The Sword and the Olive Branch

Migrations and Cultures

A World View

By Thomas Sowell

516 pages.    BasicBooks.  1996.

As I’ve been reflecting on the presently dormant Arizona immigration pother, I figured that a responsible, dispassionate survey such as Thomas Sowell’s Migrations and Cultures would help keep the actual nature of migration in healthy perspective.  I should’ve anticipated that a book by Dr. Sowell, who holds a PhD. in economics from the University of Chicago, and has authored at least ten books dealing primarily with the allocation of limited resources, would emphasize its socio-economic impacts, leading me down a much more focused path than most prevailing commentaries about immigration would.  Everything that follows is either from the book, or a direct reflection based on it. 

Migration is never merely about the relocation of human beings, but involves the reproduction of their cultures as well.  When people move en masse from one society to another (for whatever reason, and whether temporarily or permanently) they bring with them particular sets of skills, values, and traditions.  The behaviors and consequences which arise from these diverse mixtures are neither evenly nor randomly distributed, but concentrated in different places in different eras.  Emigrants leaving different regions of the same nation in the same era may bring with them wholly different sets of attitudes and knowledge.  The same can be said of peoples from the same region but different eras.  If a large number of Texans were to emigrate to another region today, they would be bring with them a different brand of cultural capital than San Franciscans, and contemporary San Franciscans would carry different sets of wisdom, values, and behaviors than San Franciscans of the early 20^th century. 

The distribution of cultural capital includes, but is hardly limited to, important economic factors such as specialized knowledge.  The economic success of different groups of human beings is not merely a product of chance, but neither can it be forced to display a perfect equality among humans which could never exist unless all cultures could be made exactly the same in all respects (not merely regarded as “equal,” which would do nothing to change the real-world consequences created by different lifestyles).   This is why Germans have dominated the beer markets from America, to China, to Australia, and Argentina.  Germans have a strong beer-brewing tradition, and the accumulated knowledge that begets has followed them across national boundaries as well as time.

How important is cultural capital?  No group has been as widely discriminated against all over the world as the Jews.  Yet although they’re less than 1% of the world’s population, at the time Sowell wrote Migrations and Cultures, they had won 16 percent of all the Nobel Prizes.  The only logical explanations for this could be: (1) A Zionist conspiracy controls the Nobel Committees (just to throw off the scent, they gave Yasser Arafat a share of the Peace Prize in 1994) (2) Jewish people are naturally more intelligent than others (also not credible—not to mention racist) and (3) something in Jewish culture promotes behaviors and attitudes which increase one’s chances of earning a Nobel Prize.  This is a not a statement of racial superiority or inferiority, or even cultural supremacy.  It’s an acknowledgement that human behaviors are shaped in part by one’s accumulated cultural heritage (which can be shared between cultures, and can change over time) and those behaviors will produce different results. 

In Migrations and Cultures, Thomas Sowell describes the prevailing economic characteristics of six distinct migrant groups (Germans, Japanese, Italians, the overseas Chinese, Jews of the Diaspora, and the overseas Indians) their effects on their surrounding cultures, and how the societies they’ve migrated to have affected them.  The author gives special attention to “middleman minorities,” minority groups which “facilitate the movement of goods from the producer to the consumer, without necessarily producing anything themselves.”  This emphasis is justifiable, as all throughout his tome, Sowell details how even modest prosperity among middleman minorities can provoke rabid resentment among their respective majority counterparts. 

Sowell details how middleman minorities are often viewed as parasites, an ignorant stereotype that has been embraced in divergent locales and by all classes.  Middleman minorities “perform economic functions which have been misunderstood throughout history, regardless of who has performed these functions.”  Among these functions are tasks ranging from retailing, to speculation, to money-lending.    For example, usury has been condemned by all three of the world’s major religions, including Judaism.  Perhaps that’s why the subtle economic affairs taken on by landlords and bankers are treated as witchcraft by the confused conglomeration of cacophonous cattle every time a home is foreclosed.  

As one might predict, hatred of middleman minorities isn’t always logical.  For example, the brutal former Ugandan President, Idi Amin, blamed Asians for overpricing native Ugandans in one breath, and unfairly undercutting Ugandan competition in another. 

Neither is this hatred rooted in some generic “fear of the other” as an amateur sociologist may infer.  In America, economic resentment of the Chinese middlemen preceded anti-Chinese racism, not vice-versa, while Austronesian Malaysians could hardly have been accused of harboring notions of “yellow peril” in their vicious hatred of the Chinese. 

Considering the prevalence of wealth resentment (or perhaps because of it), envy is a surprisingly underrated motive today.  While hatred of middleman minorities is not the product of simple envy, it is a more complex mixture of envy and wounded pride.  Our author points out that modest prosperity among middleman minorities is often resented far more than the real opulence among groups such as entertainers and nobility.   The spectacle of immigrants arriving to a nation and rising to prosperity while the natives remain poor threatens the native’s egos more than brazen disparities in income.  It suggests that the immigrants have unfairly acquired their wealth, or worse, their values are superior to the standing community’s.  Along with envy, these beliefs elicit a violent backlash more than mere jealousy ever could. 

Despite of this apparent irrationality, it’s almost axiomatic that in times of trouble, successful minority groups are targeted by a majority who will rationalize their anger by claiming that minorities are abusing them in some way.  Korean establishments were targeted in the 1992 Los Angeles riots because they were accused of exploiting the predominantly black communities they set up their businesses in.  According to journalist Heather MacDonald, during those riots, “Six hundred Korean-American businesses in South Central Los Angeles and 200 in Koreatown were damaged or destroyed; Koreans sustained 45 percent of all riot damage.”  To this day, violence against the Koreans during the Rodney King riots is justified by a small number of people in the same fundamental terms that violence against all middleman minorities has been excused: Their targets supposedly took advantage of the communities they ostensibly served, they didn’t “give back” as much as they were supposed to (however much of whatever that’s supposed to be) and they didn’t assimilate the values of the immediate surrounding majority. 

But middleman minorities, whether in Germany, Los Angeles, or Malaysia, succeed in part by refusing to assimilate the counter-productive economic values of the indigenous population.  This includes, but is not limited to, conspicuous consumption, an unwillingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term prosperity, and a general irresponsibility when it comes to paying off debt.  I’ve written about the importance of assimilation when it comes to immigration to America, but if incoming residents to my country refuse to adopt our worst habits, I won’t be offended.  It doesn’t hurt the United States if new residents refuse to assimilate American cuisine, popular culture, or our willingness to purchase flat-screen televisions but not health insurance. 

The fact that successful immigrant groups don’t appear to fully assimilate the values of their new communities, and that assimilation by migrants doesn’t protect them in their new communities (according to Sowell, even though the Chinese in Indonesia are regarded to be the most assimilated in Southeast Asia, they are also the most repeatedly and violently attacked) has compelled me to elaborate my position on assimilation and immigration (in short: the unlikelihood that illegal immigrants will learn about and preserve America’s best unique traditions is the most destructive feature of illegal immigration).   While immigrants should respect the heritage of the nations they move into, they shouldn’t do so mindlessly.  In fact, my emphasis on assimilating the United State’s finest qualities always implied that.  Also, if immigrants choose to assimilate, they shouldn’t expect that to dispel indigenous hatred.  The point of assimilation isn’t to flatter the natives in vain. 

