Ph.D. Octopus

The roots go much deeper.

By Julian

Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.

The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”

The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades.  It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.

In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.

To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.

by apini

This week’s Economist and Weekend FT both feature articles about the newest candidate to enter the Republican nomination contest, Michele Bachmann. As papers that regularly point to the celebrity reality show nature of Sarah Palin’s past (and potential future) candidacy, the papers treat Bachmann remarkably seriously.  They refer to her polling numbers in Iowa, where she is only behind Mitt Romney by 1 percentage point in the Republican nominating contest.  They refer to her religious convictions, and although it’s clear that they are not shared by the authors of the pieces, the tone is markedly different from those aimed at Palin, or even Newt Gingrich.  ’Authenticity’, ‘conviction’, ‘credentials’ seem to be the buzzwords surrounding Bachmann.   She is genuinely passionate about her religious convictions, the papers argue.  She’s the opposite of Romney’s transparent faux conservativeness, and therefore will appeal to real value voters, they say.  She is ideologically pure, as well, ridiculing the Republican establishment with as much vigor as she ridicules Democratic opponents.  But they also emphasize that she’s no lightweight.  Although she has a limited political track record, they are keen to highlight that unlike Palin, she’s smart.  Not just shrewd (though there’s that too: ‘And Mrs Bachmann certainly knows how to play Iowa;’ ‘She is a gifted public speaker, with a knack for rousing a crowd;’ ‘ her appetite for provocative stunts;’ etc), she is portrayed as genuinely smart, presidential material: The Economist says ‘ She replied, in a suitably dignified, presidential manner, that she deserved to be taken seriously.‘  The FT says that ’In Republican circles she is seen as having the potential to outshine Palin by being a smarter and more disciplined candidate.’  Clearly the comparisons to Palin are easy for journalists: they are both ‘values’ candidates, they appeal to similar voters, and they are both women.

What is more intriguing about this coverage, though, is its potential for international comparisons.  A regular feature of the Economist (and its only regular Read the rest of this entry »

by apini

I went to the Young Vic theatre on Saturday to see Vernon God Little, an adaptation of the eponymous book.  I had a reaction to it that’s becoming a familiar one after going to the theatre in Britain.  That is, after going to see plays about America at the theatre in Britain.  This reaction comes in a four stages: first, I laugh knowingly at the play’s/actor’s depiction of American culture; second, I feel uncomfortable about everyone else’s knowing laugh; third, I feel angry at the audience for assuming they know anything about America; and fourth, I feel angry at the director/writer/actors/audience for their depictions of/reactions to what are perceived to be typical American anti-intellectual cultural traits.  (The exception to this was last year’s version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which I enjoyed immensely. I think the reason for this was because the director used an all black cast, which helped to uproot and universalize the story from its white southern context.) Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

Oh wait, actually it’s a review of Bush Junior’s Decision Points from Eliot Weinberg over at the London Review of Books. Thanks to Mircea, always on the look out for the absurd, for sending my way. For those of you who are not regular readers of the London Review of Books or my facebook wall I am providing some key moments. Consider it a holiday treat [question: does my use of the term "holiday treat" constitute a Battle on Christmas?]. I would provide extensive commentary except that really, at this time of year, all we want is  to get to the good stuff:

I will note that the review, presumably reflecting the book, plays as a tragicomedy — the further you go in it the sicker you feel. Apply Foucault to Bush! Clever! But keep going on and the fictionality of the text and the vagueness of the author makes your stomach do a few flips. “Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality?” are all fine things to ask about J. M. Coetzee, but they’re not ones you want to have to ask constantly about the actions and words of a president who ran your country for eight years:

‘Damn it, we can do more than one thing at a time,’ I told the national security team.

As I told my advisers, ‘I didn’t take this job to play small ball.’

‘This is a good start, but it’s not enough,’ I told him. ‘Go back to the drawing board and think even bigger.’

‘We don’t have 24 hours,’ I snapped. ‘We’ve waited too long already.’

‘What the hell is going on?’ I asked Hank. ‘I thought we were going to get a deal.’

‘That’s it?’ I snapped.

As Foucault says, ‘The author’s name serves to characterise a certain mode of being of discourse.’

This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness); no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer (‘imperative’, because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by ‘friendly fire’ in Afghanistan; no ‘Total Information Awareness’ from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on ‘abstinence education’. It does not deal with the Cheney theory of the ‘unitary executive’ – essentially that neither the Congress nor the courts can tell the president what to do – or Bush’s frequent use of ‘signing statements’ to indicate that he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed.

