The column's author does not appear to be interested in finding common ground.
Left-wing America has reached a conclusion about the half of the country that refuses to put them in charge: Regular people are too stupid and brainwashed to vote in their own self-interest. What was once a quietly held belief among well-educated liberals is now getting some mainstream attention in books, columns and talk shows. The left has always been certain that it knows what's best for poor and middle-class folks. These self-styled intellectuals can explain the failure of the masses to embrace their message only in terms of a mass defect in the audience.His conclusion:
Socialists are realizing that if Americans can't be drawn to the big government message, they may have to be pushed.
It's a more benign version of Lenin's corollary to Marx. If the members of the proletariat won't rise up and topple their oppressors, they may need a little nudge in the right direction by their intellectual betters.
Like the avant-garde composer who creates a symphony so advanced and innovative that it sounds like a raccoon being tossed down the stairs in a steel garbage can, liberals know the problem is with the audience, not their work.
It's possible that enough "two Americas" rhetoric could tamp down those impulses for a short time. But if the new idea for the left is to be even more condescending to voters, I don't suppose conservatives have too much to worry about.Victor Davis Hanson's latest National Review offering sees the end of the old establishment consensus as long in coming, and welcome. The purloined-document flap at CBS, he argues, is just one more crack in the old journalistic edifice.
Commentators have envisioned Rather's fall as symbolic of a "paradigm shift" and the "end of the era" — an event that has crystallized the much larger and ongoing demise of the old establishment media. Allegories from the French Revolution and the emperor without any clothes to the curtain scene in The Wizard of Oz have been evoked to illustrate Rather's dilemma and the hypocrisy of all that went before. We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse.Professor Hanson suggests that this establishment has become too comfortable with its own prejudices.
First CBS went into denial; then it tried to smear its critics; next it emulated the Nixonian two-step; and finally it stonewalled altogether, hoping that the 24-hour news buzz would fade before it ultimately did. Meanwhile, more and more Americans yawn and have already switched the channel to cable news. We keep waiting for Mike Wallace on Sunday's 60 Minutes to stare down Dan Rather on the set of Tuesday's 60 Minutes, sticking his mike in Dan's face, springing on him a long list of his previously unknown sins, capped off with the zoom shot on a fidgety, sweating Rather, as the tick, tick, tick fades into a primetime commercial.
The Big Three may deride the newsreaders at Fox as blond bimbos, but millions of Americans learned long ago that there are probably more liberals on Fox than conservatives on PBS, NPR, CBS, ABC, and NBC combined — and the former are honest about politics in a way the latter are not.
Hypocrisy and aristocratic smugness are drawing the ancient regime to its death. Rather's now-ossified generation came of age in the heady Vietnam era, on the apparent premise that Main Street, USA, and the Kiwanis had given us Vietnam, Watergate, racism, and the other isms and phobias — and that only hip, swashbuckling 60s-types could tell the American people the "truth" about what the "establishment" was up to.The old academic establishment, and the old international order, are not immune either:
But the regime is crumbling on campuses as well. Too many university professors in the humanities dropped long ago their allegiance to the disinterested search for truth, or to teaching students facts and methods. How could one be so constrained and parochial when a war was raging on, and millions of youth needed to be prepared as ideological warriors in the struggle to remake our culture? Meanwhile, teaching loads decreased, annual tuition soared higher than the rate of inflation, and the baccalaureate no longer reflected much erudition. Surely, progressive academics, of all people, would not stand by while their curriculum was politicized, free speech suppressed, their part-time lecturers systematically exploited, their working-class students priced out of the market, and their research tainted with bias?And thus comes The Reckoning:
The U.N. also seems to be going the way of CBS. Only a little over a quarter of our citizenry feels that the organization reflects American values. Kofi Annan was blind to the greatest financial scandal of our time, one that contributed to the deaths of thousands in Iraq and enriched cronies, including perhaps his own son. He survives only because a biased media has judged that his progressivism warrants shielding him from the type of scrutiny afforded Halliburton.
If we wonder why CBS is in trouble, why no one trusts the universities or the U.N., or why the Democrats may soon lose the Senate, the House, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, the answer has a lot to do with arrogant hypocrisy — the idea that how one lives need have nothing to do with what one professes, that idealistic rhetoric can provide psychological cover for privilege and preference, and that rules need not apply for those self-proclaimed as smarter and nicer than the rest of us. But none of us — none — get a pass simply because we claim that we are more moral, educated, or sophisticated than most.But that reckoning ought come as no surprise. The proper question to put to anybody who poses to know What Ought To Be Done is the American Question: If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Yes, I'm yet again channeling Deirdre McCloskey's The Vices of Economists - The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (details or compare prices), this time quoting from p. 115.
The other problem is that social engineering [the technocratic vision -- Sup't.] is hostile to freedom. I realize that saying so will make a lot of my economist colleagues angry, since they have no such end in view when they advise the government of Holland or of America. But I can't see how to get out of the dilemma. Either you respect people as free adults and leave them alone. [Yes, even when they drive Harleys.] Or you don't, and want to engineer them. Social engineering is not about some personless abstraction called "Society" or "The Economy." It is about actual people, Trees Kettering or Deirdre McCloskey or Joel Mokyr. It's not really "social engineering." It's "people engineering."The technocratic vision ... is it indeed passing from the scene, or will there be new generations of politicians and academicians to restore it? And yes, there is a generational dimension to it. Grover Norquist may have made Andrew Sullivan angry by calling the current crop of elders "anti-American" and made too obvious a reference to the maxim, "where there is death, there is hope." Mr. Norquist erred, however, in pinning the blame on the G.I. era cohort. The real Destructive Generation comprises those individuals who remembered World War II and Korea, but who were too young to be called up for those wars, and too old for Vietnam, and who decided on the basis of the New Deal and the World War that Something Had To Be Done. And yes, that Destructive Generation has for too long called the shots in the universities, the international institutions, and the mainstream press.
No comments:
Post a Comment