If I haven’t made it painfully clear by now, the most important lesson to learn from Sowell’s book is the power of culture—how the customs migrants bring with them to their new lands are at least as important in shaping their fate as the foreign cultures they find themselves surrounded by.  A profound example Sowell gives of this are the differences between the Japanese who migrated to America around the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Japanese who migrated to Brazil shortly afterward.  As a whole, Japanese-Americans, despite their callous internment by the government, loyally supported the United States during World War II, while the much better treated Japanese-Brazilians (who were still interned, but for shorter periods and under better circumstances) rooted firmly against allied interests, to the point that many of them refused to believe Japan had been defeated in WWII after the nation’s unconditional surrender in 1945. 

The reason for this is that most of the Japanese who came to America grew up during in the Meiji era of Japanese history, which was so pro-western that within Japan there was a suggestion that English be made the national language.  Eventually, this produced feelings of inferiority among the Japanese, which in turn induced a hyperesthetic and shrill Taisho era, from which Japanese migrants to Brazil predominantly came.  The attitudes and values of the Taisho era certainly contributed to the Japanese ruthlessness documented in books such as “The Rape of Nanking.” 

 Even within American territory, differences between incoming cultures could be observed as the Japanese in the American mainland fared better than those in Hawaii.  Even though the mainland Japanese faced more discrimination, and were much less active politically, they “achieved higher incomes and occupational levels” than their counterparts.  Although this is slightly mitigated by the fact Hawaii has fewer natural resources than the continental 48 states, the enduring consequences of social differences between the Japanese who immigrated to Hawaii (they were from a poorer regions and social classes than Japanese who immigrated to the mainland) were more consequential in determining the economic prospects of the Japanese than the treatment they received by the larger society.  Note that this reverses the Marxist theory of historical materialism, which insists that a society’s “ideological superstructure” is determined by its economic base, i.e., ideology follows economics.

Among all of Sowell’s documentation of tragic history, one can discern a hopeful template for racial harmony in America in his assessment of Japanese integration.  Despite the fact Japanese immigrants seldom participated in racial politics, they came to be accepted in the societies they resided in.  To directly quote Dr. Sowell: “The remarkable reversal of public attitudes toward the Japanese over the years—especially in Australia, Peru, and the United States—suggests that behavior and performance are more effective ways to changing people’s minds than moral crusades or emotional denunciations.” 

Yet I couldn’t find Sowell’s explanation for why the success of Japanese immigrants (post-internment) didn’t invite the hatred of the natives the way prosperity among middleman minorities always does.  Perhaps Americans, enthused by their nation’s growing economy and international prominence, didn’t feel threatened by the presence of successful minorities, but that doesn’t take the much poorer Peruvians into account.  Maybe the aftermath of World War II, particularly America’s dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japanese soil, produced special circumstances which affected how Westerners related to Japanese immigrants.  Perhaps the Japanese weren’t truly a middleman minority.  It could be that atavistic class consciousness took a welcome vacation.  Something prevented the long-term resentment of the Japanese among post-WWII westerners, and it would have been be helpful for Sowell to more clearly identify what that was. 

Understanding the importance of cultural capital shouldn’t be confused with rigid determinism.  A long-standing tradition of business expertise would be of little use to immigrants in societies where foreigners aren’t permitted to engage in free enterprise, but to dismiss one’s cultural heritage is to unwisely dismiss how it helps determine one’s success.   Keeping an eye on cultural capital helps one transcend what Sowell calls “the fashionable but false dichotomy between ‘blaming the victim’ and blaming ‘society,’” which “ignores factors for which no blame is in order.”  This shouldn’t be a controversial point; for a group to pretend that their cultural values and inherited knowledge don’t have any effect on their prosperity is like trying to live forever by refusing to acknowledge death. 

Knowing all of this doesn’t release Americans from the responsibility of promoting justice and compassion, but it defangs the serpents who use the lack of perfect equality—whether it’s expressed in proportional representation, income level, or arbitrary prestige—as a demagogic tool.  The importance of this in preserving peace within a multiracial society can’t be understated. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that no one can fully understand the way different groups achieve different levels of economic prosperity without understanding the ideas presented in Migrations and Cultures.  I would have like to see more direct comparisons of the different cultures, as well as a timely chapter on Mexican immigration, but the book was already 500 pages long, and from the author’s account, already one of three books conceived from what was supposed to be one (the others:  Race and Culture, published in 1994, and Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, 1991.  I imagine Affirmative Action Around the World, 2004, is related to these as well).  Besides, it’s not as if I can complain about the scope of the book.   

Hey, wasn’t this essay supposed to have something to do with Arizona SB 1070? 

Tags: economics, immigration, Sowell
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I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican

A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous

By Harry Stein

199 pages.    Encounter Books.  2009.

Chicken Soup for the Conservative Soul

Conservatives aren’t very good at identity politics.  Part of it is our fundamental distaste for chauvinistic appeals based on race, gender, class, or sexuality.  While right-leaning Americans are generally well aware of their political standing relative to the rest of the country (in other words, conservatives know they’re conservative) the intimate question of what it means to be a member of a certain group, how it affects friendships, the workplace and the other mundane details of our day to day existence aren’t examined with the same intensity on the American right as it is in self-conscious victim groups.  This is what makes I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, a collection of the novelist Harry Stein’s perceptive accounts of the condensation, ignorance, and intolerance right-wingers put up with, unique.  It’s not the Limbaughian equivalent of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, but it doesn’t need to be at the moment. 

For a book culled from one man’s standpoint, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican is surprisingly broad in scope.  In short sections (some only two pages long) it deals with the headaches (“struggles” is too dramatic of a word here) conservatives experience in a wide array of circumstances.  One catches a glimpse of the failure of Mrs. Stein to pull off a successful bipartisan “purple party,” the scapegoating of landlords in New York, or the challenges single conservatives face when dating in blue states (I didn’t think it was that hard, but then again, I dated online and listed my affiliation as conservative to preemptively weed out the women this would bother).   One of Stein’s best chapters is “Shoot-out over the Holiday Table,” which discusses the need for perspective to keep families together in the presence of political differences.  Stein advises his readers to keep in mind that no matter how contentious things may seem today, “the grimmest brother-against-brother stuff is best left to history.” 

Of course, that doesn’t mean ideological differences don’t have real consequences.  What right-of-center American can’t relate to Stein’s experience after giving a 2002 speech where he pointed out how ridiculous it was for his son’s English teacher to avoid teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an anti-racist classic, because it uses the N-word a lot.  Predictably, a progressive activist stood up during Stein’s appearance and stated that he, as a black man, was personally offended by the his jokes about black people (bizarre, because Stein had told none) and rationalization of the use of the N-word, as if defending the authentic portrayal of racism in its time is equivalent to excusing the casual use of racial slurs today. 

But that isn’t the end of the story.  A reporter from a local newspaper contacted Stein, asking him about reports that he had made racially inflammatory statements.  Mr. Stein explained in detail what happened, but the reporter, apparently oblivious (and ambiguously hostile) followed up by asking if he had inadvertently said something offensive anyway.  When the article about the manufactured controversy was published, it mentioned the irresponsible accusations leveled against Stein, but it didn’t list an adequate defense to them, merely noting that the speaker didn’t understand why someone would take offense to his speech.  Stein’s feeling of “outrage mixed with a profound sense of helplessness” is exactly what all outspoken conservatives feel when our words are deliberately misconstrued to pander to the lowest common denominator.  I know I always leave room after dinner for progressives to put words into my mouth. 

One would think that our private lives would serve as a shelter from this nonsense.  Among emotionally balanced adults, the impact of political differences on friendships should be minimal.  After all, differences in opinion are part of what makes people interesting.  But I suspect all conservatives know it isn’t that simple. 

