In the past week, I have published in Deliberately Considered and posted on my Facebook page a series of reflections on the implications of the nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. And I have explained that the basis of my understanding of the present situation is a conservative insight concerning the dangers of ideological thought. The replies have been quite illuminating. The discussion starts with an interesting American irony: amusing, perhaps more.

Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.

Yet, on the intellectual front, there are few conservative thinkers who would illuminate this. Exceptions? Andrew Sullivan, perhaps also David Frum. (Anyone else?) But because these two are so guided, few, if any, conservatives recognize them as comrades in thought.

Aron Hsiao in a reply to one of my posts on conservative intellectuals explains the factors involved:

“The essence of the moment is that the mainstream demographic blocs of the Right have, as an ideological move, adopted anti-intellectualism as a central tenet of conservatism. Any marriage of democratic practice and political epistemology at the moment therefore precludes the conservative intellectual; if someone is intellectual in the slightest, the Right will disown him/her. They are the oft-maligned “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). To make matters worse, any intellectual at the moment of any value is loathe to be associated with the totality of the present (i.e. recent form of the) conservative project in America and thus tends to gravitate toward the (D) party. My suspicion is that rationally informed self-selection (they have careers and statuses, after all) results in a state of affairs in which few serious intellectuals can be found in the (R) party…”

Aside from the way he uses the term ideology, I agree completely with Hsiao. The implications are indeed scary.  I explained my understanding in my last post. I think it can help us understand the unfolding electoral debate.

Ideologists are more enamored by the purity of the ideological position, than they are committed to factual reality. This week we observed the strange case of the Republican candidate in Missouri Senate race, Congressman Todd Akin. Akin knows about wondrous powers of female biology “from what doctors have told him.” In cases of “legitimate rape” the reproductive system shuts down, according to the Congressman. I wonder what he thinks about the rape war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and beyond? From such ideologues we also “know” that there is no human induced climate change and that evolution is just a theory, persuasively challenged by creationist “science.” With the incredible power of the ideology induced human mind: fiction becomes fact; fantasy (in the technical Freudian sense of wish fulfillment) becomes science. Human suffering is ignored. Faced with a serious anti-abortion ethical dilemma, a new science is born.

Alvino-Mario Fantini, a conservative intellectual who has contributed to Deliberately Considered, I believe understands the problems here, the need to distinguish conservative thought from right-wing ideology. He responded to a commenter on my Facebook page, which he took to be an unwarranted dismissal of a significant conservative thinker. He asked:

What do you mean when you say “these days, Russell Kirk would be considered an ‘intellectual’ ?” Was he not? His seminal work The Conservative Mind was the work of a deep thinker (not an activist): an elegantly-written overview of literary and political examples of the “conservative imagination.” If anything, Kirk rejected ideology and would likely have very little to do with many of today’s GOP leaders.

Fantini shares my judgment that a serious debate between the left and the right needs to happen and hasn’t. He agrees with Gary Alan Fine that we live in partisan gated communities and that our ideas and our politics are diminished as a consequence. Fantini testifies that an important American conservative would have been appalled. Perhaps the most tragic consequence is that one party is now mired in an ideological fog, seducing a significant part of the public through ideology empowered media, i.e. Fox and company.

It is with this in mind that George Finch, disagrees with my observations and conclusions concerning the nomination of Paul Ryan. Finch noted on Facebook:

With all due respects, this country is very ideological, one that is based in the sanity of private property, individualism, the wisdom of the market, and a god-like capitalism. All are related of course. To top it off government is now seen as incompetent and part of the problem, not part of a solution. Ryan can appeal to this better than Romney, and with the right pr (lies) they may not scare people. Obama like most of the Ds do not help as they are now deficit hawks and have shifted to the Right and their ideology over the years. Obama will cut the safety net , and Ryan and his folk can use this to counter the D’s attacks and confuse people. The issue is not whether there are any Conservative intellectuals, but how far close we are coming to a form of Friendly Fascism.

And I responded:

I am not so sure that the American population is quite as nutty as you think, or that the market is worshiped in the way right wing ideologues hope and you fear. I think, and hope, that these things are in play and that the Republicans have over played their hand. I fundamentally disagree with you on Obama. He is not a deficit hawk and I think he has long fought the shift to the right and it is most clear now. Friendly Fascism is an epithet. I think it warns of the dangers of the rise of the hard right in one party, not both. Here again is a strong reason to vote for Obama and the Democrats.

Finch concluded the exchange by conceding that he has been hard on Obama, hoping that I am right in my electoral prognostication (“I would vote for a stale, bug infested baloney sandwich rather than Romney”), but asserting that Obama may be the conservative I have been looking for, given his commitment to stability and support of existing institutions and realities.