 

I never know whether to admire or detest Barbara Bush. I admire her brute strength and the fact that she whips George Junior into shape, but Margaret Thatcher had some of the same qualities. I like that she called her son out for fabricating or at least falsifying the fetus-in-a-jar story. But at the end of the day all one can say is that she might be the best of a very bad lot:

Mother – she’s never Mom – pops up frequently with a withering remark. As middle-aged Junior runs a marathon, Mother and Dad are, of course, coming out of church. Standing on the steps, Dad cheers ‘That’s my boy!’ and Mother shouts ‘Keep moving, George! There are some fat people ahead of you!’ When Junior decides to run for governor, Mother’s reaction is simply: ‘George, you can’t win.’ Not cited is Mother’s indelible comment on the Iraq War: ‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?’ But the single newsworthy item in this entire book is the get-this-boy-to-therapy scene where Mother has a miscarriage at home, asks teenaged Junior to drive her to the hospital, and shows him the foetus of his sibling, which for some reason she has put in a jar.

Bush claims this was the moment when he became ‘pro-life’, unalterably opposed to abortion and, later, embryonic stem-cell research. (The thought would not have occurred to Mother. At the time, patrician Republicans like the Bushes were birth-control advocates; like Margaret Sanger, they didn’t want the unwashed masses wildly reproducing. Dad was even on the board of the Texas branch of Planned Parenthood. )

Decision Points flaunts its postmodernity by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. That is to say, the parts that are not outright lies – particularly the accounts of Hurricane Katrina and the lead-up to the Iraq War – are the sunnier halves of half-truths. The legions of amateur investigative journalists on the internet – as usual, doing the job the major media no longer perform – are busily compiling lists of those lies. Gerhard Schroeder has already stated that the passage in which he appears is completely false. And even Mother has weighed in. Interviewed recently on television, she said she never showed Junior that jar, but maybe ‘Paula’ did. (It was assumed we would know that Paula was the maid.)

And finally the infamous claim that the worst moment of his presidency was Kanye West, which I’m surprised was actually let in by whatever crowd of advisers/consultants/focus groups vetted/wrote the thing

The book states that, for him, the worst moment of his presidency was, not 9/11, or the hundreds of thousands he killed or maimed, or the millions he made homeless in Iraq and jobless in the United States, but when the rapper Kanye West said, in a fundraiser for Katrina victims, that Bush didn’t care about black people.

West was only half right. Bush is not particularly racist. He never portrayed Hispanics as hordes of scary invaders; Condi was his workout buddy and virtually his second wife; he was in awe of Colin Powell; and he was most comfortable in the two most integrated sectors of American society, the military and professional sports. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about black people. Outside of his family, he didn’t care about people, and Billy Graham taught him that ‘we cannot earn God’s love through good deeds’ – only through His grace, which Bush knew he had already received.

And that’s where the devastation really hits. Because who would want a president who lacks empathy, and why would such a man ever become president except for the most noxious of reasons.

by Weiner

The world is all atwitter about the sins of Goldman Sachs. Few smart people are the least bit surprised. Yet for some of us, the warning signs came far earlier. As Matt Yglesias observed in a funny and accurate post, “you can’t properly analyze the Harvard to Wall Street pipeline without using the term ‘douchebag.’” In comparing the Teach for America recruiting process with that of the  financial sector, Yglesias writes:

there’s a certain kind of person who walks into a room filled with people interested in working on Wall Street and people who do work on Wall Street and says to himself (and it’s no coincidence that it’s almost always himself) “these are the kind of people I want to align myself with.”

Though Yglesias finds bankers top be among “the most annoying people,” he admits that all of this is “relative,” that is to say, subjective, and that in all likelihood “if you ask a bunch of bankers they’ll say all the worst people from college went on to become glib political journalists or to teach in inner-city schools.”

All this rings pretty true to me. Back when I was a glib columnist for the Harvard Crimson, I penned a column about how the I-Banking types were for the most part insufferably boring people, and how the recruiting process itself encouraged a careerist anti-intellectualism that accentuated this boring douchebaggery.

Some recruits may have been genuinely converted. As Ezra Klein reveals in this interview with a Harvard grad turned Goldman Sachs I-Banker, many of these graduates felt investment banking wasn’t something they planned on, but “the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful.” Male douchebags run to it like moths to a flame, but so do many others, including many women.

My 5th year Harvard reunion is approaching (5th year reunions seem to be the kind of thing that only elite schools care about; certainly this phenomenon does not exist in Canada). In the Harvard Class of 2005 Fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA: The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010), a red book where alumni could submit information about their lives, many graduates reported about their choices to go into I-Banking, or Consulting, or other areas of the corporate world. Most claimed to be happy, and I suppose they might be telling the truth (many are wealthy and boring people who get to surround themselves with other wealthy and boring people).

