How weird that you could write these two sentences: “But anti-elitism and conservatism are not and never have been the same thing. And I do think this will be more obvious in the months and years to come.”
by John Holbo on October 20, 2005
How weird that you could write these two sentences: “But anti-elitism and conservatism are not and never have been the same thing. And I do think this will be more obvious in the months and years to come.”
{ 25 comments }
Rasselas 10.20.05 at 9:39 am
Is this a guess who? Can’t be Derbyshire — no reference to male-on-male sodomy. Can’t be Ledeen — doesn’t advocate killing a whole bunch of people. Can’t be Podhoretz — doesn’t blame Bill Clinton for anti-semitism. Can’t be Lopez — doesn’t gigglingly speculate on the size of George W. Bush’s balls.
Goldberg? It’s Goldberg, isn’t it? What do I win?
Matthew Yglesias 10.20.05 at 9:54 am
If you want weird, you’re going to need to check out Jonah’s new book, Liberal Fascism : The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. That’s not a joke. It’s the actual title of an actual book. I’m not up to the challenge of mocking this appropriately.
Rasselas 10.20.05 at 10:16 am
Goldberg announced the title and subject of his minimum opus some months ago, but I doubt it’s mockable as we presently go about it. I think that civilization’s valuable mockery resources have been so thoroughly depleted — by the last few presidential campaigns, presidential administrations and awards seasons — that in order to confront the newest wave of conservative book-o-mats with anything approaching an effective force, we must wait for the coming into being of a new order of man, fortified by hours of EA Sports Mockery 2K6 on the XBox 360.
Tom Hurka 10.20.05 at 10:20 am
Why the sneering? The Goldberg post makes a perfectly reasonable point: that the liberal/conservative and populist/intellectual splits aren’t the same, so Republican populists can turn against Republican intellectuals and may do so more in the future. (That’s Goldberg’s prediction, though he doesn’t think the development an entirely good one.) As I say, why the sneering? Do the posters think all Republicans are intellectuals?
In Canada there was a block of voters, mostly in Western Canada, who alternated between voting for Social Credit or the Reform Party (the most right-wing parties, though both now gone) and voting for the New Democrats (the most left-wing party). The explanation was that their populism, or opposition to what they saw as elites, was more important for them than left/right issues. Goldberg’s just pointing out the same phenomenon in the U.S.
Of the course the assumption on the left is that since we’re for the people they have to be for us. But it ain’t so. There’s right-wing populism, and Goldberg’s just pointing it out.
jim 10.20.05 at 10:22 am
He’s forgetting 1964 (well, actually he wasn’t around in 1964, but someone must have told him about it). The attacks on “The Eastern Establishment” weren’t just rhetoric.
Russell Arben Fox 10.20.05 at 10:34 am
John, I have to agree with Tom and Jim; I don’t see what is so bizarre about Jonah’s comment. It’s a complete shibboleth on the left–one that I believe you have exposed in your own writings on conservatism at least a couple of times–to claim that the multifaceted movement that is conservatism is an elitist endeavor. It may be, in terms of their vision of human society, exclusive in some important ways, but that doesn’t mean the exclusion can’t come from populist discontent as opposed to plutocratic disdain.
Russell Arben Fox 10.20.05 at 10:38 am
I should add that Laura McKenna has been writing some interesting stuff about the “elitist” and “classist” aspects of the intra-conservative fight over Miers for a few days now.
Daniel 10.20.05 at 10:50 am
speaking as an elitist, Rusell, “shibboleth” doesn’t mean “an idea commonly held”. It means an idea which must be held as a condition of membership. The reference is Biblical; the Gileadites or some such fucking mob apparently habitually mispronounced it as “sibboleth”, allowing a test to be carried out to make people say “sixty thousand shivering shibboleths” ten times fast and smite the ones who didn’t.
John Holbo 10.20.05 at 10:51 am
Russell & Tom & Jim,
The length of the post should indicate I didn’t mean to make a mountain of it. There is of course no incompatibility between being conservative and populist. (And Jonah’s point about FOX news being populist more than it is conservative has something to be said for it.) What amuses me is the earnest hint that being conservative and being part of an elite presumptively DON’T go together. It will take months and years for us to accustom ourselves to the ‘cats and dogs living together’ curiosity of conservatives who are elitists. But eventually we’ll come to see it as not so strange.
C.J.Colucci 10.20.05 at 10:58 am
Anything that has ever pretended to be a “thoughtful” conservatism has always been elitist. There is another kind of conservatism, the Russian peasant type, that doesn’t pretend to be thoughtful, likes things the way they are because, dammit, that’s the way things are, and believes (sometimes rightly) that anything new is likely to be worse. That type of conservatism isn’t elitist, though it defers to the elites they’re used to for lack of anything better to do. It is easily turned against other elites. Hence, modern conservative Repulicanism.
As for Jonah, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Dan Nexon 10.20.05 at 11:00 am
My sense that its weirdness stems not from anything about the modern state of the conservative movement, but from the statement itself: ‘conservativism isn’t necessarily anti-elitist?” Conservativism, as a political ideology, is deeply and unapologetically elitist. The social hierarchy is there for a reason, and we shouldn’t upset it with all this talk of equality, liberty, and fraternity!
My uninformed take on Goldberg’s tract can be found here.
Tom Hurka 10.20.05 at 11:32 am
John:
Your original post was short, but wasn’t that part of the problem? You quoted two sentences of Goldberg’s entirely out of context, when the context made them not weird at all. Or is all fair in love and dumping on conservatives?