We, Finch and I, apparently, will vote the same way in November, though our reasons will be different. He will vote for “not Romney – Ryan,” holding his nose as he votes for a conservative, while, I, as a centrist who wants to move the center left, will vote for Obama, a centrist who wants to move the center left. Finch as a left-wing ideologist (as he and Hsiao understand the term) will vote against right-wing ideologists and their policies. While I will vote against ideology and a set of political principles with which I don’t agree, and vote for a candidate who I think is principled but also against “isms,” a politician looking for meaningful dialogue with his opponents, but holding to his own positions and visions, as he beautifully describes the reinvention of the American Dream. Finch, I suppose, imagines that the Romney – Ryan ticket is likely to win, given the pervasiveness of right-wing ideology in the American population. I agree that there is a problem, but think and hope that an ideology aversion will prevent this from happening.

I found this discussion here and on Facebook illuminating. It gets me thinking about the tension within conservative thought between anti-intellectualism and opposition to ideology, i.e. as I put it previously, opposition to all “isms.” We suffer from the former, would greatly benefit from the latter, in my judgment. And I am not convinced with Pait, as he responded to my last post, that ideologists get things done, while those who oppose modern magical thinking don’t.  But I agree with him, it is a challenge. More soon.

In an interesting reply to an earlier post, “Mario” presented an insightful overview of the conservative landscape and summarized what he takes to be the foundational commitments of conservatives. I then asked him a question: How could they be applied to considering deliberately the events of the day in a way that might convince people who are not conservative? Alvino-Mario Fantini presents his response in this post. -Jeff

I think that a meaningful principle of the conservative tradition is that local customs and experiences most often do a far better job at responding to people’s needs than do centralized national systems. I think this is of special importance, even though it does divide the “conservative community.” While, the neo-conservatives seem to believe that there is a formula or pattern or idea that can be applied everywhere regardless of cultural or anthropological or historical context, the paleo-conservatives tend to be more respectful of the local or native traditions of people around the world. (Of course, certain things — female genital mutilation and honor killings, for example — raise other ancillary questions about the need for modernization and whether or not we outsiders should attempt to change such things, but that is another discussion.)

In short, I think that by knowing more about how and why the state has so often and so frequently failed in other contexts, and how political leaders have so often become enamored of power and state influence (leading to horrible atrocities in many countries), we will understand that government is too often — though not always — the main problem or obstacle in the development of people and the flourishing of human societies. Furthermore, I think we’ll see that ideological or utopian visions are almost always the source of policies and state actions that end up being inhumane, unjust and violent in the name of a great progressive leap forward.

Jeff asked, more specifically, how could conservative commitments be applied to the events of the day? I think the main idea is to work towards greater local involvement, smallness of scale and an emphasis on the accumulated wisdom of local communities. If such conservative approaches could be applied to public policy problems, then I think people everywhere, regardless of political affiliation or prior ideological commitments, would realize that conservatism can empower them — turn them into real stakeholders, provide them with the power to do good and transform them into true participants in their own development, and actual masters of their own destiny — in a way that no government agency ever could. In the U.S., this means that policies would not emanate from Washington or our state capitals but would instead be “localized,” with the “agents of change” found closer to home.

I recall warmly the example of the late Jack Kemp who, as Secretary of HUD, undertook a study of urban development programs and housing policies for the poor. What he found (and never tired of revealing) was a nightmarish system of red tape (which he mapped out), of unintended disincentives and distorted prerogatives that actually served to keep creative poor people shut out of the entrepreneurial class, and which, in effect, kept urban African-American families poor and unable to either rebuild or move out of the burnt-out ghettos of our cities. Kemp railed against this Leviathan, which, in the name of helping the poor, ended up violating people’s freedom and destroying individual initiative. It is no surprise that Kemp was beloved among the community of single mothers, working dads and urban black families that the government system maintained as virtual “wards of the state.” They knew, as he did, that the very system of programs that had been set up to help them had degenerated into a morass.

I think it is by sharing stories of the American people — rich and poor, black and white, single or married — and by telling how they live their lives, manage their home economies, generate their livelihoods, preserve their customs, habits and traditions, and go about their day-to-day activities that we can best convince others of the merits of a conservative vision. If more people were to realize just how many lives have been made worse, not better, through state action, ill-conceived government programs and constant policy tinkering, then more people may come around to realize that the conservatism that they have been taught to fear is really the only approach that seems to put decision-making abilities back in the hands of the ruled, not the rulers.

I keep trying to find conservative contributors, without much success. Perhaps this is not an accident, but a consequence of the nature of the conservative mind. Thinking about my experience, and reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, gets me wondering.

Sure, when I asked in my last post, where are the conservative intellectuals, there were a number of sensible suggestions. Michael Corey pointed to a conservative institution of higher learning, Hillsdale College, and Regina Tuma and Lisa reminded me that there are some individuals, self-identified as conservatives, who are worth reading, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan (though if I am not mistaken, Sullivan has recently publicly renounced his identification with the label, given its crazy turns in recent years).

