Two Words: Accurate Analogies. You Won't Even See Them Coming.

Jon Schwarz returned last week to a subject he's addressed before, the apparent scarcity of conservative comedians:

This is a Weird Opinion, but I believe there's a connection between conservatives' inability to construct accurate analogies and the near-total lack of competent conservative comedians. That's because constructing accurate analogies is a key comedic skill.

Well, um, you know, I don't think so.  First, I don't think that analogies have to be accurate for audiences to find them funny.  Humor is not a rational, evidence-based phenomenon.  I also don't think that, as a group, liberals or leftists are any better than conservatives at constructing accurate analogies.  But the accuracy (weird word, actually) of analogies isn't an either/or matter anyway.

Take what I hope is an easy example; certainly, it was at Jon's blog, A Tiny Revolution, that I first encountered it.



Writers from The Daily Show reportedly helped Obama write his routine, so even if you don't consider Obama a liberal (I don't), even if you want to deny that the people who laughed at his performance are liberals  (I don't), I think this counts against Jon's theory.  I'm not even sure where an analogy comes in: the point of contact would be death by predator drone, but aside from that, what?  The Jonas Brothers correspond to American children?  One commenter under the blog post drew an analogy between the Jonas Brothers and a 60-year-old Brit slavering over a teenaged girl at a wedding.  (No permalink; just look for N E, a reliable Obama toady at that site.)  The weakness of any analogy involved didn't keep a lot of liberal Obama fans from finding the gag a kneeslapper, though they've mostly preferred to stuff it down the Memory Hole in years since. 

One commenter on the YouTube video wrote, "It IS a dark joke... but if Bush can joke about not finding WMDs (and thus mocking all the people he sent to their deaths based on a lie), then Obama can joke about this." That's exactly the point: people who criticized Bush for joking about not finding WMDs defend Obama for joking about killing kids with predator drones. It's contemptible. It also says something that the commenter focused on "the people he sent to their deaths", presumably US troops, rather than the many more Iraqis he killed: only American lives count.

Of course there are other examples I could give; Hillary Clinton's "We came, we saw, he died," for one.  Clinton's not a liberal either, but liberals didn't object, either to the terror bombing of Libya (disastrous for Libyans, not so much for the US) or to the lynching of Qaddafy.  The analogy in this one is clear: Clinton is casting herself as Julius Caesar, not a great example of democracy or human decency.

Several responses to Jon's remarks from liberals and leftists struck me as clueless.  Such as this exchange:

"Modern conservatives"?  Like conservatives were any better in the past?  Vastleft's reply is even odder.  Smarter people than I have been trying to discover and explain the nature of humor for millennia, but there's considerable acknowledgment that humor isn't empathetic, it's mean even when it's playful.  As Mel Brooks says: Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Dayv also wrote:

Much depends on who's the target of the satire.  Was "A Modest Proposal" empathetic toward the English?  No; it was savage to them.  And I have plenty of reason to doubt that liberals or progressives understand what satire is anyway.  Personally I think that good satire should make me wince (whether as author as as consumer) as I laugh, but I also think that's a refinement for pansy-ass intellectuals like me or Dean Swift.  The base of satire is mockery, and any empathy involved is used to make the target squirm harder.

As Ellen Willis wrote in 1979, "Humorless [is] what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls.  It carries no imputation of humorless if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth."  But that's about as predictable as it gets.  Quite a few men, including me, find her definition funny.  Others, like my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, pull a long glum face at it.

RWA1, significantly, was extremely upset by Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few weeks ago.  (Transcript here.) It was tasteless, it was awful, it was going to hurt the Democrats' chances of getting Trump out of the White House.  Concern-trolling again, you see.  It wasn't even his ox that was being gored -- he hates Trump as only an establishment Republican Never-Trumper can -- but I suppose that was the problem: true, she mocked Trump, but she also mocked establishment Republicans and Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the #Resistance, and the respectable media, which was Inappropriate, So Unnecessary, and definitely Going Too Far.  He seemed not to have noticed that the White House Correspondents Association was as unhappy as he was. Personally, I think he was revolted by all her references to lady parts, which always make him queasy.

Does the widespread disapproval of Wolf's performance indicate that her analogies were inaccurate, or that they were accurate?  I thought she was on-target most of the time, but obviously not everyone agrees.  The accuracy of analogies is as subjective, I would argue, as humor itself.

I could also mention the popularity among liberals and progressives of fag jokes about Trump.  If I were feeling charitable, I could suggest that their motivating impulse is at base conservative, but I'm not feeling charitable.  What I think bothers me most about the distinction Jon drew is that it buys into an assumption that "conservative" and "liberal" refer to actual discrete types of human beings, perhaps reflecting innate biological differences: They are fundamentally different than Us.  Their many errors can be blamed on their nature, as our adherence to Truth is due to ours.  Something wrong with that; call it a failure of empathy.