No less so than an accent in our speech or the way we dress, our political alignment will evoke a visceral response from friends and strangers alike.  Should I open the door for my feminist friend, or will she lecture me about being able to do it herself—if it happens in the office, does it count as sexual harassment?  Will my environmental friend freak out when he sees the bovine carbon footprint packed into my freezer?  Will the progressive minority be offended if I repeat a Chris Rock joke?  Will the conservative guy tell me I’m going to hell for smoking weed?  Unfair assumptions dog everyone in one way or another.  Harry Stein recollects a conversation where he was accused by an old friend of becoming a right-winger out of greed. 

At one point, our author bluntly poses a question that aims at the heart of such phenomena: “Is it even possible to be genuine friends with someone that believes you—or, if not precisely you, everyone who agrees with you—is a vicious, mean-spirited, greedy, bigoted S.O.B.?”  The majority of my friends are progressive to one degree or another, so I hope the answer is yes, but I know exactly what he means.  The assumptions made about conservatives, such as our presumed bigotry, are not only insulting, but stigmatizing—they scare apolitical acquaintances away, create a hostile environment for counterrevolutionary opinion, and are even used to justify crass mistreatment of rightists (such as boycotts of those who support conservative causes). 

Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican includes a list of “safe houses” (businesses and other establishments with conservative-friendly atmospheres) in Madison, WI.  Stein also sheds light on the way right-wingers cope with progressive aggression using abrasive humor, via the Madison talk radio host Vicki McKenna.  McKenna: “The healthiest way to look at this town—I’m talking mental health—is as comedy.”  

It’s tempting to say that conservatives and progressives are equally uncivil to one another, and I plead guilty to taunting progressives as much as any other Ann Coulter fan.  Still it’s hard to picture a National Review intern squealing “yess, Obama has lukemia!” the same way one of Stein’s liberal friends has gloated , “Yess, Giuliani has prostate cancer…”  The difference between the right and the left seems to involve charity.  Harry Stein certainly isn’t the first to note that “Conservatives think liberals have bad ideas, while liberals think conservatives are evil.” 

One can speculate as to why this is so.  The disproportionate sense of urgency progressives bring to seemingly every political question just isn’t present on the right in any palpable sense.  If someone believes that the benefits of universal health care are obvious, and clearly better in all important ways than the current system, then wouldn’t that make anyone who undermines it evil?  If one truly believes that women are “under siege” in America, wouldn’t that make mere opposition to progressive feminism misogynistic?  A certain anxiety is implicit in the left’s insistence on passing out extreme accusations like Halloween candy.  It’s gotten to the point where comparisons to the KKK say more about the accuser than the accused. 

Perhaps progressives are just clever enough to understand the cheap applause one gets from parroting left-wing sensibilities.  It’s easier to impress people by making fun of Christian conservatives than it is to defend them.  It’s easier to take a holier-than-thou stance in defense of idealistic spending programs than it is to parry endless assaults on your integrity by those who insist that advocates for lower taxes are pandering to corporations.  Advocating non-threatening leftist policies will get one called “bold” by fellow travelers, but demonstrating true courage by say, making a case that the education budget may need to be sensibly cut, will get you called a fascist toady.  Progressives applaud each other for their imagined bravery almost as much as they unfairly smear their perceived enemies.  In short, they’re smart enough to understand politics as a status symbol.

Perhaps it’s less about status and more about peer pressure.  This is congruent with a common theme in I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican.  In large segments of America, the leftist perspective is rarely challenged.  Not on campus, not in psychiatry, and certainly not in social work.  Not among artists, or most young people, or strangely, the “political class.”  Not at work (where politics, especially conservatism, can be potently offensive), in coffee shops, or on the FM dial.  One could make the case that the social incentives for conforming to the conventional left are simply greater than the ones for embracing the reportedly outrageous right.  Through their cloyingly polite deference to seemingly every sensibility registered under the umbrella of social justice, PBS and NPR have a found a way to become less daring than Pat Boone. 

Maybe, just maybe, progressives are sincerely afraid of conservatives.  Perhaps the assumptions made about modern tea partiers in pop culture have become a simulacrum of reality, causing impressionable human beings to actually believe that right-wingers are generally crazy and/or evil.  It is possible that after a lifetime of hearing it repeated over and over again by their peers and the media that leftists are truly convinced that the difference between conservatives and liberals is that the latter group opposes “privilege” in all its ugly forms, while the former excuses or even supports it. 

But let’s keep in mind that this is all speculation.  I don’t want to make the mistake of presuming that intelligent people with good intentions would never embrace progressive politics.  Some people have embraced the left in good faith, and others will in the future.  Better to cope with this reality than torture ourselves with dreams of ideological purity.  A conservative cliché is that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and an America where conservatives are free to express themselves, organize, and peacefully protest bad ideas (and the institutions and laws which they may produce) is a nation that is good. 

I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican is a brisk, pleasurable read, but it’s also thoughtful.  It’s a reminder that our personal, conservative experiences are legitimate and not isolated musings generated by our kooky imaginations.  It’s a morale booster, a light, intellectual snack for when one is not in the mood to translate Russell Kirk’s encyclopedic prose into English.  I repeat, it isn’t The Souls of Black Folk, but it doesn’t need to be. 

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Read parts one, two, and three

Part four: Purposeful Confusion

Eric Alterman has a bad habit of confusing the meanings of terms which are as plain as day to neutral observers.  It’s a pattern that has sustained his entire career.  In the past he’s bent over backwards to read the worst in Ann Coulter’s glib quips.  It continues in Why We’re Liberals as he professes not to understand what conservatives mean by “liberal elitism.”  Yet nowhere is his seemingly purposeful confusion more apparent than his denial of liberal judicial activism. 

In a short chapter on the subject, Alterman follows what has emerged as a common rhetorical formula for him.  He claims to misunderstand his opponent’s dialectal approach, denies that it can be understood, and then fills the void he created with a meaning that buttresses his argument.  In the case of “judicial activism,” he purports not to understand what it means, and then claims it “has rarely if ever been defined.”  Here Alterman is using an articulate version of the passive-aggressive “I don’t even know what you mean,” in response to slogans one doesn’t like.  It’s safe to presume that Alterman’s misunderstanding is a rhetorical technique, because it isn’t followed up by even a token attempt to grasp the term as it’s used. 

Reading fiction often requires a voluntary suspension of disbelief.  One can’t enjoy a story about dragons, wizards, or totalitarian conservative governments without the ability to ignore the fact these things just don’t exist (which isn’t to say there aren’t corrupt conservative regimes).  We need to use the same technique to follow Alterman’s logic on judicial activism.  After the professor decides that judicial activism is a meaningless term, he defines it in a way that supports his general anti-conservatism, but unfortunately has no bearing on how the term is actually used.  First he cites a study that defines judicial activism as a tendency to strike down legislation as unconstitutional—in other words, for judges doing their job.  The study suggests that conservative judges are the most activistic.

The problem with a lot of serious political science research, partly out of the need to limit difficult variables, is that it tends to saddle complex political terms with simplistic definitions.  Outside of political newbies, no one reduces political conservatism to a mere resistance to change as much as the engineers of political science studies.  Hence the simplistic equation of activism with finding laws unconstitutional.  Even if it wasn’t obvious in the first study Alterman uses, the first clue that something reeks about the whole thing is it’s dubious conclusion.  Because of a sloppy definition of judicial activism, anyone taking the study at face value is led to believe that Clarence Thomas is more than twice as activistic as Stephen Breyer.  The equivalent would be a carefully plotted, five-year long survey undertaken by graduate students which concluded that Rush Limbaugh was twice as liberal as Keith Olbermann.  Should I be more inclined to buy into the “proof” that Rush is actually more liberal, or should I wonder if the grad students are using a definition of liberal no one else uses? 