But I am looking for debate and for intellectual power, which forces me to pay attention and question my commitments, looking for committed conservatives that require respect. I have been reaching out to some conservative professors, with no success thus far. And while Frum is occasionally interesting, he is not really challenging, and Sullivan is fleeing from conservative orthodoxy. He is hard to pigeonhole. Perhaps that’s a hint of where I should go, seek “un-gated contributors.” Indeed, that is what I often do, as the editor of Deliberately Considered and in my reading, writing and teaching.

Over on my Facebook page, some friends have suggested that I may be delusional in my search for conservative contributors. One friend declared, “You are a Diogenes for our time, although with worse odds.” Another asked “Where is Ann Coulter when you need her?” Another wondered, “Are you going to play with necromancy?”

I realize that these ironic remarks imply a serious judgment. Perhaps, there is something fundamentally problematic with the conservative position, and that, therefore, my search is mistaken. Could it be that serious reflection on the events of the day shouldn’t include those on the right? Could it be that the center has shifted so far to the right that those who are now called conservatives are in fact beyond the pale of intellectual interest and decency, that  the reactionaries, the counter revolutionaries and the conservatives are all the same, and fundamentally indecent? If this is so, therefore, conservatives should be appraised and opposed, but not taken seriously on their own terms.

This is how I understand the position of Corey Robin in his book. It is a provocative and illuminating collection of inquiries. It has opened a serious discussion about the significance and meaning of the power of conservative thought and practice in the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. The Reactionary Mind received the full New York Review of Books treatment. A prominent scholar, Mark Lilla, has negatively reviewed the book, dismissing it by outlining the book that he thinks should have been written. Robin has rightly called foul, and Lilla has gotten in the last word. Lilla thinks that a book should be written to explain conservatism, to recognize its distinguished contributions, and to critically appraise its present intellectual quality and political application in its diversity. He gives an outline. I think it would be an interesting book. He criticizes Robin for not having written it. This criticism is not fair. Robin’s project was to present an argument, a sharp reading of conservative, counter-revolutionary and reactionary thought (he identifies the three) as a defensive reaction against social emancipation. It’s a strong, though of course not complete, argument.

Robin formulates his project in a variety of different ways. In the opening pages he explains: “conservatism is: a meditation on — and the theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” A few pages later, he explains a bit more fully. After discussing John Adams’s resistance to Abigail Adams’s proto-feminism and the resistance of slave owners to emancipation, he presents some details of what conservatism is and is not:

Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty – or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians and warriors, for that fusion is infused by a more elemental force – the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

The libertarians, according to Robin, like all other conservatives and reactionaries, defend challenged hierarchy. I have no doubt that there is something to this, but I am also sure that there is more involved. What he calls the byproducts of conservatism, may include the real cultural accomplishment and intellectual challenge.

I also must make myself clear. I sometimes want to be on the other side of the revolutionary barricades. I know that defending established ways is sometimes imperative, that some social projects enacted in the name of emancipation actually enslave. Being a veteran Central European hand, a long- term observer of the politics and culture of the old European killing fields, the contrasts in Robin’s account between progress and regress are too sharp for me. I am reminded of an essay of Adam Michnik, first given as a public lecture at the New School, beautifully entitled. “Grey is Beautiful.” (I wonder: perhaps my difference with Robin can be ultimately be explained by the fact that when he thinks about the cold war, he thinks about Latin America, while I think about the Soviet Union and its neighbors.)

In a quick Facebook post, I called Robin’s approach reductive. He responded and rightly called me out. I was overly casual (and dismissive) in the style of the social networking site. His position is richer than my quick post suggested. He provoked me to write this piece, publicly recognizing and critically appraising his work. Robin knows that the conservative position starts with a defense of hierarchy, but then goes on in a variety of different ways to cover a lot of ground, “from Burke to Palin.” He has interesting things to say about Anthony Scalia, Hobbes, neo-conservatives and, ex-neoconservatives (I found these reflections particularly intriguing). The essays taken separately linger on the details of the cases he studies, but the frame of the book makes the big statement, and the details recede. I am more interested in the cases than the frame, which I think is too roughly drawn.

But, I must admit, I have some self-doubts. Robin’s argument could explain why my project of breaking down the gates is mistaken. On balance, I still don’t think so, but it is a possibility.

I want Deliberately Considered to be a place where people on the left, right and center debate and take into account the position of their opposition, learning from each other, unfettered by and challenging ideological dogmas. Because of this, I am continuing to look for intelligent conservatives and radicals who challenge me in my political convictions. I know that radicals will illuminate what is wrong with the way things are, force us to pay attention to overlooked problems and explain why something completely different and new must be enacted. I also think that conservatives will help us understand what is in the present or the recent past that should not be lost, needs to be conserved and protected, force us to see the possible unintended negative consequences of good intentions and to appreciate the wisdom of past experience. Radicals warn of the dangers of the present, conservatives of the dangers of the alternatives. The debate between left and right is important. Instead, we exist in ideological gated communities to paraphrase Gary Alan Fine.