Incidentally, today is the eleventh anniversary of this blog.

On Not Getting Along

A younger contemporary from my high school days -- call him "Splendora" -- posted this meme on Facebook, which he'd found on another jerk's page.  I suspect that he posted it because some people (including but not only moi) had disagreed in comments when he complained about a report of two drag queens from RuPaul's Drag Race appearing in a commercial for Starbucks.  This was entertaining in itself, given Splendora's own fondness for drag and general bad taste.  (It was he, as much as anyone I know, who inspired my tagline "Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something tacky!")   Maybe I'll return to that little controversy another time; for now, I want to address this meme.

I've often seen complaints like this online, as I think I've mentioned before: when someone's posted opinions encounter disagreement or criticism, they may protest that "this isn't the right place for debate." (One obnoxious variation is the old quip "Debating on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win, your [sic -- they always seem to write it that way] still retarded!")   I've asked such people what is the right place for debate, but they never seem to have an answer for that, probably because they don't think there is a place for debate.  Usually it's they who are in a place that has been designated for debate, and are trying to stop other people from having a discussion.  They could just leave themselves, but that, of course, is unthinkable.

Facebook is a different case, I suppose.  I recently defriended an old friend of thirty years' standing when she deleted some comments of mine under a political meme she'd posted.  Facebook, she told me sternly, is not for "politics," it's "where friends and family come together."  She was, she said, already embroiled enough in debates in other online fora.  So why did she post a political meme on Facebook?  She said she had the right to post whatever she liked on her page, and to delete any comments she objected to.  True enough.  So I deleted her, as I've unfriended another nasty, illiberal liberal friend as well as obnoxious right-wingers.

I've also received angry messages from people I don't know, because some mutual Facebook friend had commented on some post of theirs, so the comments and the post showed up in my news feed, and I felt like putting in my two cents' worth.  Why are you posting on my page? they thundered.  You don't even know me.  If you don't like what I post, it's none of your business.  If it turns up on my page, it's my business.  If they don't want people to respond to what they post, they need to tweak their privacy settings so only their Facebook friends will be able to see it.  This is actually much older than Facebook, of course, the idea that what someone posts publicly isn't public, and only those responses they like should even be posted.  (In other words, If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all!  That stricture doesn't apply to them, naturally.  Usually I respond because they've posted something especially nasty and vicious.  But that's different.)

I've been seeing a lot of complaints (the one cited here, for example, but it doesn't stand alone) that social media like Facebook are an echo chamber where people only talk to people they agree with, and that liberals don't have any conservative friends and have no dealings with people of different politics.  (Conservatives like to claim that they have liberal friends, though it's hard to understand how they can do so if liberals won't be friends with conservatives.  And those liberal friends only seem to function as sources of stupid beliefs that the conservative writers demolish with contemptuous ease.  Admittedly, I use several of my liberal and conservative friends for that myself.)  This meme, of course, demands that Facebook be such an echo chamber.  (The earlier step in the transmission had the poster casting his stance as keeping toxic people out of his life; he seems pretty toxic to me.)

But then consider this article from The New Republic that another friend passed along.  The writer declares that Fox News's racism is too harmful for liberals to ignore.  He didn't, that I could see, show that any liberals had said explicitly that Fox should be ignored, not even Frank Rich, whom he quoted at some length.  The quotations supported my own distrust of Rich, who not so long ago was quite the liberal icon.  But they didn't really say much, nor did the writer of the article really say what liberals should do about Fox, except that "the ideas that Fox's [sic] peddles remain gross and dangerous, and as long as they are in circulation, they should be criticized, debunked and scorned."  "Scorned" -- that'll learn 'em!  I can't see that liberal criticism and debunking of Fox and other right-wing sources has done a lot of good, not least because liberals have their own blind spots that are harmful, gross and dangerous, and ostensibly liberal non-Fox media also mislead and misinform their audiences.

I know that trying to deal with people you disagree with isn't easy, or comfortable -- how well I know it!  But what do people think it means to live in a more or less free, diverse society?  We have to share our society, our country, our world with people we not only disagree with, but disapprove of.  And there's so much talk about "conversations" we need to have about difficult subjects, such as race (via).  But we can't have them if we insist on being comfortable, on not being challenged or criticized or disagreed with.  I understand why people shy away from these discussions, but I think we need to have them, to get used to being disagreed with, to learn how to disagree with others, if we're going to have the kind of society that most people claim they want.