The second flawed study Alterman cites isn’t truly an alternative to the first.  It just measures judicial activism by a tendency to strike down executive acts instead of legislation.  Predictably, small-government conservatives find more executive acts unconstitutional than statist liberals do.  In both cases, Alterman is conflating activity with activism. 

Alterman’s clever chapter is disturbing because it doesn’t take much effort to understand what conservatives generally mean by “judicial activism.”  Loosely, it means judges interpreting the Constitution in ways that correspond more with prevailing trends than with established principles. This doesn’t mean there isn’t any debate over the meaning of “original intent,” the importance of statutory laws in relation to constitutional law, or whatever keeping with the “spirit of the Constitution” entails.  Conservative opponents of judicial activism are chiefly concerned with keeping judges from arbitrarily imposing their views on others.  Even conservative novices know this—which means that Alterman, too smart and intellectually curious to simply overlook something central to his argument, has purposefully went out of his way to avoid understanding what he’s talking about.  At least here, the author is demonstrably more ideological than intellectual. 

Conclusion

So what general impressions does one come away with after reading Why We’re Liberals?” 

Firstly, liberals are capable of self-criticism.  It may come sandwiched in between layers of anti-conservative vitriol, but it’s there.  Alterman is no shill for communism.  His take on affirmative action is to approach it through class instead of race, which is at least one step up from the lowest rung of identity politics.  Alterman is individualistic enough that I imagine that I could have a good faith dialogue with him; he doesn’t share President Obama’s habit of talking past conservatives, recycling academic talking points as if he’s still on the campaign trail. 

Secondly, even the most educated liberals are dismissive and uncurious about conservative ideas. This happens because the left’s problem isn’t the absence of a moral code or education; it generally has plenty of both.  No, what the left needs more than anything is humility.  Liberals look down on those who aren’t liberal.  Blanket claims that liberals are smarter, kinder, and more sacrificial than conservatives are not uncommon even among the most cultivated progressive minds.  This arrogance has kept them from learning any lessons from the conservative movement. 

This won’t change anytime soon.  Until a dominant segment of America comes to understand that political alignment doesn’t dictate character, liberals and conservatives will jockey for moral superiority.  In the meantime, conservatives should remind the left that being liberal doesn’t mean you’re smarter, more caring, more tolerant or less capable of pettiness and crime than anyone else.  It just makes you liberal, that’s all.  Until this sinks in, Americans will keep using liberalism as a status symbol, something to signify that they’re well-educated, thoughtful citizens (think PBS license plate frames). 

This is one of the most important fronts in the culture war.  Not until the veneer is stripped off of liberalism and all of its subsets will American politics even have a chance to become an intellectual endeavor, as opposed to a vehicle people use to feel good about themselves. 

Finally, liberals are insecure about their beliefs.  Alterman’s worst moments don’t come when he strays to the far left, but when he’s inappropriately lashing out against the right.  When he carelessly tosses around accusations of bigotry, it betrays an insecurity which belies his aptitude and relative affluence.  Liberals wouldn’t feel such a strong urge to lie or call their opponents hate mongers if they were truly convinced they had the intellectual high ground.  Confident people argue with ideas; insecure people embellish anecdotes.  This suggests that liberals can be persuaded if they would actually listen to conservative arguments.  Thus, the most difficult left-wingers to talk to aren’t necessarily the furthest to the left, but the most defensive and uncommunicative.

So in the face of liberal intellectualism, don’t be intimidated.  Eric Alterman is one of the most intelligent liberal authors I’ve read, and his philosophical soft spots aren’t much different than Sean Penn’s.  If you find yourself debating a liberal egghead, don’t feel as if you need to be clever or conniving.  Just make your case as if you were sharing ideas with anyone else.  Obviously there will be a lot of disagreement, but you’ll be surprised at the things smart liberals concede.  Open up to them, empathize with them, and if they get too full of themselves, give them a good rhetorical smacking. 

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Tags: Eric Alterman, judicial activism, why we're liberals
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Follow the links to parts one and two

Part three: Elitism

Some of the most important battles in politics are waged over the meanings of words.  Responding to the rhetorical question “Why are liberals so damn elitist?” Eric Alterman writes that it’s difficult to know exactly what conservatives mean when they say “elitism.”  He then proceeds to describe exactly what conservatives mean by noting “the crime is apparently one of the mind,” and that the right judges elitism “on the basis of attitude, rather than income.”  Curiously, Alterman claims conservatives shout “elitism” to beat back liberals instead of arguing with them.  He thinks it’s used to preempt and dismiss liberal perspectives.  This is actually a mirror image of Ann Coulter’s premise that liberals use “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” and “stupid” to avoid arguing ideas with right-wingers.  Like many of Alterman’s arguments, this one is intuitively wrong, but needs explaining to refute. 

Elitism is indeed an attitudinal trait.  While Alterman disagrees with this, he also perfectly understands that this is how conservatives have used it.  He’s being sarcastic in the following example, but I couldn’t describe elitism better than he did: “It’s not about where you live, how much money you have, how many security guards you regularly employ, where you summer, what you drive, what you drive when you’re driving whatever else you drive when you’re not driving that, where you went to school, or where you think people should have gone to school.”  Exactly, Professor Alterman.

Elitism isn’t necessarily about class; it’s about looking down on others.  Certainly there are wealthy elitists, but not all wealthy people are elitist.  Elitism is not contingent on class, education, or any other demographic category.  Bill Gates owns multiple cars, likely employs his own security guards, summers wherever he wants, and doesn’t have to work another minute of his life if he doesn’t want to, but nothing I know about him suggests that he’s elitist.  Yet even the poorest, white-trash leftist who looks down on Christian conservatives for not being sufficiently critical of their personal faith is displaying an elitist attitude. 

So if elitism is a shallow tendency to look down of groups of people for having demographic characteristics one doesn’t admire, then it follows that liberal elitism is the presumption that liberals are superior to conservatives solely based on political alignment.  While anyone who identifies themselves as liberal or conservative will naturally hold their ideals in higher esteem than others, what would make ideological particularism elitist is an arrogant, personal tone.  Ironically enough, Eric Alterman provides more than a few examples of liberal elitism. 

My first exhibit of Alterman’s snobbishness is his common claim that conservatives frame issues in simple “black and white” dichotomies, while liberals perceive “shades of grey.”  His strongest evidence is a study which suggests that liberals are more willing to accept new ideas, but that could signify a lack of conviction as much as it implies a capacity for nuance.  Either way, these contentions are demonstrably false.  No matter how morally ambivalent liberalism may or may not be, conservatism cannot be reduced to simplistic, reactionary protest.  

The American right has always been a predominantly literary movement, rooted and nurtured by words and ideas.  Conservatism would be unrecognizable without its literary column.  If American fascists had censored the publication of Whittaker Chamber’s Witness or Frederic Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, anti-communism may never have never caught on and induced the birth of American conservatism.  Take away Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and what we now call conservatism might have a different name.  If the National Review had never been published, conservative ideas probably would not have been able to spread the way they did in the latter half of the 20^th century.  Moving away from literature, right-wing audiences dominate talk radio, and I won’t be the first to tell you that there are far more entertaining choices of media than explicitly issue-driven commentary.  It takes more than watching syndicated episodes of The West Wing to understand conservatism. 

