYBODY ELSE.
Teh extremely liberal are the leading edge of the waveform that is shaping culture and academe in this country….no wonder you don’t want Obama to talk to your kids.
Conservatism is dead already……it is just the tiny little dinosaur brains in your hips that don’t know it yet.
;)
Tant pis, indeed!
American Thinker: Still the Biggest Missing Story in Politics
I’ll ignore the dinosaur brain snark, because I am a kindly soul, and I tend to cut a lot of slack to the intellectually…ah…challenged, especially when, as in your case, English appears to be their second language, and French their first. (I presume that “tant pis” thing indicates your primary language - otherwise I’d have to accuse you of unbearable pretentiousness along with your other intellectual failings…)
Get back to me in about 14 months, at which point I expect reality to have punctured that congenial bubble in which you are encased, and we’ll take up the discussion again.
lol
nah nah hey hey
doesn’t matter what they say
as long as they don’t vote that way.
192 electoral college votes.
Who is your candidate for 2012 pray tell?
Like I said, come back in 14 months, and we’ll talk again.
In the meantime, how’s that socialized medicine thing coming along?
Bill,
Thanks for your response. I will link your response and weigh in at greater length when I am not typing on my phone. But briefly:
1) In my Liberty and Tyranny review I quote Mr. Levin laying out the attributes of the statist as he defines the term. His own definition assumes a proactive love of state power as an end in itself. It precludes the person you mention who doesn’t know they are a Statist. This is a big reason why I think the statist as Mr. Levin describes it is a strawman. The typical American liberal is wrong to want expand the federal role in all sorts of matters, but they generally regard government as a means to an end they regard as good, not an end in itself. Understanding that is critical to opposing their efforts. And Fyi, I have repeatedly said that Mark Levin is very smart, and I certainly don’t think he is evil.
2) I do not share Mr. Ruffini’s desire to define who gets to associate with the conservative movement as a general matter. This is probably because his chosen project is shaping it’s future.
3) You are right that there is disagreement about whether those with whom I disagree actually fail the intellectual honesty test I lay out. But that seems like something we could test by referencing their archived words. For example, what if we selected a day at random and analyzed Mr. Limbaugh’ show for factually inaccurate and rhetorically misleading statements. What do you think we would find?
Are you game?
3)
To me, the usage indicates a lack of understanding french. :)
Sure. I listen to Rush in passing, if I have the car radio on, as well as Levin the same way, and I watch some news on Fox, and I read the occasional Human Events article, although I haven’t paid much attention to Sarah Palin lately. Like you, I operation is a politics and ideology-soaked atmosphere, and there are times when I simply can’t bear to pay too much attention to out of power politicians - at least until they become relevant again which, by the way, I do expect Palin to do.
I’m willing to see what we can come up with vis Rush, although I’m uncertain what it will contribute to the issue. Say we find a coupe of instances of factually inaccurate and/or misleading statements? Does that poison the entire Limbaugh well? If so, that’s a pretty strict standard. Would you like to submit to it also?
Anyway, yeah, sure, I’m game. How do you want to do this?
I’d be willing to put the number of lies told on Limbaugh’s show against the number of lies spit out by obumble and his fellow travelers on any day of the week, heh, Bill. I doubt that Conor will actually want to go that route.
Emdfl, I agree that Rush is no more dishonest than the average politician, Obama included.
Bill, shoot me an email and we’ll figure this out. It should be interesting. Conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com
No, it’s how one would say “Too bad!” when one means to be obnoxious. In other words, it’s pure French.
Conor, spin this as you wish, but my second thoughts have burgeoned to the point that I’ve decided not to participate in this particular project. As I say, I’m unsure what “measuring” a day’s worth of Limbaugh (or any person creating content for the public eye and ear, including both you and me) would contribute in any useful way. If Limbaugh were to be “clean” for that day, it would not necessarily invalidate your arguments against him, just as a few “catches” (which would then be subject to argument, most likely, as to whether they were really catches) would prove your argument against him. The same goes for everybody else.
What I am interested in discussing with you, however, is statism. I am especially fascinated by the concept of unconscious versus conscious statism that unexpectedly cropped up in our interchange.
What say you? Worth discussing, or not? If yes, we can each maintain threads at our own sites for the back and forths, as we have already done.
I know the meaning. I should have said, “a lack of understanding the french”, as I don’t believe the usage indicates french as a first language. It’s possible.
However, there was some baiting there and I only caught Clayton.
Don’t despair. It takes practice.
I thought the guy misspelled “ant piss”.
Bill,
Sure, I’ll talk about Statism, though I’ll need more of a prompt than that to get started. So why don’t you go ahead and write the first post, and I’ll grapple with whatever it is that you raise at The American Scene. And FYI, I am not going to check this threat again, so shoot me an e-mail either way when you post.
Bill, you waste your time with Conor and his pretentious circle if you want to. He and the rest of the “intellectual vanguard of conservatism” have become quite tedious. “Look at me, look at me, see how smart I am!” might be cute in a precocious third-grader; coming from an adult it’s just embarrassing.
Conor, it looks like you, Ruffini and your pals are the ones who aren’t going to be invited to the party.
I’m looking forward to the exchange, so I hope it takes place. I enjoyed reading Friedersdorf during his stint at Sullivans (except when he defended Ezra Klein as being readable. That’s just wrong). As much as I agree with Bill on the Ivory Towerism he has posted on, lately, I admit, also, to missing the steadying influence of WFB, tremendously.