I Really Must Read More Orwell
09/01/2014
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.
The USA has of course long since been added to this list. I don't know if it's true of other one-time parts of the Empire or not. Left-wing American intellectuals, and the far larger coterie of left-wingers who like to think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, have been predominantly of this mind for several decades now.
The passage from Orwell above is quoted in this piece in the Telegraph about the role of leftist contempt for their own countrymen in enabling, among other things, the horrendous organized sexual abuse, including out-and-out rape, of white girls by Pakistani Muslim men in Rotherham.
We don’t need to rehearse the facts. We’ve all read them, and reeled away in horror. The interesting question is how and why would any country allow the racialised gang-rape of its own daughters?
Why? Because too many in that country, especially on the Left, most especially in the Labour Party, despise their own ordinary people: the white working classes.
Take this comment by Jack Straw, Labour MP for Blackburn, and Home Secretary from 1997-2001, when the Rotherham atrocities were beginning. “The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent.” It is almost unimaginable that any senior politician would say this of his own people in America, Russia or France. Yet here it comes straight out of the mouth of a very senior politician indeed – along with many other expressions of Guardianista sneering: at the white working classes with their “chav culture”, “BNP values”, “Gillian Duffy bigotry” and so forth.
What kind of message does Straw’s statement send to everyone else? It says that the English are dislikeable, that they are to be feared, and contained, to be treated with contempt. It says that the ordinary English are a nasty race who need to be diluted by mass immigration; it says, in particular, that poor white English people are especially worthless.
It is not, however, at all "unimaginable that any senior politician would say this of his own people in America, Russia or France." I can't think of any examples quite as straightforward as Straw's from senior politicians, but among the left at large, especially the wealthy and those in academia, journalism, and entertainment, such talk is normal. And does anyone doubt that, for instance, Hillary Clinton is privately of similar mind? (The remark about mass immigration is particularly applicable here, when so many left-wing voices clearly see the diminishment of white America as desirable in itself.) There is evidence that President Obama's own views, unedited, and among those whom he considers his peers, which is to say wealthy liberals, are similar, as suggested by the famous "bitter clingers" remarks, never meant to be made public:
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama was actually trying to express sympathy for working-class people here, which perhaps makes his lack of comprehension of them even more obtuse. The sad fact is that snobbery is a major component of liberal-leftism in this country. I'm sure there are leftists out there who really know and do not despise most of their fellow-countrymen, especially working-class whites, but they have almost no visible presence in the public face of liberalism. (Look, I found one.)
The Telegraph writer quotes Orwell again:
...who once said that, however silly or sentimental, English patriotism is “a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia”.
"Comelier"--yes, a good choice of word. Decades ago, the casting off of my own youthful leftism began in part with the same recognition. I became disgusted by the disgust my fellow leftists evidenced toward their own country and countrymen. Another important factor was simply empirical: I began to suspect that leftist diagnoses of our problems were not very accurate, and leftist policies not generally the best solutions, or even workable.
Not that most of the right's are adequate, either.
I think in this country there are two vectors at work: class snobbery and subcultural contempt. The interaction of the two is manifest in wine-track prog attitudes toward a variety of types. Evangelicalism, small-town and rural residence, certain tastes and hobbies (hunting and fishing), certain types of education, certain attitudes toward men, and certain speech patterns all trigger it. The reaction to Sarah Palin is the purest example of these aversions at work.
Recall, for example Roger Ebert's bill of particulars re George W. Bush: the man did not make a habit of traveling abroad. For anyone my age (much less yours), traveling abroad was something done by men during their military service or (after a certain point) by college students living seat of the pants in tents and youth hostels. Even very affluent people did not travel abroad if they had families. Just about the only people I knew in elementary school who had were U of R faculty brats who'd done so on the foundation dime. This remained true until around about 1978 when Freddie Laker hit the town.
Now, is there any evidence that Roger Ebert spoke or wrote any foreign language, or that he had any interest in architectural history or had any relatives abroad or knew squat about any foreign country? The man had likely had almost no context to inform his is foreign travels. He's just enjoying the atmosphere. George W. Bush can do that in the Texas hill country, and somehow that's something bad about him.