I don’t doubt the intelligence of liberals, but on the surface, conservative perspectives on several issues are clearly more nuanced than liberal ones.  For example, conservatives tend to believe that tax cuts across the board help stimulate the economy by allowing businesses to keep more capital to invest in more opportunities, often resulting in the hiring of new employees.  Contrast this counter-intuitive concept with the anti-intellectual left-wing mantra “tax cuts for the rich,” which insultingly implies that the rich are the only people conservatives intend to benefit with tax cuts.

Immigration is another issue which liberals frame in “black and white” terms while conservatives wrestle with its moral ambiguity.  Conservatives recognize that illegal immigration is a cultural and economic issue whose ethnic implications are incidental.  If white people with a general tendency to resist assimilation started illegally residing in America, immigration would still be a serious issue to conservatives.  A sure way to undermine American culture would be to introduce a large population of immigrants who are ignorant of, and even hostile to it.  Contrast this argument against illegal immigration with liberal protests, where poster-board advertises inanities such as “no human being is illegal;” as if that breaks the conversation wide open. 

The ideas that conservatives see things in simplistic terms is in part an unfortunate by-product of the fact that liberals tend to be self-styled moral relativists, while conservatives believe in a transcendent moral authority.  Classical conservative dogma states that matters of right and wrong lie on a plane untouched by humanity’s ability to recognize evil.  This is not the extreme moralizing position one might expect.  Even liberals generally agree that crimes such as pederasty are wrong no matter what reasons are invented to excuse them-yet this argument depends on the existence of absolute morality, even if it’s narrowly defined.  Even if one doesn’t agree with my reasoning, it’s obvious that even the most maligned conservative doctrine, absolute morality, is cerebral, and not a dippy general attachment to authority.   

Just as irritatingly condescending is Alterman’s corresponding claim that liberalism is more demanding than conservatism, which if true, would mean liberals are more self-sacrificial.  While it’s undeniable that leftists spend more time picketing and protesting than rightists, is that really a sacrifice?  The unmatched standard for mass protest happened at Woodstock, and it’s difficult to argue that attending a self-congratulatory, drug-fueled concert for days on end is more of a sacrifice than a lively vacation.  Even today’s protests are social events that aren’t exactly inhospitable to its participants.  If marching against the Iraq war was truly a sacrifice, it would have been rare, and not a predictable phenomena on college campuses and outside big party conventions the past seven years.  At its root, activism is simply the combination of belligerence and direction.  It’s not necessarily something to frown upon, but getting yourself arrested for sitting on the white house lawn isn’t nearly as sacrificial as opposing a left-wing monster, communism, by standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.

This begs the question: what exactly is it about liberalism that makes it more demanding?  No one in America is punished by the government for simply being a left-wing activist.  I could stand on a soap box all day and shout anti-conservative speeches through a megaphone and the most I’ll be accused of is disturbing the peace.  Perhaps being on constant vigil for political transgressions, i.e., always being “conscious,” can take a psychological toll on someone, but conservatives have a much clearer case that their political doctrine is more demanding.  

The absolute moral authority so important to conservative thought is just that: absolute.  It makes claims on us whether we like it or not.  For example, in the conservative mind, there are no good reasons to cheat on a spouse.  The fact that not all rightists live up to their professed ideals only speaks to how difficult they can be to uphold.  The liberal theory of moral relativism necessarily dictates that cheating is o.k. in certain circumstances.  Considering mankind’s ability to justify even the worst crimes (Al-Qaeda released videotapes with measured, if ultimately wrong reasons for attacking the United States on 9-11), that’s not anywhere near the vicinity of sacrificial.  Making excuses for stealing (my family needed the food) cheating (my wife ignores me) and lying (Republicans did it first!) is always easier than not doing those things in the first place. 

Perhaps the most glaring example of liberal elitism comes before the table of contents in Why We’re Liberals.  One of the opening quotes in it is from John Stuart Mill, “…stupid people are generally conservative.  I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”  For Christ’s sake.  Everything I’ve written up to this paragraph is unnecessary.  Mill’s arrogant proclamation describes everything conservatives mean by liberal elitism. 

Next week: conclusion-purposeful confusion  

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Elitism, Eric Alterman, why we're liberals
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GUILTY

Liberal “Victims” and their assault on America

By Ann Coulter

311 pages.  Crown Publishing.  2009.

Slander II

So I just finished Ann Coulter’s latest book, Guilty.  Like a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it starts with a lot of promise, but gets sidetracked just as the plot starts to develop.

It begins by describing how people go out of their way to portray themselves as victims in America.  Some make up hate crimes against themselves; others make up stories about growing up impoverished.  Particularly interesting is how celebrities such as Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, and Barack Obama embrace their African-American heritage while downplaying their white heritage in order to acquire what Coulter calls “Victim Chic.”  Then there’s Asians who complain about being stereotyped as “model minorities,” which is only harmful in the sense that it inhibits upper-middle class San Franciscans from playing the race card.  This is only a fraction of the evidence Coulter cites to demonstrate that victimhood is a status symbol. 

This is followed by the controversial chapter on single mothers.  Here, Coulter makes a compelling case that single motherhood is deified (as if to prove Coulter right, the New York Times recently printed a squeezably soft puff piece on single mothers).  The glorification of single motherhood causes Americans to overlook its negative consequences, including the fact that children from single-parent homes are more likely to end up in prison, drop out of school, kill themselves, and even become rapists.  As Coulter’s latest interviews show, not everyone is prepared to consider these harsh truths.  This is Coulter at her best, taking an entrenched liberal narrative and turning it on its head.  The most any polemicist can do with a sacred cow; break the ice around the taboo subject, hopefully making it more acceptable to debate in polite circles. 

Here’s where the conductor forgot to hit the right switch.   Soon after the chapter on the complicated realities of single motherhood, Coulter turns her attention away from what I thought would be the driving theme of Guilty, the left’s idealization of victimhood, and instead focuses on her arch-nemesis, the arrogant, left-wing media.  As a result, most of Guilty reads like a sequel to Slander, including b-sides from the original involving Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.  It’s full of great information (I like her breakdown of books written by George W. Bush “insiders,”) but liberal media bias doesn’t need to be discussed again, especially to her readers.   

In Slander, Coulter’s point is that the media is overwhelmingly liberal.  Her focus in most of Slander II is that the media is still that way, which allows leftists to behave aggressively while maintaining their front as victims.  Even left-wing journalists act as if they’re part of an oppressed minority in their field.  She could have done this in a brisk chapter.  Instead she spends more than a hundred and fifty pages discussing how the media perpetuates the myth of liberal victimhood in one form or another.  Sentient Americans know the media slants left.  The science is pretty much settled on that. 

Fortunately, in the last chapter of Guilty, Coulter picks up the pace again.  In it, she indirectly cites an interesting Rothman and Lichter study that liberals are twice as likely to value being popular as conservatives.  This may explain why artists are so liberal.  Popular culture is driven by image, not substance; thus the most successful artists are usually going to be the ones preoccupied with shallow things such as popularity.  It also explains why liberals are so uptight about America’s standing in the world.  It’s as if they need their country to be liked in order to feel validated. 

Like all of her actual books (as opposed to assorted collections of her work) Guilty finishes strongly.  Towards her stirring denouement, Coulter lists a long line of political violence committed by left-wingers.  The intimidating compilation starts with the violent pacifist John Wilkes Booth, and ends with a 2008 story involving two young liberals who walk into a Republican campaign headquarters, accuse old people of stealing Obama campaign signs, and are then escorted out of their opponent’s office, only to spray five McCain staffers with mace. 

