John Holbo

Some reviewers have complained that Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind seriously overreaches when he writes stuff like this:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of … animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite. (7)

He digs up fun quotes from old, odd sources.

“In order to keep the state out of the hands of the people,” wrote the French monarchist Louis de Bonald, “it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children.” (15)

At this point conservatives get ticked off: Louis de who?

Can’t pin us to some dead monarchist! Guy was French! Robin is guilty of tarring all of conservatism with the broadest, blackest brush. It’s paranoid stuff. Nasty sniffing around in the alleged id. No respect for the superego.

This sort of dispute is hard to adjudicate, because the only way to do so rigorously is with specifics – examples and counter-examples. But really Robin isn’t claiming that there are no counter-examples to his claim. He is saying his model is the paradigm. He is modeling the typical, not the invariable, conservative. The conservative response is that – today – only conservative extremists think in this bad way. It’s no accident that Robin has to run off to Old Europe for the juiciest quotes. The rest he gets from more contemporary conservatives when maybe they slipped in an interview and said something they didn’t quite mean, or they exaggerated for effect and … taken out of context …

Let’s take a crack at defending Robin, like so. Ross Douthat’s latest column in the NY Times is a good fit for Robin’s thesis. Douthat is no one’s notion of a radical conservative. He’s a squish (well, that’s what lots of conservatives think of him.) His job is to make conservatism sound reasonable to urbane liberals. None of that seamy underbelly, talk radio-style stuff.

So if even Douthat fits Robin’s model – that doesn’t prove anything. Still … [click to continue…]

Why aren’t citizens allowed to sell their votes to the highest bidder? (Bear with me for a minute.) You may at first be inclined to say that it’s like the stricture against selling yourself into slavery: we don’t let citizens strip themselves of the most basic political rights and liberties. But I’m not talking about disenfranchising yourself permanently. Let’s focus just on the case in which you sell one vote in one particular election, or on a particular measure. It’ll grow back. You can vote next time. It’s like working for pay, rather than selling yourself into slavery. A short-term surrender of rights and liberties for the sake of something you want: namely, cash. It’s hard to see that giving up the right to vote in one election – which you honestly may not care much about – would be permanently crippling to someone’s status as a free citizen. (We let people not vote. Why not let them not vote for an even better reason?) [click to continue…]

Several years ago I read – and posted about – a book I quite enjoyed: Roads To Ruin, The Shocking History of Social Reform (1950), by E.S. Turner. (Reasonably inexpensive used copies available from all likely sources.)

It’s basically a survey of forgotten British moral panics of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Predictions of the death of decency and/or fall of Western Civilization meet social reform proposals that sound (to us today) right and proper, or at least reasonable, or at least unlikely to bring about apocalypse.

Daylight savings. Should the ban on marrying your dead wife’s sister be lifted? Should spring guns be banned? Should children be forbidden to buy gin (for their parents, not themselves) in pubs? (You might think that the panic was over a proposal to let children buy gin. But no.)

It’s in the minor nature of these cases that, 30 years on – let alone 150 years – we forget these were hot-button culture war issues. Suppose we were to rewrite Turner’s book today. What cases can you come up with? Now-forgotten moral panics in the face of social reforms enacted in, say, the last 75 years?

No-fault divorce and legalized birth control are good examples. Same-sex marriage is going to grow up to be an example, I’m reasonably sure. But the genius of Turner’s book is that his cases are so minor. Birth-control and easy divorce were big deals, socially. Opponents were right about that much. Letting men marry their dead wive’s sisters, by contrast, was never going to make a big difference. What recent examples can you think of that are more like the latter? I’m looking for cases in which politicians and pundits and and so forth really got into the game. It’s a big hand-wringing public End Is Nigh botheration. And, in retrospect, it’s not just wrong-headed but fantastically silly.

It’s more common, I suppose, to get these sorts of moral panics about some new thing the kids are up to. Dungeons and Dragons is turning children into satanists. (Ah, those were the days.) Let’s try to restrict ourselves to cases in which social reformers, not the kids, are the targets. What have you got for me?

Following up my previous post, here are some free PDFs. Enjoy (or not). I’ve tried to optimize these for the iPad. I would be interested to hear about any problems/unsatisfactorinesses, perhaps due to the fact that you are using a Kindle or whatever. [click to continue…]

I’d like the survey the CT commentariat about their ebook reading habits, and toss out a few ideas. I’ve made the shift this year. I now read more new books on my iPad than on paper. I also read a lot of comics on the iPad, mostly courtesy of the Comixology app. But let’s start with plain old mostly word productions. [click to continue…]

Somehow I got on the AEI mailing list, so I get email. In this case, an announcement of an upcoming (Dec. 12) event. “Liberalism and Mass Culture: Fear and Loathing of the Middle Class,” a Bradley Lecture by Fred Siegel. (This Fred Siegel. He’s apparently working on a book about “The Inner Life of American Liberalism”. But the AEI site seems to be down at the moment, so you’ll have to check back later for event details.) I’ve got a good feeling about this one:

There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

Sometimes Amazon makes me offers I find it quite easy to refuse:

Katherine Rampell takes note of a Pew poll result. Respondents were asked whether they agreed that ‘success in life is determined by forces outside our control’. Only 32% of Americans agreed, whereas, for example, 72% of Germans did. I suppose this question is as bad as it is by design. (Pew pollsters aren’t stupid, I think.) It’s a kind of dog whistle values question, since it’s too imprecise to be anything else. It basically says: if you had to pick one of two statements that you don’t actually believe, to say you believe, by way of signaling your attitudes about social justice and the value of hard work, which would it be – that everyone determines their own destiny %100 or 0%? (True, there might be a few considered fatalists out there, who sincerely believe the latter. But few enough that they should hardly register. And obviously no one would sincerely go for the former option, despite the fact that most Americans did.)

That’s why it’s a values question. Even so, wouldn’t it be better to conjoin this values dog whistle with some non-dog whistle questions in the topical vicinity? I mean: obviously yes. More is better. But more specifically: it would be interesting to try to determine to what extent people actually think, practically, about their own lives and those of others, in such extreme, total voluntarist-or-fatalist terms, when not dog whistled into picking one or the other extreme. To what degree, and in what cases, do people believe themselves, and others, to be in control of the course of their lives? My empirically unsupported suspicion is that people would turn out to be pretty similar in their beliefs, across partisan lines and cross-culturally, if you took care not to blow the dog whistle.

What do you think?

Soon after reading this (via Chris’ post) I read this (bia BoingBoing). I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.

“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”

On the one hand, I’m glad DC is bringing out volume 1 of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane [amazon]. I’m glad, too, that they aren’t bringing it out until after X-Mas. That way, I can’t give it to Belle as a present, which would be unwise. On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that an even better book might collect just the covers of all 137 issues, cataloguing all the ways in which – due to being too fat, or a ghost, or due to Pat Boone, or a lead cube on her head, or being a giant, or very small, or too highly evolved, or having over-educated green ape feet – Superman’s girlfriend [UPDATE: girl friend!] serially failed ever to become his wife, or even his girlfriend, I think. Fortunately, the internet provides. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read an issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, but I can’t believe it could be as much fun as the covers promise. [click to continue…]

This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.”

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. We’ve had some debates on Crooked Timber of late about what ‘neoliberalism’ means. I’ve not participated because, honestly, term’s more trouble than it’s worth, worrying what it means. (I have other terms that are more trouble than they’re worth to worry about that I worry about. As a philosopher, I need to limit the number of such that infest my mental life.) The thing is: in the current situation, there is not – and should not be – anything analogous to the neoliberal side of the trade debate. No one sane thinks that this whole 99/1 business might be like NAFTA, i.e. something we have to go for, in an end-justifies-the-means spirit. [click to continue…]

It is a testament to my deep dislike for Zizek that even this piece by Niall Ferguson wasn’t enough to turn me Zizekian on the spot. But it was a near thing.

I think Nobel Prize winning economist Chris Sims has a much shrewder take on this whole 99 vs. 1 business.

Honestly, almost all these defenses of the status quo make more sense than Ferguson’s alternative, ‘never trust anyone over 30’ rabble-rousing proposals. (What is this, 1968?)

I emailed to congratulate Sims and he was very modest about his prize.

UPDATE: On second thought, I take it all back. That deftly-dropped hint that Zizek grew his beard to look as as wild-and-crazy as Krugman was worth the price of admission. Karl Marx sort of had a ‘Krugman beard’, too, if you think about it. Makes you think! And that’s why they pay Ferguson the Big Bucks, I presume.

I’ve been grading papers half my life, so I think I know a thing or two about how it should go. Here’s a simple point that, I think, is not always clear to the grader him or herself (I’ve found it necessary to explain this to newbies, when advising them about how to do their jobs); that is almost never clear to the students themselves; that really ought to be to made clear – and made explicit – to all involved. There are two basic functions comments on papers can serve.

1) Explaining/justifying to the student why she got the grade she got, not the higher grade that, perhaps, she hoped for.

2) Communicating something significant that will teach the student to be a better writer/thinker.

I think graders try to do 2 but feel vaguely obliged to make 2 do double-duty as 1. And students typically expect 1, although many of them are also healthily open to 2. But 1 and 2 often come apart. It’s damned hard to provide anything that would really be sufficient to accomplish 1 in a general way. And even harder if you’re trying to do 2, too. And 2 is more important, and do-able, so basically you should just do 2. Clear your head of the vague feeling that you should be doing 1, except a bit around the edges, in the natural course of doing just 2. [click to continue…]

No, I’m not thinking about our Daniel. I’m working up to a proper follow-up to my conservative cognitive dissonance posts. This isn’t really it, alas, but it’s a start.

It makes no sense for conservatives like Jim Geraghty to express this sort of concern about the booing of Stephen Hill at the GOP debate. (Hill is, as you probably know, the gay soldier who asked about DADT):

Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage.

Whatever you think of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country.

And for sure it doesn’t make sense for Santorum himself to have responded to subsequent questions about the booing, like so: [click to continue…]