P.S. I should also address the final line, the "If you don't like me, don't talk to me" bit.  Whether I like or dislike someone has little or nothing to do with whether I disagree with them.  But unhappily, it's a normal human response to personalize disagreement.  If I disagree with you, or criticize you, that means I hate you, right?  Well, no.  In many cases I've never met the people I talk to online, and that suits me, because what concerns me is the validity of what they're saying -- or the lack thereof.  I've often suspected that some people get upset in online discussion because they're used to letting their personal charm or cuteness or sex appeal or physical menace speak for them, and none of these means diddly online.  Since they've never learned to think critically and construct arguments, of course they freak out when they try to twinkle endearingly over the Intertoobz and it doesn't work.  Since they don't know how to answer an opposing argument, they throw a tantrum and fall back on personal attacks, because in their minds it's all personal.

Which is why the injunction to distinguish between "being a racist" and "saying racist things," though it's perfectly rational, won't work over the long haul.  Love me, love my racism.  But I'm not a racist, nobody's a racist, the accusation of racism is the worst thing you can call anybody!

Flexibility for Me But Not for Thee

I'm not sure I'll finish Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (The Free Press, 1998).  I'm not even sure now how I happened on it -- I know it was on Amazon, probably while I was looking for something else.  (There's another book with the same title but different politics.)  Postrel is a former editor of Reason magazine, and since then has written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other media.  She's evidently a Libertarian, and from what I've read in this book so far she's trying hard to extricate herself and her readers from the toils of conventional political categories.  But so far she's not trying hard enough.

Her organizing master categories are stasis and dynamism: one side wants everything to stay the same in society, the other is excited by change.  These categories are found everywhere on the political spectrum, making for strange bedfellows at times.  So, for example, she points out gleefully that the radical environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin and the falangist reactionary Pat Buchanan unexpectedly found themselves in agreement when they met on an episode of CNN's Crossfire program in 1995: "Rifkin answered Buchanan's opening question of 'this new global high-tech economy" as a cruel destroyer of jobs.  "You sound like a Pat Buchanan column,' replied his interrogator. 'I agree'" (2).

In retrospect, no informed person should have been surprised by this strange accord, but many are still surprised, and think it's a new development when Pope Francis attacks rapacious global capitalism, though his predecessors did so too.

Postrel continues:

Economic and cultural dynamism get similar treatment.  The [Weekly] Standard praises cultural critic Tom Frank, an anticommerce leftist, for promoting the idea that "both free speech and a free market did much to democratize values and attitudes that previous generations would have largely dismissed as pernicious or infantile."  Attacking management guru Tom Peters for emphasis on change, flexibility, and innovation, Frank himself waxes conservative.  He denounces markets for disrupting the social order: "Capitalism is no longer said [by management thinkers] to be a matter of enforcing order, but of destroying it.  This new commercial ethos, not a few movies and rap albums, is the root cause of the unease many Americans feel about the culture around them.  Former Clinton aide William Galston praises Republican Bill Bennett for his attacks on market-driven popular culture: "The invisible hand," says Galston, "no more reliably produces a sound cultural environment than it does a sound natural environment."

What all these left-right alliances have in common is a sense of anguish over an open-ended future: a future that no  Galston, Bennett, Frank, or Buchanan can control or predict, a future too diverse for critics to comprehend.  Their anguish is not always coherent, nor is it expected to be.  If stasist criticisms are impossibly vague, they seem all the more profound.  What matters is the general message: The world has gone terribly wrong, and someone needs to take control and make things right [4-5].

And again:

"The enemies of the market are ... not the socialists," wrote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his influential 1967 book, The New Industrial State. ... "With the rise of the modern corporation," wrote Galbraith, "the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of the capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists as an individual person in the mature industrial enterprise."

In the era of Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and Andy Grove, no one much believes this any more.  The efficient capital markets that Galbraith consigned to the crazed imagination of free-market ideologues are all too real and disruptive.  Contrary to his confident claims, technology generates change, not predictability, and corporations cherish flexibility, leanness, and just-in-time management.  The small and adaptable flourish [6-7].

It has been a while since I read The New Industrial State, but I think Postrel has misread Galbraith.  He was right to point out that, contrary to corporate and free-market propaganda, American industry did its best to evade market forces.  If the propaganda has changed, not much about the practice has.  It doesn't really matter, though, because she's wrong about everything else, largely because she has mistaken management gurus' fantasies and corporate propaganda for fact.  First, it's absurd to claim that "the small and adaptable flourish" when you're talking about Bill Gates and Ted Turner: they run behemoths, and that hasn't changed in the decade and a half since The Future and Its Enemies was published.  The "leanness" myth was disposed of by David M. Gordon in his Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing" (The Free Press, 1996), published a couple of years before Postrel's book.  Managerial fads come and go, but management abideth forever.