Behavior like this doesn’t happen on accident.  All the liberal radicals Coulter describes view themselves as downtrodden, or at the very least, spokespeople for the downtrodden.  The children of single parents also tend to view themselves as powerless.  So do violent felons.  Even if it isn’t rooted in reality, feeling powerless excuses violence, and shows how a preoccupation with victimhood leads to not just bad behavior, but often self-satisfied cruelty. 

Ann Coulter could have written her entire book on these losers, creating a media firestorm and bursting the argument about the roots of political extremism wide open, starting with the contentious premise that it’s rooted in victim ideology.  But she only spent a handful of pages on that, and instead we’re left with a good point about the deification of single motherhood that America doesn’t seem to be getting. 

I love Ann Coulter.  She’s one of my three biggest influences.  Slander is the book that turned me towards conservatism.  Perhaps because of that, I expected a lot more from Guilty.  It’s worth reading at least once, if only for chapters one, two, and seven.  Yet for all its high points, Guilty is still not nearly as good as Treason, her most focused (and entertaining) effort.  In 2007, Camille Paglia wrote that Coulter seems to be regressing rather than growing intellectually.  I won’t say that, partly because I don’t think I can hold a candle to Coulter’s breadth of knowledge.  But I will say she’s mining in a familiar cave, when she could be finding much more gold someplace else. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: ann coulter, Guilty, Slander II
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Part one can be found here.

Part two: Obligatory Identity Politics

Why we’re liberals begins with a predictable but thoughtful (at least in this case) premise that liberalism has been maligned by conservatives and the mainstream media (Alterman’s breakthrough hit, What liberal media?, makes a comprehensive argument that the mainstream media is conservative).  It’s followed by a short account of recent trends in liberal history.  He focuses on reasons liberalism isn’t as popular as it was in the early 20th century, including the prevalence of welfare payments “that appeared to reward sloth,” the “permissive social morality” advocated by the left, “the use of courts, rather than the electoral process, to achieve liberal aims,” and many more.  While no serious person could mistake Alterman for anything but a leftist, his description of liberalism’s fall from grace is critical and informative. 

Alterman then paints an impressive portrait of what a liberal society looks like by describing the most progressive aspects of Europe: free health care and the European Union’s abolition of the death penalty come to mind.  He claims that health care costs Europe less than half of what it costs America, and that Europe’s infant mortality rate is lower than the United States’.  He advertises Europe’s recognition of gay marriage and mandatory paid vacation for all workers.  Yet he doesn’t mention how dominantly liberal the political atmospheres of American hellholes such as Detroit (consistently recognized as the most liberal city in America, according to voting patterns), and Oakland are.  He only mentions Europe’s problems with unemployment (fueled in no small part by the expensive mandates the EU imposes on businesses) and immigration as an aside.  No group in America intimidates its citizens like politicized Muslims bully Europeans.  Groups of unassimilated immigrants don’t light up America’s streets like a Christmas tree.  These same people will remain unassimilated because the only alternatives to cowardly, balkanizing multiculturalism Europeans seem to conjure up have more than a whiff of racism. 

All the Europhilia in the world couldn’t derail Alterman’s defense of American liberalism.  But his unabashed declaration of Europe’s cultural superiority does foreshadow his most problematic arguments, the reasons he believes that America doesn’t embrace the left today.  When attempting to describe America’s reluctance to become liberal, Alterman cycles through the usual excuses: He argues that liberals by their very nature don’t get as angry as conservatives do, so they’re not as forceful.  He argues (falsely) that the conservative base is much wealthier.  He claims that liberals are handicapped by their dedication to good government.  He peevishly complains about the Electoral College, and so on and so forth.  In contrast with the book’s promising opening, Alterman serves the reader, among other gruel, boiler-plate proclamations of moral superiority more appropriate for the street-fighting blogosphere than a serious ongoing debate. 

Perhaps the most inappropriate section in Why We’re Liberals blames liberalism’s unpopularity on conservative’s “purposeful exploitation of racial fear and loathing.”  While this is disappointing to read from the pen of an intellectual, it’s not a surprise.  No sympathetic summary of left-wing viewpoints would be complete without irresponsible accusations of America’s most taboo crimes: racism, sexism, and “homophobia.”  Earlier in his book, Alterman accuses Glenn Beck of “racist rants” without attribution.  He accuses the New York Daily News of “homophobia,” for describing former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson in feminine terms, such as calling his voice “fruity.”  Even the word “hatred” is loosely wielded by Alterman, as calling Cindy Sheehan a “crackpot” is apparently an example of it.  

His loose definition of fear mongering includes a deeply flawed analysis of a 2006 political ad the RNC ran against the African-American Harold Ford during a Tennessee Senatorial race. The ad begins with a young white woman proclaiming “I met Harold at a Playboy Party!”  To support the contention that the ad was racist, Alterman cites a writer who doesn’t understand the simple southern term “he ain’t right,” and instead makes a logical leap and concludes that it really means “he’s just not white.”  This is the same logic Alterman himself employs when he claims that attacks on the New York Times have an undercurrent of anti-Semitism because supposedly average Americans associate New York with Judaism. 

This all leads up to Alterman’s most inflammatory claim, that “blacks are demonized by conservatives so they might more effectively exploit the fears of white Americans.”  Really?  It’s the left, not the right, which insists on framing the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad as a racial appeal, not an argument about the dangers of letting prisoners loose on weekend furlongs.  It’s Democrats, not Republicans, who in practice preserve racial resentment by refusing to reject the anti-intellectual tendency to attribute racially ambiguous phenomena, such as opposition to Barack Obama, to racism.  Aside from sex crimes, racism may be America’s most stigmatizing offense, so charges as serious as racism must be backed up by something more substantial than subjective rhetoric.  Otherwise we risk unfairly branding people to the point no American wants to hear what they actually have to say.  But I suspect Alterman already knows that. 

Our ancestor’s past racial crimes cast such a long shadow over America today that I fear that my discussion about Alterman’s book has been drowned out.  But precisely because racism is so inescapable, any discussion of America’s dominant political schools cannot help but to broach it.  There’s a reason Americans are still arguing over two decade-old advertisements.  So I will end this section with a few important words on race, while acknowledging that truly addressing the topic would take much more than a personal essay.

Anyone who comprehends the American right knows that racism is incompatible with conservative doctrine.  Conservatism insists that people be judged by their actions, which obviously cannot include their ethnic makeup.  Race does not dictate character.  This isn’t to say there aren’t any self-identified conservatives who are racist, but their racism is a deviation from conservative ideology, not a natural manifestation of it.  Additionally, none of the right’s most influential figures, including Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, and G.W. Bush are bigots, nor do they promote bigotry.  The closest any of them come is Ann Coulter’s stupid use of the term “raghead,” to taunt Muslim terrorists. 

Again, a lot more needs to be said, but it would engulf my original message.  The point is that Mr. Alterman’s accusations of bigotry are clearly polemical, intended to vilify, not inform.  Remember that this is Professor Eric Alterman, a well educated, level-headed representative for the entire American left, not some glazed-eyed neophyte, intoxicated by the opportunity to feel important through politics.  His rhetorical excess just proves that intellect alone does not prevent even the smartest people from overstating their opponent’s crimes. 

Next week:  Elitism

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Part 1   Part 2    Part 3   Part 4

Tags: alterman, racism, why we're liberals
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Up until I was a junior in college, I had never heard of Ann Coulter until I saw her on CNN.  I thought she was a breath of fresh air—she shattered my then libertarian conviction that conservatives are joyless and preachy.  I was so intrigued that I picked up Slander, which in turn induced my fascination with conservatism.  I don’t want to know what that says about me. 