A reminder: I once had a teacher, Edward Shils, who demonstrated to me that I had to take the conservative position seriously, as I reported in an earlier post. He assigned Burke, Eliot and Oakeshott in his course on the sociology of tradition, from which I learned a lot, helping me make sense of the development of an independent cultural movement in communist Poland. I am searching for such teachers, or, at least, good students of these teachers, in contemporary political debate. But, I am having problems.

Identifying contributors to my left, whom I respect, but with whom I have significant disagreements on some fundamentals, I find to be a pretty easy project. For example, as indicated in his posts and my responses to them, Vince Carducci.

My search for conservative intellectuals, on the other hand, has been difficult. Given the ridiculous state of conservative politics, as revealed most recently at the C-PAC meeting this weekend in Washington D.C., this may not be surprising. But I persist, nonetheless. Today I will give a short progress report, in my next post, some second thoughts about the viability of my project, the search itself, through a review of Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind.

When I surf the web, I can easily find objectionable and often appalling conservatives. The idiocies of the hyper-nationalists and the market fundamentalists are readily available. But even when I am guided to potential sources by reasonable people who understand, more or less, why I am doing this, I have been frustrated. Gary Alan Fine and a childhood friend of his made some suggestions.

Take a look at the National Review Online, the friend suggested. I had been there, of course, but this successor of William F. Buckley’s major journal of the conservative revival didn’t seem very promising. But I went back and looked around again. There may be material to be found, but it is opaque to me. Perhaps, I don’t get the language. On my visit yesterday, all I found were polemics against Obama and the Democrats, arguments for or against one Republican candidate or another for President, and a nostalgic piece about Ronald Reagan. I suppose that there might be something to appreciate here, but it is almost completely pitched to be read by the already convinced, which counted me out.

Fine’s friend also suggested The American Thinker. Yesterday, it opened with a piece comparing Obama to the worst despots of the recent past.

How many times will the American people have to be hit over the head before they understand that Barack Obama is the most corrupt, dictatorial, and ideologically driven president in American history?

I read the article that followed this opening to be an invitation for me to read no further. But I pushed on, trying to understand how the other half thinks. The repeated substitution of assertion for argument turned me off. And the comments were beyond belief.

Gary also recommended particularly two bloggers, “Robin of Berkeley” and Ann Althouse.

Robin is a muscular writer. She presents herself as a sane conservative in a sea of liberal madness. She confesses that there was a time, not too long ago, that she also lived in liberal ignorance:

Before Obama came on the scene, I could have been interviewed, mumbling and bumbling, just like those other frothing-at-the-mouth leftists. [in the Occupy movement, which she sees as being delusional)…

To me, capitalism was bad, communism good (which I discovered after watching the handsome Warren Beatty in the sweeping thriller, Reds).  I envied Cuba, home of the finest health care system in the world (thank you, Michael Moore).  And I, like our current occupiers, ranted and raved about the racist, patriarchal, capitalist system with its millionaire fat cats (which I learned from reading books by those millionaire fat cats, Noam Chomsky, Al Franken, Gloria Steinem and the late Howard Zinn).

Preaching to the converted, she reflects on President Obama and the meaning of life:

Just to clarify things: it’s Obama who’s putting a sledgehammer to the economy; it’s Obama who is aiding and abetting the uprisings in the Middle East; it’s Obama who is sending out the signal that it’s open season on Whitey. Not George and not Dick Cheney, but Obama, Obama, Obama.

It turns out that she is obsessed with Obama, apparently thinks he is the root of just about all evil, makes amazing attacks on his integrity, and sees the President as no better than a mugger:

Frankly, every time I see Obama, I catch a glimpse of the man who mugged me.

This is what Fine calls “pungent politics.” But I confess, it’s too pungent for my taste. I don’t know how to digest it. It makes next to no sense to me. And more to the point, there is nothing in Robin’s writing that suggests she could take part in a discussion with someone who thinks differently than she does. She was once a true-believing leftist, now she is a true-believing rightist. From my point of view, this is not a serious transformation and provides no promise for Deliberately Considered.

Ann Althouse is more interesting. She is fast, funny, posting multiple times a day. Quickly, rather than, deliberately considered, is her style. She posts odd tidbits: yesterday (February 13, 2012) about the mugging of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, along with a note on the Obama budget juxtaposed with a Monty Python clip. She is a law professor who can write critically of the left and the right when it comes to the constitution, on Rush Limbaugh’s uninformed reading of the first amendment, along with critical reflections on the reading of the legality of same sex marriage and changing social values. She is hard to pin down, which I like. I will have to read more. I wonder, though, whether she really is a conservative.

