eye of the storm

michael kinsley rocks.

my pro-conservative-studies piece is in the latimes this morning. ungratefully, i'm going to express my dissatisfaction with the edit. to start with, i am aware that you don't endow a professor, but a professorship or a chair. incomprehensibly, they lost the strongest paragraph:

    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.

anyway, if anyone cares, they can compare it with the submitted text.

For Conservative Studies
By Crispin Sartwell

That the University of Colorado would establish a Chair of Conservative Studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It certainly smacks of affirmative action, and casts conservativism in the syntax of whole departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, African-American studies, and so on.
    Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. Women may be oppressed, sort of, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multi-national corporations. In fact, if women are oppressed, they're oppressed by conservatives, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
    But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think it's not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. On a faculty of 825, the University of Colorado apparently has 23 registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
    The professoriate is unanimous for Obama. I say that's a problem. It's a problem in a variety of ways, but it's certainly a problem pedagogically: ideological uniformity does a disservice to students, and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge.
    I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backwards to teach texts I hate sympathetically; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Marx - both of whom I regard as totalitarians - compelling.
   But I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as or in the same way as would a professor who found them plausible. On the other hand, with Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," I've immersed myself in the text for years. I've struggled to parse every sentence. I've put it into the context of all Thoreau's work, and that of his friends and contemporaries.
    When I get to the end of the "Communist Manifesto" I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?" I don't - I can't - teach Marx the same way a Marxist would. I think that's fine, but what I'm saying is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if did try to be neutral) my real opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
    It's horrendously true in a situation in which academia produces a consensus. Here everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer within those departments to the texts taught within those courses to the ways those texts are taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
    Indeed, the academic consensus is of a particularly irritating variety. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a Ph.D. leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing: that no one could disagree with Obamanism without being an idiot. This has been expressed by the continual attack not on the positions of Reagan and Bush, for example, but on their grades and IQs.
  That is, the self-image of the professoriate results in a non-stop ad hominem attack. Furthermore, the claims of the professoriate to independence of mind, actual academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify - "working-class white men," for example - or indeed far more so.
    That's partially just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whoever's sitting next to you. But it's also partially a result of the fact that a professor has been processed, often for a decade or more, by the institutions that harbor this unanimity. The predictable result of "educating" professors for many years in unanimous institutions is that each cohort is a bit more unanimous than the one before.
     Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree, and in which they associate agreement with intelligence and with . . . degrees, jobs, tenure, and so on. If you think conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself richly justifies a decision not to hire or tenure a Ph.D. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.
   That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of these institutions is obvious. Higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obamanism as it is to conveying information. But it is massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
     So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they flower in endowed chairs of conservative studies, that's at least pretty funny.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College In Carlisle, PA. His book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory has just been published.

    

for what we might call a mainstream leftist, eugene robinson is an awfully good columnist. but here he makes (again) a truly wrong argument. he puts down the failures of the bush administration to what he thinks of as the traditional republican mistrust of government,  which we'd associate with goldwater and reagan. so bush supposedly set out to dismantle the government, leaving us all to starve etc. well. this is laughably anachronistic; it accepts at face value the occasional forays of bush and co into reagan rhetoric. but on the contrary, the bush administration has dramatically increased the size and power of the federal government, established whole new bureaucracies. etc. robinson probably is not a big fan of the conversion of the us into a security state, both at home and abroad, and the concomitant growth of budgets and bureaucracies and powers. but surely he can't argue that it expresses a mistrust of government. even programs such as no child left behind display the tremendous republican enthusiasm for centralized federal control of various aspects of people's lives. blaming the pathetic katrina response on the supposed mistrust of government is silly; it wasn't lack of resources, but of competence; indeed the whole response has been characterized by spendthrift waste of resources; consider the tens of thousands of useless trailers, etc.
it's a perfectly reasonable criticism not to like the spending priorities of the bush administration. but obviously, what we have these days is two parties who love government, want it to grow substantially, and think of it as the provider of all solutions, whether "keeping us safe" or addressing various social inequalities

sorry to have had to pull down "demographics." it's in this morning's la times.

moving acid back above the fold.

crispin sartwell on acid.

david brooks says this, with regard to mccain:

Eventually good and honest candidates get rewarded no matter how badly outspent they are, no matter how few consultants they have.

i don't see how you could possibly draw this conclusion. i have a lot of respect for mccain. but he was killed by bush, who besmirched him with with filth, in 2000. when was the last time the dems nominated a "good and honest" candidate? i guess when they nominated bill bradley. or paul tsongas. sometimes our boy's faith in democracy takes on the quality of sheer hallucination.

check me in the latimes this morning.

