How They Make Liberals -

How They Make Liberals - I took the opposite route of an awful lot of people; I entered college as a McGovern Liberal, and left as a committed Reagan Conservative.

Shortly after I moved to the Twin Cities, I met a couple of MacAlester College graduates at a party. One of them - an Anthropology major, who, along with his Poli-Sci major girlfriend, were working at miserable temp jobs - voiced his big dream:

What we need is for government to give jobs to smart people".

People like them, of course.

I remembered that exchange on Tuesday night, when I was writing my response to Jonathan Chait's piece in the New Republic. Chait gave voice to the reasons for his (and by extension, many liberals') hatred of President Bush, in statements both illuminating...:

"Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!

...and pathetic...:

"He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it."

The subtext of the message: "If only real life were fair. Like school. Or, let's be accurate here, the good parts of school, where the smart kids got their rewards for their good grades - not the unfair stuff, like gym class or recess or prom".

A comment to my post yesterday referred me to an excellent article by Robert Nozick, from the Cato Report that examines this phenomenon on a broader scale.

It may go a long way toward explaining Chait's article.

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling--the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge--spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better...

...The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

So why does the intellectual - Nozick uses the term "wordsmith", a term I hate as a verb but makes great sense in this context - prefer statism?

The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

Nozick draws a sociological conclusion:

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

This brings to mind two major points.

First: This would seem to explain so much of the Chait article, wouldn't it? Chait's piece fairly exudes a sense of frustrated, denied entitlement. "The dumb guy got what should rightfully have gone to one of the smart guys - and as a fellow smart guy, I resent that". Bush doesn't play the academic game - which is the game that spawned so much of our "wordsmith" intellectual class. It's the same thing that dogged Reagan with the "intelligentsia"; Dinesh D'Souza noted in "Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader" that the thing that most infuriated the intelligentisa of the eighties was the Reagan not only didn't have the trappings and credentials of authority that they so valued (the degrees from prestigious institutions, mainly), he didn't care about them, nor did he especially value them in his associates and advisors. This devaluation of their currency was a huge threat to their sense of legitimacy.

Second: It helps to explain a lot of the facile, social observations I make about lefty society, especially here in the Twin Cities. Take a walk through Highland Park or the Wedge or Kenwood; if you encounter a fiftysomething man wearing a ponytail and beard, and dressed like a college kid, you can probably fairly assume that:

• He votes DFL or Green,
• Works for an academic, government or non-profit entity
• Has had more or less the same style and outlook since college.

They learned their theory of value in school, where their strengths were rewarded; as adults, they favor a system that grants rewards the same way school did; indeed, they haven't changed their appearance since college. It's not "arrested adolescence", it's "arrested worldview".

The whole article is worth a read, by the way - be sure you do. Read it and the Chait piece side by side, and see if you don't make the same connections I (and the person whose original comment sparked this post) did.

Posted by Mitch at September 25, 2003 09:43 AM