[P.S.  Later Postrel refers to "the apparent efficiency of Galbraithean big business" (20), which confirms my sense that she gets him wrong.  To repeat, Galbraith was describing the reality of big industry, against its "free-market" propaganda misrepresentations; and I don't think he had any illusions about its efficiency.  But maybe I should reread The New Industrial State ... sometime.]

Second, corporations were always creatures of the State, as a Libertarian like Postrel should know, and their CEOs have no interest in facing instability and change themselves: that's for lower management and peons.  When a big corporation fails, it demands (and usually gets) rescue by the government.  This is true whether the government at the time is nominally Republican (see Reagan's savings and loan bailout) or nominally Democrat (see Obama's support for Bush's Wall Street bailout and his own bailout of the auto industry).  CEOs aren't accountable when they drive their company into the ground -- they still get their salaries and bonuses; they downsize the lower echelons not to achieve efficiency or flexibility but to show their toughness.  Big corporations generally become big through government largesse, which undercuts Postrel's thesis on a couple of counts.  The immediate post-WWII period was hardly a time of stasis, but whatever dynamism there was came about as a result of joint government-corporate planning.  High-tech industry, as David F. Noble showed in Forces of Production, depends on government support to fund innovation, which tends to be expensive and inefficient, even wasteful.  Elsewhere in the world at around the same time, the Asian "economic miracles" were marvels of central planning and government-business symbiosis, and (yes) highly disruptive for most people.  What kind of balance obtained between the disruption and destruction is hard to measure, but it's not certain that most people benefited over the long run.  As a dynamist, Postrel assumes that they did, because it's self-evident that change and disruption are good for us.  Or at least, for those who matter.

In addition, Postrel's characterizations of critics of unfettered capitalism and technological change as "anticommerce," anti-trade, anti-market, anti-technology, and so on are familiar caricatures but inaccurate.  As with management magical thinking, she takes for granted that if a policy is called "free trade" it must really be about free trade, and "free markets" are really free markets.  But "free trade" agreements are meant to control trade (Obama, for example, wants to limit South Korean auto imports to the US while increasing commerce in the reverse direction), and to subsidize US business interests at the expense of workers.  When Steve Jobs attacked Obama for not being "business-friendly" enough, he wanted the US to be more like China, whose government subsidized the supply chains and other amenities that made his obscene profits possible.  None of these guys really wants to face the free market naked.  But only people like Jobs, Gates, and their ilk can demand government protection against the market's dangers.

So, while Postrel is right to point out that many differences of position don't map well onto "left" and "right", "conservative" and "liberal" categories, her own "stasis" and "dynamism" categories don't work either.  Maybe she'll improve as the book proceeds, if I decide to follow.

P.S.  I've read a little farther.  In chapter 2 she tries to explain more, but just digs herself in deeper.  I have to admit, though, that I'm in sympathy with her definition of "dynamism," which sounds like anarchism to me.  She quotes approvingly the economist Herbert Simon ("like Hayek, a heterodox Nobel Prize economist" (37):

We have become accustomed to the idea that a natural system like the human body or an ecosystem regulates itself.  To explain the regulation, we look for feedback loops rather than a central planning and directing body.  But somehow our intuitions about self-regulation without central direction do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society.  I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief always expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just "grown" in response to myriads of individual decisions.  To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose fiat it had been implemented.  The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as "naturally" as a snowflake was foreign to them.  They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer! [37-8]

I'll have to take Simon's word on the "natural" growth of medieval cities, but it's also true that medieval and ancient societies included projects that were designed and carried out through central planning: cathedrals, for example, didn't just grow, nor did pyramids or aqueducts or the Roman road system.  Probably medieval cities were a mixture of central control and organic, unplanned growth.  I'd also point to the inconvenient fact that "natural" organic evolution often produces very faulty design.  And cancer is dynamic "growth" and "change," but that doesn't make it desirable.

Postrel's trouble is that she isn't consistent or accurate in her classifications.  She condemns "urban planning and endangered species laws to keep out Wal-Mart and block new housing" (22).  But Wal-Mart isn't organic dynamism, it's a centrally controlled entity, organized from the top down, which requires massive organized systems (not to mention big government subsidies for its supply chains, not to mention food stamps and other subsidies for its underpaid workers).  New housing is also generally centrally planned by people from far outside the community, financed by big banking systems, and it also demands public subsidies of water and sewer systems, electricity, and so on.  Blocking such enterprises isn't necessarily stasist, it can just as easily be dynamist small-scale spontaneous resistance against centralized technocrats.