Your last post and Dan’s still seem to me to misrepresent Goldberg’s point. He’s not saying “Not all conservatives are anti-elitists,” as if that would be some kind of surprise. He’s saying “Not all anti-elitists are conservatives,” i.e., the anti-elitists who now rail against the ACLU, NY Times, etc. may just as easily rail against the WSJ, AEI, etc. He’s addressing his fellow-conservatives, and saying something they might well find a surprise.
abb1 10.20.05 at 11:34 am
I guess this is one of those threads where I link this piece:
Pseudoconservatism Revisited
So, yeah, both populism and elitism soldered by dementia.
Russell Arben Fox 10.20.05 at 11:35 am
“It will take months and years for us to accustom ourselves to the ‘cats and dogs living together’ curiosity of conservatives who are elitists. But eventually we’ll come to see it as not so strange.”
Ok, I gotcha. Good line.
Daniel: I bow before your elite knowledge of the Book of Judges. I’m more a New Testament man, myself.
jim 10.20.05 at 11:36 am
But modern Conservative Republicanism, the movement that took over the Republican party in 1964, is anti-elitist. I watched them in 1964. They were scary then. They threw out, or neutralized, the Republican elite that existed in 1964. Since then, a new Republican elite has grown up: a new Eastern Establishment. The Miers affair is the first occasion where that elite and the movement have come into conflict and the elite is going to lose. Miers herself may go down (I wouldn’t put money on it, though) but those who opposed her will pay a price. The first of them has already been fired.
Uncle Kvetch 10.20.05 at 12:07 pm
Jim’s got it right–and no less a “populist” than David Brooks, champion of Backyard Man and the New Exurban Frontier, is now starting to rethink whether he really wants to be associated with “those people.”
John Holbo 10.20.05 at 12:28 pm
Tom,
You write: “He’s addressing his fellow-conservatives, and saying something they might well find a surprise.” Namely, that not all anti-elitists are conservative. Now that I look again, I can’t say I’m entirely clear what he is saying. But even if he is saying what you say, which I’ll grant makes some sense: isn’t it (per my post) weird? I mean: that it could ever FAIL to be obvious that since conservatism and social elitism tend to go together, therefore at least SOME anti-elitists can be expected to be anti-conservative, ergo not conservative?
Hogan 10.20.05 at 12:41 pm
Being opposed to a specific elite doesn’t, or shouldn’t, entitle you to call yourself “anti-elitist.” The conservative “anti-elitist” complaints about liberals boil down to “they prefer bad (e.g, academic) elites, while we prefer good (e.g., military or financial) elites.”
Tom Hurka 10.20.05 at 1:11 pm
John:
But Goldberg’s post wasn’t about SOCIAL elites; it was about INTELLECTUAL elites. That’s why, in my first post, I replaced his “elites” with “intellectuals”; it’s what he’s talking about. His populists don’t like the ACLU, NYT, and Harvard; they have nothing against GM and GE. (Populists in the early 20th century did dislike big corporations, and some do now, but they’re not who Goldberg’s talking about.) And do you think he calls Fox News anti-elitist because he thinks it’s against the corporate elite?
In the current political climate, what he says isn’t weird. He’s noting that for a long time the anti-intellectual strand in American politics has worked against the intellectual left, and he’s saying it may now start to work against the intellectual right. Neo-conservative intellectuals have tended to assume that they could count on the “heartland” for political support; he’s telling them that assumption, which has probably held good since Reagan, may not do so from now on.
And hey, isn’t a bloodletting on the American right a good think to look forward to?
CM 10.20.05 at 1:16 pm
What’s weird is that the New Criterion crowd will whine about people not reading Milton and Shakespeare and college, but then consort with the conservatives who consider Milton and Shakespeare readers part of the liberal elite. Can you imagine what they would do to a Democratic candidate who, say, was also a literary scholar?
harry b 10.20.05 at 1:23 pm
But I thought John’s point was that it is wierd to live in a world in which there are people who can say that and it not sound wierd. And it is wierd! At least to me — I still haven’t got used to a world in which candidates for leader of the Tory Party campaign; or in which Christians shout about how virtuous they are without embarrassment, or in which it is possible to advertise patriotic paraphenalia on TV, and not be pegged by everyone as an unpatriotic profiteer.
I’m not so sure I want to see a blood-letting among the Republicans. I’d be entirely happy to see it if there were a left-of-center opposition capable of taking advantage, but there isn’t, and seeing these guys falling out scares me even more…
Grand Moff Texan 10.20.05 at 4:44 pm
both populism and elitism soldered by dementia
And massively capitalized, yes. Oh, and don’t forget a near-absolute media monopoly. It all means sfa if you don’t have that.
“Fools and millionaires,” I believe, was the formulation.
.
Grand Moff Texan 10.20.05 at 4:45 pm
Can you imagine what they would do to a Democratic candidate who, say, was also a literary scholar?
Can you imagine what they’d do to a coke-head deserter?
.
John Holbo 10.20.05 at 8:24 pm
I like Hogan’s distinction between good and bad elites. Aha! So Jonah was being elitist about elites, whereas lefties tend to think all elites are created equal.
Tom, I could go round again but how about this. I DO admit that in the current climate what Jonah says isn’t weird. What that goes to show is that, since what Jonah says IS weird, our current climate has the same chemical composition as the atmosphere on Bizarro’s home planet.
As to the bloodletting, indeed I am just sitting back to watch the Corner fight with Hugh Hewitt. It’s the opposite of Alien v. Predator. No matter who loses, we win! (That’s what I’m hoping.)
Laura 10.21.05 at 7:01 am
“As to the bloodletting, indeed I am just sitting back to watch the Corner fight with Hugh Hewitt. It’s the opposite of Alien v. Predator. No matter who loses, we win! (That’s what I’m hoping.)”
heh. I know. Best not to talk and let them go at it. But keeping my mouth shut has never been one of my finer qualities.
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