Some, however, reported ambivalence. The examples I found (this was not an exhaustive survey) turned out to be women.

One classmate had written a progressive feminist column for the The Crimson while in school with me.  Here’s what she had to say :

While at Harvard, I published a book encouraging more young women to enter politics and dedicate their lives to civic engagement. Since graduation I’ve been working at a multinational investment bank helping rich companies become richer. I’m not quite where I want to end up at this point, but I’ve been told that “putting in your time” in the corporate world will pay off eventually. Let’s see how things look at the next Reunion.

Another graduate wrote this:

Since 2006, I have been living in New York City and working in commodities and international trade. [My co-workers] are white, old, and male, so I obviously fit right in.

Not thoroughly inspired with this work, she founded a not-for-profit dedicated to fighting breast cancer. And so she concluded:

While I really do love [my job] and have made many friends who older, white, and male, I am currently in the midst of seeking out a new career. I am attempting to find a job that does not involve as many spreadsheets as my current position and will allow me to better serve others.

Perhaps the most interesting report along these lines came from another female student I knew in college, a very bright woman who took a history seminar with me. She noted that the “most life-altering thing she did at Harvard” was go on a volunteer spring break trip “to rebuild black churches burned in arson attacks.” There she discovered that she “liked construction,” she “liked the act of building, or managing complex projects,” she “liked work boots, two-by-fours, power tools, and yelling at people.” She ironically observed, “At Harvard, a place notorious for not teaching its students any useful skills, I learned how to hang a drywall.”

But then her story took a different turn.

I was living in [X] after graduation, hating ever day as a management consultant, when my boyfriend gave me a roof-shingling hatchet as a birthday gift. It was a transformative moment–here was someone who believed in me and the things I liked to do. I left my job, bought a dilapidated house in [X] and started my first renovation project. I was a twenty-three-year-old homeowner reading a book called Plumbing 1-2-3 and learning how to restore 1920s windows. I was also pulling stray bullets out of my roof and trying to keep the local dog-fighting ring out of my backyard.

She and her boyfriend “gutted and rebuilt the house by hand, got lucky and sold it off before the market crashed, and married soon after.” They moved to the northeast, and she stills works in construction. And so she concluded:

Harvard teaches you to follow your dreams–and then the recruiters show up on campus and remind you that the one path to true enlightenment is management consulting. I feel lucky to have discovered something else, something I can touch with my hands. Or with a hatchet.

These women all reported some dissatisfaction with the corporate world. But 3 examples do not make for a very solid body of evidence. As a result, I don’t quite know what to conclude here. Obviously many people are happy in the corporate world. But it remains a very masculine environment and that masculinity may continue to make some women uncomfortable. If the latest regulation succeeds not only in reining in risk and protecting the economy from future bubbles bursting but also allows for greater gender parity on Wall Street, then that should be taken as a positive development. And maybe the Ivy League pipeline can lead more graduates to more public spirited careers. And maybe the financial sector should put some kind of filter in the pipeline and start looking elsewhere when hiring.

by Nemo

For those who don’t compulsively check for updates on Politico (i.e. those with good sense), you might have missed the link to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s fascinating recent speech on intellectuals and the politics of hatred at the Kennedy School of Government

Ben Smith lays out Trumka’s Money quote:

“Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia. At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice—whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred—of anti-intellectualism—will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.

anti-intellectualism in american life

And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.”

Now, I’m all in favor of Trumka’s call for intellectuals to reject the easy money that can come from serving an apologist for unfettered corporate globalization. Who wouldn’t? And, I also think it’s high time that intellectuals pay more attention to labor. Perhaps since many are now realizing that the forces of neo-liberalism are affecting their livelihoods as much as everybody else, maybe they will.

I wonder, though, if the link between anti-intellectualism and the recession are as close as Trumka makes them out to be. As Richard Hofstadter recognized several decades ago, there is a long tradition of anti-intellectualism ingrained in American history. Trumka cites the anti-Semitism of the 1930s as proof of the connection between economic downturns and the politics of hatred, but one might just as easily point to widespread xenophobia of the 1920s and the McCarthyism of the 1950s to show that the connection is not as straightforward as he makes it out to be. In addition, the economic collapse arguably made it easier for someone like Barack Obama to get elected President in the first place, since many voters rejected the deeply cynical attempts to manipulate popular discrimination for political gain that seemed to have made a bigger impact in the recent past.

Still, I appreciate Trumka’s call for intellectual engagement. Read his whole speech. It’s well worth checking out.