Her accusation of "antitechnology" is also dubious.  Noble showed in Forces of Production that opposition to automation on the shop floor wasn't opposed to technology: machinists were not only fond of machinery, they figured out how to reprogram automated machine tools, reverse-engineering the program tapes when the programming went awry.  In that book and in his later Progress without People (Charles H. Kerr, 1993) he points out that General Electric experimented with a decentralized shop system:

In the late 1960s the management of GE’s Lynn, Massachusetts plant was having technical difficulties with newly installed numerical control lathes and blamed it on worker sabotage. In reality, the workers were trying to correct for problematic equipment by manual intervention but were hampered by management’s insistence that machines could run by the themselves, and that the workers were only “button-pushers” or “monkeys.” After considerable conflict, GE introduced a quality of work life program (prototype of those later introduced in the auto industry) which gave workers much more control over the machines and the production process and eliminated foremen. Before long, by all indicators, the program was succeeding – machine use, output and product quality went up; scrap rate, machine downtime, worker absenteeism and turnover went down, and conflict on the floor dropped off considerably. Yet, little more than a year into the program – following a union demand that it be extended throughout the shop and into other GE locations – top management abolished the program out of fear of losing control over the workforce. Clearly, the company was willing to sacrifice gains in technical and economic efficiency in order to regain and insure management control [65].

It was the workforce that was "dynamist" in this and other cases, and technocratic management that was "stasist."  But Postrel can't see any resistance to technocratic control as anything but stasist.

Again, Postrel reports how,

When Hurricane Andrew swept through Miami in 1992, residents spontaneously took to the streets to clear fallen trees and help neighbors.  Some directed traffic at intersections where the lights were out.  Floridians north of the stricken area loaded their cars with supplies and headed down to help ... Such efforts, unplanned and uncoordinated, proved vital in reaching out-of-the-way towns missed by the Red Cross and government workers.  Like ants following a scent without direction from the queen, charitably minded individuals found places that needed supplies and took care of them.  Decentralized solutions worked even as centralized disaster authorities, specifically the head of Dade County's Emergency Management Office, were throwing tantrums on national television [38].

This is inspiring, and Rebecca Solnit would approve.  Postrel's summary shows what's wrong with her account, though: "For posthurricane Miamians and their benefactors, [decentralized decision making] meant cleaning up, providing ice, food, and gasoline, and getting life back to normal" (39).  Gasoline and ice (in Florida, at least) are the products of highly organized, centralized planning and production, to say nothing of electricity, cars, and the roads on which those benefactors drove them.

The same goes for her objection to "mass-transit subsidies and car-pool mandates to fight the automobile" (22f): "the automobile" isn't some scrappy little mutt that evolved spontaneously.  It could become a vital feature of American life only after it became mass-produced through central planning, with highly organized supply chains, and government-subsidized road systems (the Interstate Highway System didn't just grow either), plus conscious and deliberate programs to disadvantage mass transit.  Postrel's tunnel vision keeps her from seeing a full three-dimensional picture of her pet products and projects, and ends up a caricature.  It appears to me that if she likes a phenomenon, it's dynamist; if she dislikes it, it's stasist.  The world of human enterprise doesn't fit into her categories any more than it fits the conventional left-right, liberal-conservative categories.

Postrel's analysis is, I'd say, of a piece with the Tea Party slogan "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."  She doesn't seem to grasp the intricate connection between central and localized decision-making: you can't really have one without the other.  She comes close to recognizing it when she declares that "The Net not only managed to become big and important before big and important before any would-be regulator noticed, it evolved both software rules and social norms without official direction.  Its origins as a Defense Department program are far less significant than its bottom-up growth and development" (38).  It's possible for a centrally planned system to leave room for "bottom-up growth and development," but you couldn't have the latter without the former. If I manage to get through more of the book, maybe she'll explain how she hopes to get rid of all the stasists and give us a purely dynamist world.

You're Stupid, Therefore I'm Smart Q.E.D.

Roy Edroso decided to make fun of the right-wing legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg yesterday.  He couldn't decide whether "the key line" of the Goldberg post he was mocking was its celebration of the TV show Breaking Bad as true conservative entertainment, or "And that is why great novels are, by nature, conservative."

This, of course, set off a wave of parodies from Edroso's commenters, rewriting the opening lines of various famous works of literature.  Not all of them were novels, and I suspect that a similar blurring of form and genre by right-wing writers or commenters wouldn't get a pass from this lot.  Anyway, because Edroso's fans, like all liberals, are bold independent thinkers, they followed his lead predictably.  Most of the parodies were constructed by putting in references to Goldberg's mother (because Goldberg probably got his start in right-wing punditry thanks to his connection with her), flatulence (Edroso's standard punchline for his mockery of Goldberg), and Cheetos (another standby in Edroso's comic arsenal).  Because, as we all know, the most devastating reality-based criticism you can make of your political opponents is to call them fat.  It's the vital common ground between American liberals and conservatives.