So I brought the book home in between semesters and told my mother, the Democrat, all about it.  Mom isn’t belligerent, like Keith Olbermann, nor is she smug, like Rachel Maddow.  She was just born a Democrat, and has remained loyal to her party.  I respect that—she’s my mother!  Being my mother and knowing I liked Slander so much, she insisted on picking up Treason the day it was released.  It started a tradition where Mom buys me every new Ann Coulter book as a “surprise” gift.  Just like every other program which depends on Democrats to provide for certain needs, this has proven to be inefficient. 

Remember when Coulter released Godless and the media subtly suggested that she had attacked all 9-11 widows for two weeks?  I couldn’t watch coverage of it or discuss it with my friends because I wanted to read the book first, and Mom didn’t get it to me until the following July (Godless was released on 6-6-06).  Similarly, I had to sit out the hand-wringing over Coulter’s chapter on single mothers in Guilty because Mom was waiting for my last Christmas present to arrive before shipping all of them in bulk to me.  That’s why I’m blogging about it today. 

I’m only a chapter into Guilty, and it’s the most fun I’ve had reading an Ann Coulter hardcover since Treason.  If it doesn’t come unraveled, it will be one of her three best books, alongside Treason and Slander.   Coulter is at her best when she has the discipline to write around a coherent theme.  Slander is about media bias; Treason is about the left’s bizarre sympathy for ideas and cultures antagonistic to traditional American values, such as communism and the societies which embrace it.  Concordantly, Coulter is at her worst when she strings mostly unrelated one-liners around a very loose theme (as she did in Godless), or doesn’t even pretend to have an overarching subject.  I’m in no place to criticize such an established conservative writer, but I worry that she’s been mailing it in for a few years. 

I’m now cautiously optimistic about Ms. Coulter.  Guilty seems to be a return to her best form.  Not only has she produced a tome united around a clear theme, but that theme, the idealization of victimhood, is worth bringing attention to.  Victimhood has been abused as a status symbol for a long time, and it’s nice to see Coulter drag that into the light.  In Guilty, Coulter echoes Camille Paglia, who railed hard against feminist victim ideology right around the time Bill Clinton was first inaugurated.  Although it must be noted that Ann’s far glibber than Camille. 

From the introduction, Guilty promises to condemn the exploitation of victimhood, including exaggerated claims, fake hate crimes (which the right isn’t immune from), and linguistic gymnastics that would intimidate Natasha Liukin.  Coulter even takes it step further by arguing that victim ideology creates real victims, such as those whose good will is being taken advantage of by fabricated claims of abuse.  Give me a weekend and I’ll let you know if Coulter’s brand new (to me) book closes as strong as it opens. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: Coulter, Guilty
Posted in Belated book reviews | No Comments »

WHY WE’RE LIBERALS

A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America

By Eric Alterman

402 pages. The Viking Press. 2008.

The Arrogance of the Intellectual Left.

While I was browsing through the Social Sciences section of the small airport bookstore the other day, something caught my eye. It wasn’t a new polemic by Ann Coulter. Nor was it a judicious Dinesh D’Souza tome. It wasn’t the instant classic Liberal Fascism, I already owned that one. No, what grabbed my imagination was a book by the leftist intellectual Eric Alterman, titled Why We’re Liberals. After some internal dialogue with my inner demons, I agreed with them that I would buy the book on the condition that I buy a conservative title as well—a sort of a self-imposed tax on bad behavior. That and I like seeing the look on certain stranger’s faces when they spot the smiling face of Ronald Reagan on my prominently displayed book cover. It’s more effective than wearing a t-shirt that says “eff you.”

Anyway, the conservative book isn’t anything I hadn’t read before, but Alterman’s book has proven to be a valuable addition to my collection. It’s an intelligent, well-written insight into the minds of liberals. The title effectively conveys the book’s content, a broad description of liberal values. This isn’t as common on the left as one might think. Because conservatives tend to be self-conscious about their place on the political spectrum, right-wing accounts of American conservatism’s short history come a dime a dozen. In contrast, the left tends to deny their intellectual heritage, so finding a good book written by a liberal who has actually acknowledged the simple nature of his politics excited me.

Another plus is that it was written by Eric Alterman, a formidable thinker. It would be easy to refute or even dismiss a long attempt to defend liberalism if it were written by one of the left’s worst elements. It’s easy to sit back and laugh at the arguments posited by attention-starved perpetrators of fake hate crimes, the underdeveloped personalities who insist that 9-11 was an inside job, and eagerly fascistic animal rights activists who commit everything from vandalism to arson to get their point across. But just because these types of people can be found on the left doesn’t mean they represent it, much less the best liberalism has to offer. Conversely, Professor Alterman is smart, articulate, and most importantly not prone to emotionalism or counterintuitive conspiracy theories. In short, he’s an excellent representative for the left. Because he’s “normal,” the flaws in his argument will more likely reflect flaws in liberal philosophy, as opposed to his character.

Whether or not it ever catches on with the public, Alterman’s 2008 book is a definitive work. It’s an intelligent exposition of the modern liberal mind, warts and all. As much as any all-encompassing right-wing handbook, Why We’re Liberals directly communicates the logic behind the left’s ideals. Rarely are political writers as forthcoming about their motives without descending into boorish polemics. So without any further adieu, let’s see those gears turning.

Part I: The Definition of Liberalism.

Before discussing a book whose central theme is liberalism, one must understand what the word actually means. But for all that is holy, don’t ask a liberal that. If he doesn’t bedevil you with a laborious speech about labels, he’ll lazily pronounce that liberalism is too philosophically broad to be identified. Others will be even worse, self-righteously proclaiming that liberalism means caring about minorities and poor people. Often they suggest substituting the word “liberal” with “progressive.” This is fine, but it ignores the fact that “progressive” has more stridently left-wing connotations than “liberal.” Joseph Stalin was definitively not a liberal, but he just as certainly was progressive. In general, liberals don’t seem to like conceding that they’re part of a recognizable group. Like someone running from a police officer for no apparent reason, they curiously evade the word that describes them as if it were a pejorative.

In Why We’re Liberals, Alterman spends a good part of the introduction giving a bare-bones description of the roots of liberalism, while eventually defining it as a pragmatic quest for justice, a definition I imagine most left-leaning intellectuals wouldn’t take issue with. But a desire to achieve justice through reason isn’t a philosophy as much as it’s a vague mission statement. Neither pragmatism nor a sense of justice is exclusively liberal.

To put it another way, I could describe conservatism as a quest to preserve life, liberty, and property, but that’s not a school of thought, that’s a wish that can be interpreted countless ways. To greatly simplify the right’s core philosophy, conservatism is a blend of libertarian individualism tempered by traditional morality. It’s not a definition that sits well with all self-identified conservatives, but it does describe in one sentence the foundation of the right. Finding a liberal correlation to that would give Americans a much needed toe-hold on the meaning of liberalism.

Fortunately, Alterman provides something close to that. He describes liberalism as roughly a combination of “rights-based” liberalism and communitarianism. “Classical liberalism” might be a better term than “rights-based liberalism,” but they both connote the same thing: an ideology which stresses freedom from coercion. The ideals which inform the classical left include, among others, an emphasis on limited government, a deep respect for private property, and an animus toward the welfare state. Whenever Benito Mussolini or Mao Tse Tung decried liberalism, this is what they were combating.