I was not satisfied by my search yesterday, but just as I was about to give up, this morning I came across a recent discussion that gives me hope, a deliberate intellectual exchange between a liberal, Conor P. Williams, and a conservative, Rod Dreher. Williams, at Thought News (inspired by a failed enterprise, a philosophical daily of John Dewey from 1892) noted the confusion on the left about the meaning and commitments of the left, gave his own position, and asked for others to add their perspectives. Rod Dreher noted Williams’s post at The American Conservative and asked for a parallel discussion on the right about the right. Both posts were serious and illuminating. The long discussion of Dreher’s was especially robust, providing a rich array, of varying quality, of positions and sensibilities. The next step is to apply these to an understanding of pressing problems of the day in a way that challenges those on the left, right, and center, beyond ideological cliché.

I am posting this now, hoping the wonders of the web will yield results.

On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.

Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.

Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.

Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.

While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.

I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the emotions will affect political choice will play a big role in the coming elections. How is it that public personalities that I find so repulsive are actually attractive to my fellow citizens? I can more easily accept my policy differences with Tim Pawlenty than I can listen to Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. I hope the majority of my compatriots feel the same way, but I worry about this arena of feelings. It is one thing to recognize that feelings matter. Its quite another for them to run wild, as in the xenophobic birther movement.

Mine is not always a reasonable response, I admit, and I try to fight against this. I have been looking for conservative thinkers and public figures to respect, without much success. I have sought out conservative contributors to our discussions and hope for more success in this regard. I think that there is an underlying serious debate about the public good occurring in American politics, but I am perplexed how ideological certainty and willful ignorance of facts seems to be the price of admission into Republican presidential politics. Not one of the Republican presidential hopefuls would agree to reduce the deficit if it included minimal tax cuts. This indicates that they are either ignoring hard budgetary realities or that their ideological project is to radically reduce the role of the state, far beyond the expectations of the general public.

The Republicans have included the extreme right into their mainstream ranks. As a committed partisan, I believe that this will lead to Obama’s reelection and a more Democratic Congress. I also hope that as a result a more reasonable opposition emerges. As an analyst of politics and the human comedy, I fear that my partisan self may be mistaken. Fictoids have power. True belief can be convincing. Calm deliberate leadership can look weak, and the economy is stagnating, thanks to global forces, but also to American politics gone wild. Reason, imagination and feelings may be destructively interacting.

It has now passed into the realm of political cliché that there are red states and blue states. Like so many commonplaces there is a certain truth to the analysis. We expect Mississippi to vote differently than Minnesota, Indiana differently than Illinois, and Vermont differently than New Hampshire (the last a point made elegantly by Jason Kaufman in describing the divergence of political cultures). States have different political cultures, which are based on their histories, their values, and their economies.

However, even in the most garishly red of states, Democrats often get 2/5 of the vote, and the same is true in the most azure domains for Republicans. But what are we to make of these divides and these common tendencies? A potentially more powerful way of understanding politics is to recognize that even more than geography, occupations have political cultures. It is very often true that you vote as you work. While this has been recognized by political consultants as they target their mailings and by sociologists who examine what produces individual-level voting decisions by studying broad occupational categories, the red job/blue job divide has not captured the public which thinks in terms of land.

Research from the General Social Survey run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents their political preferences and their occupations. Based on surveys from 1996 to 2008, sociologists David Grusky and Kim Weeden constructed occupational categories which can be compared in light of political affiliations. The surveys focus on the basic division between liberals and conservatives (and self-professed moderates, who typically comprise half to two-thirds of any occupational group). While even these categories are somewhat broader than are desired for the examination of the local cultures of work, they serve adequately for making this point.

The results demonstrate vividly that there are substantial differences between jobs. For example, fewer than 5% of all bartenders consider themselves to be conservatives, while 27% admit to being liberals. This is a ratio of nearly 6:1. Conservatives might suggest that this reveals moral turpitude, while liberals suggest that this underlines the sympathy of barkeeps for the parade of human frailty that they encounter. In contrast, religious workers (perhaps not so very different from bartenders when one stops to think of it) are skewed 15% liberal, 46% conservative. Accountants are nearly 4:1 conservative, while professors are 4:1 liberal. Doctors and dentists trend conservative; lawyers and judges, liberal.

These data are curiosities, but what do they tell us? They help us understand the politics of geography: pulling back the covers on the red state puzzle. States and communities are not merely geography, but they are labor markets. If we learn that creative artists, authors, and journalists are overwhelming liberal, those regions in which the creative class resides (Hollywood, New York, even Las Vegas) will tend to elect Democrats. In turn, when we discover both farmers and (surprisingly) farm laborers are very conservative, agricultural regions become a strong base for the Republican party. On an even more minute level, those suburbs that attract police as residents tend to be conservative as a result, and communities of teachers tend to vote for more progressive candidates.