For a long time I used to go to through a 32 oz bag of Cheetos quickly. Sometimes, when I had put my hand in the bag, its contents would vanish so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’ve eaten another goddamn bag of Cheetos!”

But none of them, not Edroso and not his commenters, thought to notice that Goldberg had an arguable point in that claim about the conservatism of novels.  Better minds than either Goldberg or Edroso have claimed as much, and it's not exactly surprising.  The literary canon is conservative in the strict sense of the word, because it's designed to expose students to the normative works of the past, and despite right-wing hysteria about liberal professors, the canon was generally chosen by political as well as artistic conservatives, and they've traditionally been taught to minimize whatever thoughtcrime they contain.  (George Orwell, for example, remained a socialist all his life, but 1984 and Animal Farm are usually taught as pro-capitalist because they're anti-Communist.  And so they are, but they are vehemently anti-capitalist too.)  There might very well be great works of literature that could be labeled liberal or even radical, but they were usually not taught to children or even college students.  Schooling was primarily intended to mold the young to obedience, not to critical thought.  Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, for another example, doesn't need to be rewritten with the Cheeto in the place of the madeleine to make it a conservative work.  Jonah Goldberg was probably just cribbing someone else's cliché, and he doesn't seem capable of developing an argument to defend his beliefs anyway, but he might not be totally wrong in that sentence.

Even if I grant Goldberg that much, though, neither he nor Edroso and his merry band notice that "conservative" in the sense I've been using it here has nothing to do with what's known as American political conservatism.  Richard Hofstadter pointed out fifty years ago that American right-wingers like William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan who styled themselves "conservatives" were really radical reactionary statists who wanted to overturn the American system of government: real conservatism, in the sense of wanting to conserve the good things in one's society, would in the 1950s have meant New Deal "liberalism."  Older American conservatives were generally put off by the vulgarity and belligerence of the New Right, which is not really a point against the latter; it's a matter of class and style, not of content or policy.  Pointing out that today's conservatives aren't really conservatives is as much a cliché as Goldberg's truism about "great novels."  But that's why I'm mostly referring to people like Goldberg as right-wingers here, not conservatives.

As I've noticed before, Edroso's take on art is pretty "conservative" in the sense of hanging on to the New-Critical stance which denies or ignores the political content of art and entertainment in favor of close readings of the texts -- usually short forms like lyric poetry, which can be covered in a single class period or journal-length article.  (Even the New Critics, if I remember correctly, admitted that their approach didn't work well with long poems or novels, but they thought that just counted against the value of those longer works.)   He loves to mock his right-wing counterparts' obsession with finding right-wing content everywhere they possibly can, but he (and even more, his fans) clearly wants to believe that good art is liberal if it's anything.  This, you may recall, was the lot who were comfortable with claims like "Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project" (which is false no matter how you define "liberal" and "conservative"), and had to be reminded that "Marx, Alinsky, Debs, Chomsky, Ilich, Mills, Zinn, Sinclair, Gorz and the like" were not a liberal canon but a left-wing one.  Just as the Right wants to claim various dead heroes as real if unbaptized conservatives had they only known it, liberals love to claim those heroes for liberalism, even when they were explicitly hostile to liberalism.

One commenter today wrote:

Wait a second, isn't this the guy who just wrote a piece on how liberals try to bring politics into everything? Geez, Jonah, you couldn't have let a week lapse in between those observations?

And another lamented, "They just can't let us have anything to ourselves, can they?"  (Reminiscent of heterosexuals who see gay readings of works they like as "appropriative."  If gay men love Bette Davis, normal people can't love her.)  Resistance to "political" criticism of art or entertainment is a bipartisan bugbear, of course.  That's partly because it's not easy to do it well, partly because many people persist in understanding literary "criticism" as purely destructive rather than analytical, and partly because it often uncovers aspects of popular and beloved works that their fans don't want to think about.  Laura Miller's book on fantasy, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008), falls into this trap, even though Miller recognizes the value of criticism generally.  Yet she also writes:

The traditional, reverential study of canonical literature that prevailed in Lewis’s day, and the revolution-mongering of the 1960s and 1970s that supplanted it, gave way to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding. If you wanted to know why the world proved so resistant to the utopian designs of a fading radicalism – and that’s exactly what many academics, having seen such dreams die, wanted to do – you could point to the poisonous bias embodied in even the most celebrated pillars of our culture [170].

