Populism’s negative affect on politics

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest, wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about “What the rise of Sarah Palin and populism means for the conservative intellectual tradition.”

To summarize, Lilla laments the apparent rejection of intellectualism that initially attracted him, a self-described liberal, to the world of conservative political thought.

Coming of age politically in the grim ’70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion. In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.

But as a response to what many conservatives saw as a uniformly hostile environment in the media and on university campuses (“campii”?), the tide began to turn:

They [then began to] mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

The issue is not that “regular folk” are bad. Lilla’s concern with populism is that, in this manifestation, it has become less about the people and more about pandering to the people. The thinkers and the politicians leading the Republican Party — or, of course, any political party or movement — are supposed to be leaders, not panderers. They’re supposed to raise the level of thought, the level of discourse, not play to the lowest common denominator.

There’s a rather fine line between being elite (which has similarly been twisted into a slur) and being exclusive. One certainly can be elite — which, I’ll remind you, simply refers to being of the cream of the crop, not favoring those who are the cream of the crop at the expense of others — without being exclusive, and that an important distinction in a functioning democracy.

A great thinker of our time, Jon Stewart, summed up well the case for elitism: “If you don’t actually think you’re better than us, what the ____ are you doing? … Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”

Thanks to my partner in blogging crime Gary Hornseth, one of several contributors to The Same Rowdy Crowd, for bringing this WSJ article to my attention. Great find.

Photo courtesy of Gaetan Lee on Flickr

Thicker Skins

One of the aims of “Better Discourse” is to elevate everyone’s game.  When you’re better able to articulate a point without resorting to bad rhetoric, strongarm tactics, emotional appeals or distoritions you stand a better chance of reaching someone who is undecided. The posture of the speaker has as much to do with the success of a message, and playing ‘the victim’ is not a posture of strength.

Here’s an example I see playing out right now:

Saturday Night Live did a skit this past weekend which clearly lampooned the New York Times.  A large gathering of Times staff was brainstorming about possible stories about Sarah Palin, and the need to send a large contingent to Alaska to “dig up” whatever they could. Playing off the notion that Times reporters are clueless about Alaskan culture, guns, snowmobiles, or life without a nearby therapist, the skit was downright funny.  (Upon seeing a picture of a shotgun, a know-it-all reporter proving his mastery of Middle America spouted ‘that is clearly a derringer, also known as a Saturday Night Special’, or something to that effect.)

However, some on the right are howling mad that a fake reporter – in a sketch about how overboard the media might be in finding dirt on Sarah Palin – suggests following “rumors” that Todd Palin molests his daughters.  The way in which this is described is clearly a parody, and the target of the humor is the mainstream media, not the Palin family.

By whining about something that has never been alleged – and was served up as an absurd counterpoint to skewer the mainstream media – those on the right diminish their ability to be taken seriously on any assertion of media bias.

Grow a thicker skin, and show that you can at least comprehend a joke before reflexively flailing away at every possible grievance.  It makes for a better discourse.

Judging Palin’s qualifications, supporters

Well, this is a doozy.

South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler, perhaps no surprise, isn’t a huge fan of Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. What surprised me were some of the words chosen to express that lack of fanaticism.

Fowler kicks things off with a solid pot-shot. She said it seems as though Sen. McCain has chosen a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

“Only”? Really? I’m sure the hyperbole works in front of a friendly audience, but it’s not much good for making a persuasive argument, at least not in this case. This, however, was told to a reporter in an interview setting. Couple that with the inclusion of a widely recognized hot-button issue and you have yourself one hell of a lightning-rod comment.

The subsequent apology gets even better. Her apology statement said:

I personally admire and respect the difficult choices that women make everyday, and I apologize to anyone who finds my comment offensive. I clumsily was making a point about people in South Carolina who may vote based on a single issue. Whether it’s the environment, the economy, the war or a woman’s right to choose, there are people who will cast their vote based on a single issue. That was the only point I was attempting to make.

In a way, there’s some logic to this apology as an explanation for why she said what she said. McCain is notoriously less-than-perfect in his positions over the years on certain issues of great importance to voters referred to as “social conservatives,” abortion certainly being one of them. By choosing the firmly anti-abortion Palin, according to Fowler’s thinking, McCain is shoring up those voters to whom abortion is an important issue.

But with this apology, Fowler seems to step in another cowpie by implying people who vote primarily based on a single issue — or who can at least be perceived as doing so — are of lesser intelligence or of diminished rational capacity. One-track minds. Stupid. Sheep-like.

Again, a statement that might work well in front of a friendly crowd, but one that’s not smart to make when your primary focus should be singing the praises of your preferred candidate — not putting yourself in a position to apologize and clarify and backpedal.

Photo courtesy of kromatic on Flickr