As a result, a central, defining feature of the politics of place is the politics of occupation. The red state/blue state chasm hides as much as it reveals. If we recognize that work is often linked to ideology, both because economic self-interest is different and because of the way that jobs (and our fellow workers) help us to read society and to understand human nature, we realize that this more fine-grained analysis helps us to color code our world.

As Andrew Gelman and his colleagues remind us in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, occupations do matter. But we simply have to extend that analysis by emphasizing the places of work. The illusion of group boundaries is replaced with a more subtle recognition that occupations present a set of interests and world views. It is not the red clay of Georgia or mossy hillocks of Oregon that determine elections, but rather the job markets that rest on these soils.

A few days ago I asked the question “Where are the conservative intellectuals?”  I posed the straightforward question, but also gave a reason why I, as a person who is generally on the left, asked:  I used to be challenged by conservatives, but not these days, and wonder  if there are any out there who are still challenging.  I received interesting replies.

Michael suggested the Heritage Foundation, and  Alex suggested Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution Blog and Kosmos, a career networking site for classical liberals.  I found the Heritage site very predictable.  The Cowen site an interesting place for the discussion by conservative economists, or more precisely classically liberal economists,  and Kosmos a networking site for like minded people.  Scott later pointed me in the direction of American Conservative Magazine, Reason Magazine, and sometimes the Frum Forum: a site of traditional conservativism, one for significant libertarian thought, and a kind of Huffington Post for conservatives.

So there are places to explore, but as a looked around, I didn’t find anything that challenged me.  Where are the conservatives who have ideas that I must consider because of their intellectual power and insight?

Scott poses a hypothesis why I am having a problem.  He wrote:

I think there are conservative intellectuals, but they use their brainpower however towards electioneering and must necessarily for the most part remain in the background. That is, they can’t be public intellectuals, or at least appear to be intellectual in public, but follow their own narrative which says that the elitist intelligentsia is out of touch with the majority of Americans.

This is ironic. There are conservative intellectuals, but because of their practical commitments and principled convictions that intellectuals are dangerous, they dare not show their faces, nor their ideas.  In the past, they avoided this problem by calling themselves “men of letters,” reserving the label of intellectuals for despised leftists.  This was the position of Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sarte and Chomsky.

Now, apparently, or at least according to Scott, they are not doing this.

But Tim in his reply found more than this.  He had his own appreciative take on conservatives, which tells me that I need to pay attention:

It seems to me that a fundamental conservative posture in American intellectual discourse is still soundly rooted in our history and traditions as a people. That posture rests on the respectable ideal that at the conclusion of the American Revolution the sovereignty of the crown passed not to a government nor to a select elite (though it certainly did pass to a propertied white, male elite for a time) but to “The People” who then delegated carefully circumscribed powers to government through elected representatives. Of course, the historical reality was far more complex, but the ideal of “The People” setting constitutional restraints on public power is not.

This understanding of limited government places a burden on those seeking to expand its writ to explicitly and narrowly justify almost any exercise of power. To a progressive liberal, as I would describe myself, that burden does not create an insurmountable obstacle to public action — only a serious rebuttable presumption. Concentrated power — from any source, but particularly from government — must be justified in light of constitutional limits, settled public expectations and the exigencies of the moment.

A good and constructive conservative is therefore a natural critic of government power, constantly probing and challenging changes that encroach on private prerogatives. When I recognize such people I actively support them. For example, I supported a candidate for Congress from Long Island, Frank Scatturo, who recently lost the Republican primary in his district to a less impressive choice of the local party bosses. Scatturo has a brilliant conservative mind and would have been a thoughtful dissenting voice in Congress. For the same reason I am glad Antonin Scalia is on the U.S. Supreme Court, though I disagree with most of his decisions and wish he were the only conservative voice on the Court.

But the conservatives I describe and respect are hardly the conservatives we routinely witness in political life today.

Perhaps he is right about Scalia, but I have my doubts.  He is smart and learned.  But his notion of original intent makes no sense to me as a sociologist, given how I understand the sociology of knowledge. I will address this issue in an upcoming post.  I will have to look into Scatturo.

Indeed looking further reveals some interesting developments.  In yesterday’s Times, Ross Douthat presented a genuinely interesting conservative critique of the Wall Street bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, on the grounds that it establishes a custom of crony capitalism and undermines the moral foundation of sound economic life.

Something worth considering, I would say.  I am not persuaded, but it is intriguing.

The political right has been successful in swaying the general public for the time being, but American intellectuals remain unconvinced: are there any serious conservative intellectuals?

I am not worried that the universities are dominated by tenured radicals, as one right wing ideologue or another regularly discovers.  While the political center of American academics is significantly to the left of the center of the public at large, I see no reason to be particularly upset by this.  Career soldiers are probably to the right of the American consensus and this too doesn’t put me up in arms.  Better not, I guess.  The experience of particular vocations informs political judgment, and people with common world views make common career choices.