Compare this to Joan Acocella's fervid defenses (which is how she saw them) of Willa Cather against "theory" which leveled the "accusation" of lesbianism against Cather.  Both Miller and Acocella are probably liberals, but they both treat any discussion of authors' "personal lives and political beliefs" as scandal-mongering -- even though they both root around in the knickers of their chief subjects themselves, Cather in Acocella's case and C. S. Lewis's in Miller's.  I suppose there must have been writers who fit Miller's caricature of postmodernist theorists, but I can't remember ever having read any myself, and I've read a fair amount of postmodernist theory.  Probably the chief work of this kind is pre-postmodernist, a classic of feminist scholarship: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, published in 1970.  Millett focused on three iconic male modernist writers: D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, with an envoi on Jean Genet, but she included a historical overview that, among other things, introduced me to (and induced me to read) Charlotte Bronte's Villette.  Millett was attacked for demonizing Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer, though in my opinion her analysis was nuanced and didn't demonize the great men; I'd say she drew fire simply for criticizing them at all.  Ironically, Miller too was attacked by Lewis fans who thought she didn't cut the great man enough slack, though I think she cut him plenty, and wrote about him with affection and compassion.  To the true devotee, of course, no acknowledgment of the hero's clay feet is acceptable.

But all this pretty much misses the point of political (or "political") criticism.  In the first place, the "traditional, reverential study of canonical literature" was fully compatible with destructive criticism of non-canonical work, to justify its exclusion.  Read male critics' denigration of female writers, and you'll see what I mean; Joanna Russ collected and analyzed critical misogyny in her How to Suppress Women's Writing (Texas, 1983); and as Robert K. Martin argued in The Male Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Texas, 1979), mainstream critics generally agreed that a great artist must be a Truly Good Person, so they had to decide whether Walt Whitman (for example) couldn't be homosexual because he was a Great Poet, or he couldn't be a great poet because he was a homosexual.  Biographical criticism of this kind is traditional; perhaps what changed in the 1970s was some critics' insistence on confronting the question, and it infuriated the traditionalists.

But biographical criticism of this kind is not really political criticism.  As Miller argued,

Of course, it’s absurd to speak of the “politics” of Narnia. These are children’s fantasies, not designed to address such adult concerns as class systems, nationalism, and economics. They take place in a dream world where talking beavers bake marmalade rolls despite having no surplus goods to trade for oranges and sugar, commodities that can only have been imported from a warmer land. Who raises and slaughters the pigs to make the bacon and sausages gobbled up at almost every Narnian meal? Who grows the wheat and grinds the flour for bread, and who imports the tea and coffee? Even Tolkien, who labored for countless hours to make Middle-earth a consistent, coherent alternative world, never made it entirely plausible economically, and he thought Narnia a disgracefully slapdash creation [158].

I disagree that it's absurd to speak of the politics of Narnia, and Miller shows right here why it isn't.  It's just not all that relevant, since as Miller goes on to say, Narnia isn't a real world but a fantasy creation where political economy isn't involved, any more than it is in a dream.  But notice that J. R. R. Tolkien, hardly a poststructuralist critic, objected to the Narnia books because they weren't realistic in this sense, the sense he tried to realize in The Lord of the Rings.  That would indicate that it's not improper to point out flaws in Tolkien's execution of his aim to make Middle-earth "a consistent, alternative world," though doing so is probably as much beside the point as it is for Narnia.

What political criticism does properly do is analyze the assumptions that underlie art and entertainment.  As Joanna Russ argued, "it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value." (Quoted at greater length, with sourcing, here.) Myself, I don't really draw a distinction between art and entertainment, but I'm thinking here of people who get their pants in a bunch over academic criticism of commercial entertainment and culture.  They hardly consider Madonna or Barbie or I Love Lucy to be Great Art, so they don't see the point of analyzing it (though they don't really approve of analyzing Great Art either, as I've already mentioned).  I think that commercial entertainment is just as full of assumptions about "what human nature is", etc., as Shakespeare, and it's interesting and worthwhile to figure out what those assumptions are and to see how they work in practice. 

As for sexism and racism and other bigotry in canonical art, I've argued before that conservative critics don't want to confront them because they consider bigotry acceptable, a cultural norm.  "Liberals" tend to defend their favored works and and artists by declaring that in the old days it hadn't yet been discovered that people of color, or homosexuals, or women, were people, though they're unclear as to when this great discovery was made.  (Notice that Orson Scott Card has tried to use this argument to oppose a boycott of the upcoming movie of Ender's Game: "Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984."  Gay issues hadn't been discovered yet in 1984, and won't exist in the future!) Of course, it's not easy to evaluate the significance of bigotry in works from the past, which is why academics are still hotly debating whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, for example.  But I don't see why it's unfair to raise the question.

I realize that going off in this direction takes Jonah Goldberg more seriously than he deserves; and probably Roy Edroso, too.  But I think that both of these boys are playing with serious (if not necessarily important) matters that deserve better, more thoughtful treatment than either can give to them, or cares to.