In contrast, communitarianism stresses positive rights, rights to things such as education or health care. Often positive rights are alluded to as “agency,” or “power.” From a communitarian perspective, the right to pursue happiness uninhibited by the state is less important than ensuring that everyone is being provided the means to do so. The communitarian side of liberalism has defined the modern era. From the New Deal on, the right to something has been emphasized far more successfully on the left than individual autonomy. This isn’t to say at all that liberals don’t respect individual rights. Self-styled individualists of all kinds have found refuge in liberalism (Nat Hentoff is a voracious defender of free speech) they’re just not as persuasive as the advocates for positive rights.

While faithful conservative philosophy tends to oppose governmental intervention as a rule, the communitarian-dominated left tends to hold political power in high esteem. This leads to one of the most fundamental differences between the left and the right; conservatives deplore government-sponsored injustice in the name of human rights (the Iraq War being a radical exception) while liberals usually consider the price of governmental intervention worth paying to sate an always changing sense of justice. Affirmative action is a great example of this. Conservatives believe the concept of state-sponsored racial distinctions is too harmful to accept, while liberals are much more concerned with the steps toward healing racial injustice AA represents that any of its potential abuses.

A plethora of similar examples can be used to illustrate this dichotomy, including the distinct right-left splits over sexual harassment law, environmentalism, and health care. But conservatism and liberalism are not irreconcilable. I’ve been guilty in the past of positing liberalism and conservatism on opposite poles, but I’ve learned that the left and right indeed converge on the axis of free will. Like puzzle pieces, the libertarian side of conservatism snugly interlocks with “rights-based” classical liberalism.

Human beings share a universal aversion to coercion; Citizens on both sides of the middle intuitively know that dignity cannot exist without free will. This manifests itself on the right as a naked distrust of the overbearing state, and on the left as a rebellion against traditional norms. Both of these are libertarian impulses. In fact, freedom from hectoring do-gooders, whether they represent a government or a community, makes up the core of libertarianism. This explains why libertarian publications such as Reason magazine reliably criticize both the left and the right. America’s true political spectrum doesn’t have Ronald Reagan at one end and FDR at the other. Instead it has traditional morality on the far right and progressive communitarianism on the far left, with libertarianism as the median. The average American falls somewhere in between Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.

But all of this distracts from the main debate, the meaning of liberalism. Plainly put, what is it? What distinguishes a liberal from everyone else? What one definition encompasses the political left and all of its many factions, while leaving out everything else?

At the risk of sounding glib, the foundation of liberalism is quite simple: an attachment to comprehensive social engineering. To explain what I mean, mandatory sensitivity classes are liberal in nature; they’re attempts to turn callous individuals into conscientious citizens. Global warming treaties intended to preserve planet Earth from nebulous threats by nothing less than remaking how all industries relate to the environment are liberal in nature. So are campus speech codes which are meant to preserve a right to a peaceful academic environment (a positive right). So is using the classroom to make a world a better place through political activism. So are Canadian and European laws which effectively make it illegal to criticize Islam, as seen most publically in cases brought against Maclean’s magazine in Canada and Oriana Fallaci in Italy. While few liberals support each of these efforts (as well as similar ones) none will eschew them all. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe liberalism as an injudicious desire for change, but the solemn conviction that something needs to change can be found in all leftist ideas.

Here we come to the important realization that justifying government intervention for the greater good is perfectly compatible with liberalism. If the left is about anything, it’s about using the state to correct injustice. A liberal solution to high gas prices may involve nationalizing the oil industry. One liberal remedy for conservative dominance of talk radio would be to reconsider the fairness doctrine. While liberalism isn’t inherently in favor of an overbearing state, it certainly recognizes that courts and laws have an unmatched ability to affect change. To the left, the state is neither good nor bad; it’s just a powerful tool that can be used to achieve social justice.

Objections to liberalism often come from confusion over its intended scope. Since “justice” has never been responsibly and consistently defined, its boundaries are always in flux. Take America’s albatross of racial conflict. What constitutes justice for America’s past crimes of slavery and institutional discrimination? Is justice equality? If so, what kind of equality? Equality of status? Equality of opportunity? Equality under the law? What about reparations? Is affirmative action a step towards or away from justice? These often uneasy questions have never been settled, making it difficult for Americans to discern between appropriate and inappropriate resentment towards liberal social policies.

This confusion touches issues much less flammable than racism. As the left-wing emphasis on justice is applied to gender equality, poverty, and a slew of other topics, it shows that the left is mired in a hopeless metaphysical debate over the meaning of “justice.” This quagmire not only affects what justice is purported to entail, but who for. Feminists, who by their political nature insist that more attention be given to women’s grievances, won’t necessarily be concerned with the Hamas’ objectives. Likewise, the militants in Hamas, deeply concerned with bringing Israel to “justice,” may not care at all about women’s rights. On top of that, civil rights leaders may or may not take up the mantle for either of these causes, but will always be focused most on racial justice. After taking into account the influence of environmentalists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists, and a slew of other groups, I now understand why liberals don’t think they’re a definable class. That doesn’t mean feminists, Palestinian rights organizations, civil rights groups and all two thousand of their other cousins aren’t leftist in nature.

Liberalism is a collage. Ideologies such as feminism are distinct from but not alternative to liberalism. For better or worse, all left-wing groups propose giving more power to the state to bring about a just society. Feminism, as one can observe how easily feminists pick up the picket signs for environmentalists, animal rights activists, and seemingly all other left-wing groups, is just gynocentric liberalism. Communitarian minority-rights movements are just ethnocentric forms of liberalism, and so on. Their similar foundations explain why victims rights movements collapse together so easily on the left.

Yet the left’s sense of justice has a single prerequisite: they will only support a victim of injustice if that victim can claim some sort of underdog status. For reasons that may be psychological or personal or simply out of the scope of this essay, liberalism cannot bring itself to defend anything but an underdog. When’s the last time you got the impression that defending America against the international community was a priority for liberals? The left wing narrative insists that Americans and certain demographic groups within America are bullies, and deserve a taste of their own medicine. Conservatives, who are seen as powerful, rich, elitists to liberals, will never find camaraderie on the left no matter how much evidence of media or academic bias they collect.

Even individual conflicts, such as the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial, are framed by the hard left as group conflicts—a fearful white establishment dedicated to ruining a successful black man. This explains the left’s insistence that our group identity is so integral to our overall character. Without group distinctions, there are no classes of “victims” and “oppressors.” Take away the “us versus them” dichotomy, and injustice becomes a much more evasive and frustrating opponent, one that is too elusive to rally strangers against.

So now we have come, practically via osmosis, to a definition of liberalism: A rational quest for justice for a group or individual perceived to be disadvantaged (heavy emphasis on “perceived”). In this context, “rational” means unbound by tradition; the freedom to go with any social program that works, ala FDR. What makes liberalism diverse isn’t a mythical inclusiveness that defies all meaning, but discernable variations of degree and focus within left-wing activism. Every single left-winger wants to rectify a perceived wrong, but countless definitions of justice proliferate among the left’s coalition of the handicapped and their spokesmen.

By the way, the animal rights movement fits in this framework thorough the personification of inhuman entities. If cattle, dogs, and all other animals occupy the same moral plane as humans, our treatment of them would certainly count as unjust. Environmentalism finds a niche on the left by correctly claiming that whatever threatens the earth threatens all humanity. This weds environmental justice to social justice—anyone who abuses the Earth is abusing the community.

Finally, with this under our belt, we can move on to Professor Alterman’s book.

Part 1   Part 2    Part 3   Part 4

Tags: alterman, liberalism
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