Polls, Pols, Populations
By Crispin Sartwell

Here's a basic picture of how polling works. There is an antecedent set of facts known as public opinion. The pollster takes a representative slice and reports the nature of this opinion, like a rover on Mars clutching a sample of crust. The pollster is a scientist.
    But that is not the function of polling in the bizarre house of mirrors that encloses our politics.
    I am a political junkie, and so end up watching MSNBC, Fox, and CNN a lot these days. But the coverage, with a few exceptions, has been unbelievably repetitive, banal, and empty. Thousands of hours have been devoted to muttering the word "change," determining who the real "change agent" is, investigating how the voters' evident desire for change will affect the vote, querying campaign staffers about the relation of the candidate to the term, and so on.
    Really, once you narrow the thing down to a single word, you've subtracted all the content. You might pluck any word out of the dictionary with as much cogency. Who is candidate of hydrolysis? Who the candidate toponium? Who, of cheddar?
     Here's why we whittle the grand spectacle of human thought down to the single term. It is extremely pollable. To what extent do you agree with these statements: "America needs change" "Mitt Romney is a changent," etc. That's a lot easier than getting some poor schlub on the phone and trying to work through the details of Duncan Hunter's health care plan.
     Now, the people interpreting the polls swing into action. The Washington Post leads with the story that change is polling well and experience is falling. The campaigns have their own pollsters, and they too see the upward trend in change. The next day all the candidates appear on stage with big red, white, and blue signs that say "change, change, change." Even Mitt Romney.
     Duncan Hunter, in the spirit of his hero Salvador Dali, promises the immediate complete random change of everything, all at once. If elected, I will melt all the clocks and turn earth's atmosphere into a solid.
     All of this represents the relatively harmless hijinks of Americans, a fascinating primitive people. But now something bad happens: some people actually start to yearn for change and wonder about who best embodies it, if indeed it is possible to wonder about something that has no content. Pretty soon Candy Crowley sticks a mic in their face and asks them why they're here to see Hillary. Change! Change? Change.
    Now the polling has come full circle. The people want change (as shown by the polls). The politicians re-gear to put out their fresh new message: change. Then people see everyone talking about change on television. Then they sort of think they want change. Then they get polled about their attitude towards change.
    The simple way to put this is that polling and focus groups articulate or shape rather than represent public opinion. That's not primarily because polling changes peoples minds, but because the categories and questions and terms employ in polling end up shaping the debate through the media and the campaigns.
     That much is irritating, but not disastrous. Something has to shape the debate. But it's hard not to see that the giant woolly symbolic themes of this campaign have emerged largely as a matter of convenience for pollsters. We have tumbled, thereby, into the void. I can still hear John Edwards screaming as he falls, falls.
     In every election cycle over the last fifty years, the "scientific" "measurement" of "public opinion" has grown in intensity. It's hard to imagine how many polls by how many organizations the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire were subjected to, for instance.
    There are no real stories, and no real policies, there are only the tools of demographic analysis with their hideous limitations. The question isn't whether Hillary has got a good education plan; the question is "agree or disagree" with "education"? Strongly agree! So let's try to say 'education' all the time.
     At any rate, I have no solution to propose. It may be that, having narrowed down the governance of the supposedly free world to a single term, the pollsters have nowhere left to go: they can't just poll single consonants or blank sheets of paper, can they? Perhaps they'll add some more words.
    And my fellow Americans, I leave you with this: Cheddar. Cheddar we can believe in.

ok, back into the kristol.the public editor of the nyt, clark hoyt has a piece on the bill kristol hire. now first of all this piece irritates me with its inability to formulate a coherent opinion. yes or no? no. only yes. here's why he briefly says no:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Publication of the article was controversial — my predecessor as public editor first supported it and then changed his mind — but Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

ok. deal with it. saying that a newspaper should be prosecuted is itself the expression of an opinion, not an act of censorship. i'm completely puzzled by the idea that this "smacks of intimidation." you mean bill kristol sounds angry enough to go on a shooting spree in the times newsroom? or maybe just that he'll make you look stupid. real stupid. and then there is pathetic pandering to the audience and the paper ("the most elite audience"). please, man. maybe we're complaining about the wrong guy; this hoyt column is incoherent, cowardly in its wishywashiness, and cloying. christ, get someone who can think and write sharply.