But I do worry about the absence of intelligent conservative commentary and criticism in American intellectual life.  It does seem to me that almost all serious thought these days is to be found on the left, and I don’t think that this is a good thing.  The conservative tradition contributes too much for it to come down to this.  And given the swings from left to right in the public mood (which I do regret, all I am saying is give leftists a chance) it would be a good thing if there were a sensible right.

Ideologues of the right, of course, do exist, those who know that there is a clear and present danger, and we must be vigilant, these days against “Islamofascism. “ I think that’s what they call it.  But these use fantasy and fear to empower their arguments, not reason and careful observation.  How else can you find a liberal Sufi cleric to be a terrorist sympathizer?

And there are those who cling if not to their guns and religion, to their absolute dogmatic beliefs and their assertions of the moral high ground, while fearing actual moral inquiry and debate.  Better to worry about the attack on Christmas.  And also those who know with certainty that the market is magical, and condemn government waste and inefficiency, who never met a tax cut they didn’t like, won’t ever concede that tax increases may sometimes be a good idea.  They won’t debate with me my strong conviction that there is no civilization without taxation.

I find Fox news intolerable, not because there are people on it that I disagree with, but by the way they assert their positions and the way facts are disregarded.  And when I read newspapers and magazines and search the web, I still can’t find conservatives that force me to take them seriously.  Here and there, I find the witty or the apparently educated, but they don’t challenge me, as great conservative thinkers do.  I deeply admire, Burke, Tocqueville, Arendt, Oakeshott, even my teacher with whom I had a difficult relationship, Edward Shils.

Soon to be on display at the Natural Museum: Republicanus Intelligus

They were all conservatives or at least influenced by significant conservative insights.  Shils taught me the importance of tradition and custom, and to worry about the limits of reason, as he introduced me to the conservative tradition.  We didn’t get along, but I had to take him seriously, and in the end I was flattered that he took me seriously.  But I can’t find conservatives to have a discussion with now.

That’s not my conclusion but my challenge.  Who are the intelligent conservatives out there?  Do you think it is necessary to find them?  And what should we do, when we do?  My guess is that we will find an intelligent conservative intellectual or scholar, and if I am lucky and they read this post, they will assert themselves in no uncertain terms.  But what about an intelligent, serious public figure, a conservative politician that acts in a way that is worthy of respect.  Are there any out there? At least over the past year, they have become not simply an endangered species but apparently, extinct.

Once, I heard an American journalist condemn Fox News. The condemnation was deserved, in my opinion. However, the argument meant to justify it was frightening. Why – did the journalist ask – should Fox News be allowed to exist while its position contradicts that of all other American journalistic institutions?

In my view this journalist was not attacking Fox News. He was challenging the very possibility of debate. He was pointing to a consensus and requiring that dissenting voices be silenced. Obama was perfectly right in stressing that they should not (while still being critical of their position in a Rolling Stone article. Obama’s point is essential to the very existence of a democratic pluralism. Obama was no less correct in noting: “We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated.” This tradition is also ingrained in European journalistic traditions, and, in particular, in the French.

Interestingly, it is not this tradition that retained the attention of some of the most radical media critics. (I am thinking of such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Stuart Hall.) For them, the real danger lies not with those media discourses that flaunt their ideological positions, hoist their flag, advance in fanfare, scream their values. Such discourses are unmistakeably partisan. They are too strident not to be instantly spotted .

The real danger is with these other discourses that are so persuasive that they can be conflated with “reality.” It lies with discourses that seem neutral, balanced, fair, often intelligent . The real danger is with discourses that seem “self evident.” Such an evidence – present in the consensus that the journalist in my first paragraph pointed to — speaks of the power enjoyed by those groups who become the “primary definers” of the social world (Hall); of the power of constructing reality, of multiplying ‘effects of real‘ (Barthes); of the power that stems from ideology, understood not as a discrete doctrine, but as an almost spontaneous “way of seeing“ (a spontaneity that begs, of course, to be deciphered).

I tend to share the concerns of Barthes and Hall. The antics of Fox News perpetuate an opinionated tradition. But what of realistic, fair, balanced, sober news discourses? Does anyone seriously believe they are blank? Devoid of opinion? Empty of ideologies ?

I believe that social realities are not merely “recorded” for our sake by media institutions. They are recorded in order to be shown and they are shown for a purpose. Showing has a rationale and this rationale is translated into recording protocols. Showing or –as I call it , with a French accent, “Monstration“– is always an action , as opposed to the mechanical operation of monitoring machines. Showing consists of directing your gaze. Would anyone take hold of your gaze for no purpose at all? What are then the acts performed, especially when “monstrations” seem routine, banal, devoid of a special purpose?