Canons to the Left of Me!

How Goes the Culture War? Roy Edroso asked sarcastically today, referring to some more conservatives who are whining that their side gets no respect, and in particular:

And at Power Line, Steven Hayward asks, "WHY IS THERE NO LIBERAL AYN RAND?" He's taking off from Beverly Gage who, slightly less stupidly, asks, "American conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?" Sure we have a canon -- it's called Western literature. And it beats the snot out of the sad, long-form political pamphlets wingnuts like to name-check. You will learn more about the human condition from the works of novelists, playwrights, and poets than you ever can from a thousand power freaks' blueprints for the mass production of Procrustean beds.

I don't think this works, but then I have to remember that Edroso's mission is to make fun of the monkeyshines of the Right in a Democratic-Party-friendly fashion, not to do any serious thinking.  Once in a while he tiptoes toward the precipice of criticizing Obama, but never goes too close.  Most obviously, the canon of Western literature is also claimed by conservatives, and rightly so, since that canon is a conservative product.  (As well as something of a fantasy: the canon looks different in each European country, both in its content and in how it's read, and the content changes over time within each national tradition.)  Edroso also has this hobbyhorse about art not being political, which would seem to conflict with his implication that the canon is more liberal than conservative.  He's right to make fun of the contemporary American Right's attempts to read their views into art and pop culture, but that's because the writers he's citing are sloppy thinkers.  As Joanna Russ once wrote, "To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political." I admit it's tempting to believe that there's a connection between sloppy thought and the Right, but I've read too many sloppy liberals and leftists to take the idea very far.

For example, in an update to the post, he approvingly quotes a commenter:

Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project. In some sense liberal political philosophy fuckin' created Western political culture. Human rights grew entirely out of liberal institutions consciously advancing specific liberal political conceptions...

I suppose that "almost" saves the claim from being completely false.  Political philosophy in the West begins with Plato and Aristotle, neither of whom was what you'd call a liberal, and proceeds through centuries of thinkers who drew on them.  Perhaps what the commenter meant was "modern Anglo-American political philosophy," but even there, I think it would be more accurate to say that human rights grew out of individuals struggling to get institutions to advance their political conceptions, not all of which were "liberal" in the sense that Edroso and his regulars use the word.  Parochialism isn't limited to the Right, you see.

American universities, the guardians and gatekeepers of the canon in the US, were quite conservative institutions until after World War II, when the GI Bill funded higher education for a flood of people who'd never have been allowed in before, certainly not in such numbers.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1962, President Carl Bridenbaugh lamented the changes he saw occurring in the academic world. Himself from Protestant Middle America, Bridenbaugh deplored “the great mutation” in Clio’s profession that was occurring as the post-World War II GI Bill ushered into the undergraduate and graduate programs people who could not have gone to college in the Depression. “Many of the young practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices,” Bridenbaugh lamented, “are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They suffered from an “environmental deficiency” because they were urban-bred, rooted in the Old World traditions of their parents’ homelands, and therefore lacking in the “understanding … vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town.…They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true.”

Almost everyone who heard or read Bridenbaugh’s references to urban, foreign-born outsiders, mutants tarnishing a noble profession, understood that he was talking about Jews. This was far from the last lamentation about the wholesale change in the recruitment of historians in a period of extraordinary growth in higher education. Bridenbaugh’s discomfort was shared widely because before World War II the history profession had been drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of middle- to upper-class white Protestant men [Gary B. Nash et al, History on Trial (Knopf, 1998), p. 54].

Stuff like this is a reminder why American academia underwent such upheavals in the 1960s, and the canon was opened to such abominations as Women's Studies and African-American Studies.  (Do I need to caption "abominations" for the irony-impaired?  If so, consider it captioned.)  Edroso's a lot younger than I am, so he may not be aware of the changes that occurred.  His politics-neutral claims about art indicate that he absorbed some reactionary rhetoric along the line, though detached from its earlier context.

Another commenter not quoted by Edroso wrote:

I am sure that if one were to cite as a liberal canon the works of Marx, Alinsky, Debs, Chomsky, Ilich, Mills, Veblen, Zinn, Sinclair, Gorz, and the like, Hayward wouldn't call them a commie or anything like that.

But as another pointed out, "that's a left canon, not a liberal one; the two concepts are somewhat different."  The same is true of George Orwell, whose anti-totalitarian stance has often been confused with pro-capitalism, especially by the Right.  A good many heroes and heroines of today's liberals don't seem to have been liberals, and were often vilified by liberals in their day.  It's as dishonest to claim Martin Luther King Jr., for example, for liberalism as it is to claim him for conservatism.  But both those factions want to bask in King's prestige: the best (or at any rate safest) role model is a dead role model.