This takes us away from Fox News as stage-villain that everybody (in our circles) loves to hate, to another form of theater. In plays such as The Exception and The Rule,  Bertolt Brecht points to the kinship between the “obvious,” and the abusive. What seems evident is often so because evidence is just another name for Power.

Of the two volumes in Tocqueville’s classic, I enjoy most reading and discussing Volume 2, which is more a critical examination of the promise and perils of democracy and its culture, less about the institutional arrangements and inventive practices of the Americans, which Tocqueville celebrated and which is the focus of Volume 1 of his masterpiece.  But this year, Volume 1 has become especially interesting to me.  I hope for the students also.

I have taught the course many times.  The way it develops always depends upon what’s going on in the world, who is in the class, and how they connect their lives with the challenges of Tocqueville.  We don’t read Tocqueville for his insights and predictions about the details of American life, judging what he got right, what he got wrong.  Rather, we try to figure out how his approach to the problems of democracy can help us critically understand our world and his, democracy in America back then and now.

Assigning the Constitution

This semester, indeed, for the past two weeks, the course has taken an interesting turn.  As we have been reading Tocqueville on the American system of government, political associations and freedom of the press, i.e. Volume 1, Parts 1 and 2, I felt the need to assign an additional shorter reading, The Constitution of the United States of America.  I did this not because I feared that the students hadn’t yet read this central document in the story of democracy in America and beyond (they had), but because I judged that it was time to re-read the text, to note what is in it and what is not, to critically appraise the use of the document as a confirmation of the partisan passions of today, and also to appraise what Tocqueville had to say about American political parties of his day and how his observations apply to our circumstances.

A few days after assigning the reading, Ron Chernow’s op-ed piece in The New York Times underscored my motivation for the assignment.  The Constitution is a complex political document, the product of serious political confrontations and compromise.  “The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything… Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day…Those lofty figures, along with the seminal document they brought forth, form a sacred part of our common heritage as Americans. They should be used for the richness and diversity of their arguments, not tampered with for partisan purposes.”

Thinking about Political Parties

Because the Constitution was a rich political document in its time, it does not decide the major political confrontations of our day.  Rather, it fuels them, as it did in the first years of the Republic in the tension between the primary advocate of an activist government then, Alexander Hamilton and along with him George Washington, and their primary opponent, Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson.  The competing readings of The Constitution served as the basis of the American party system (much to the regret of the Founders, opposed as they were to factions).

As my class and I moved on in our discussion of Volume 1, we considered the nature of the American party system.  Was it primarily about petty politics, as Tocqueville thought, in contrast to the big issues of European parties?  Or are there fundamental principles embedded within American partisan contests?  Obviously this is a matter of judgment of the observer. Tocqueville thought that Americans agreed on fundamental principles and argued only about details, that the days of great politics in America were over.  While my students generally agree with him, I don’t.

Considering the Constitution carefully and identifying what it has opened up, it is clear to me that major debates have raged about it since.  The relationship between the government and economic life is not settled by the document but raised.  The role of federal and local authorities is not decided, nor at first was the question of the relationship between freedom and slavery.  Such issues have led to competing legal opinions and decisions, but it seems to me, even more significantly, it has led to big politics, including civil war, major social movements and fundamental changes in the relationship between culture and power, in political culture.  Such issues have animated the actions of political parties in America, including right now.

It may seem that politicians are in it for themselves and that advancement in life is based upon not what you know, but who you know.  It may seem that American political practices are petty and cynical. Indeed, they are.  Tocqueville thought that major issues of governing fundamentals were settled in America and therefore it was the conflict of narrow political interest that would be the basis of American political conflict.  Some would advocate a more active role for government because it was in their immediate interests and others would advocate for minimal government, also based on interest.

But then as now there are those who see the political contest as a matter of fundamental principles, and they debate it accordingly.  There are those, such as Barack Obama and before him Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, indeed all the Democratic Presidents since FDR, who as a matter of principle see the democratic government’s positive role in the pursuit of the common good, and there are those who think the common good is best achieved by the invisible hand of the market.  This was the position of Reagan and his revolutionaries, and with post Reagan Republicans, at least in their rhetoric.

And now it is the position of The Tea Party, but they are on steroids.  The present day Tea Party Patriots seem to forget that there is an important distinction to be made between protesting the actions of a tyrannical government, and protesting and criticizing a democratic elected government that follows all the rules and procedures of the Constitution which they purport to revere.  There are competing principles and judgments, and not just competing interests.

What worries me most about the Tea Party and the Republicans and Independents that support it, aside from the craziness, is that they pretend that the debate was settled two centuries ago, in favor of minimal government and the invisible hand.  What worries me about my students’ appraisal of American politics, which I think they share not only with Tocqueville, but with the majority of their fellow citizens, young and old, is that they don’t appreciate what is at stake in the big political debate.