Or, consider Charles Fried's endorsement of Barack Obama due, he said, to Sarah Palin's selection. The endorsement made no sense. Barack Obama might have (or might not have) had the preparation to run for corporation counsel in Chicago. The political parties had never nominated such an empty suit. It makes no sense if you are assessing someone's actual preparation and not their mastery of certain social cues. That Obama had attended Harvard Law School 17 to 20 years earlier mattered to Fried and Gov. Palin's 11 years as a public executive meant nothing.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/01/2014 at 12:40 PM
I was about to ask what the difference is between "class snobbery and subcultural contempt," but then I considered your GWB example, and, for instance, the difference in treatment of GWB and Al Gore. Bush is certainly Gore's class equal, if not superior. And Bush actually had better Ivy League grades and credentials than Gore. None of that mattered, and I guess that's the "subcultural contempt" you're talking about.
I remember even before the Iraq war really inflamed people against Bush, possibly even before 9/11 (can't remember for sure), a thing circulating around the net that purported to show that Bush's IQ was some rather low number. I received it by email from a friend and immediately doubted its scientific validity because it seemed to be based on nothing more than observation from a distance. Looking more closely, I thought it even more obviously a fraud, because the name of the institution and researcher seemed pretty obviously bogus. Not quite on the level of I.P. Freely, but certainly dubious. And indeed it was a fraud, or simply a joke, never meant to be taken seriously. But the friend who sent it was not joking at all, and is a very intelligent person who considers himself enlightened and skeptical. Why was he so eager to accept the fraud? The answer's pretty clear.
I'm sure we've discussed Palin-hatred before. I really was rather shocked by it.
Posted by: Mac | 09/01/2014 at 02:48 PM
I recall that and Steven Sailer, whose avocation is reading literature on psychometrics, wrote about that internet meme. Sailer has little use for Bush (FWER), but said it was remarkable that people were willing to believe that a man with and Ivy League MBA had scores on intelligence tests placing him 2/3 of a standard deviation below the median (or at the 28th percentile). People who have scores in that range are typically flummoxed by community college and have semi-skilled positions or unskilled positions. The military will not accept recruits whose scores are much lower than that (much less put them in the officer corps and teach them to fly planes).
An aspect of the problem in Bush's case is that he is not a felicitous public speaker (though he's better than his father). Thomas Sowell has remarked that the nexus of which the Democratic Party is a part reflects very much the interests and priorities of articulate people. Obama earned his living by running his mouth, as does Charles Fried. Bush made his pile from a mix of connections and a talent for deal-cutting.
Interestingly in that regard, Sarah Palin was once a radio reporter. The thing is, her beat was sports and her accent, diction, and rhythm is definitely provincial. I think knowledgeable students of linguistics have said she speaks like someone who grew up in Wisconsin. (Her father was from Idaho, and that's the only other place she'd lived for more than a few months, so curious).
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/01/2014 at 05:27 PM
Not that most of the right's are adequate, either.
The difficulty you get there is three fold:
1. Some of these characters are what Wm. Ascher calls 'economic romantics'. They have an inchoate conception of political economy which appears derived from antebellum America, more or less. William Voegli is likely the publicists who has put the most thought into it (when he is not diverted by twee controversies of the 1790s). They have this notion that you can reconstruct a society wherein common provision is manifest completely in voluntary philanthropy.
2. You only see sanitized translations of it among politicians and publicists, but an important vector on the popular level is what you might call the 'suburban f*** you'. Its a huge problem in my home town. Try suggesting metropolitan service consolidation in a forum filled with Republicans and you get a rant from someone about how it's unreasonable to expect him to pay taxes to police the slums (and, implicitly, that those losers deserve to be holed up in their homes by local hoodlums).
3. A great deal of it is shtick and pride-driven. For example, tradeable permits to contain air pollution were an innovation being pushed by resource economists like S.H. Hanke 30 years ago. Hanke is an uber libertarian. They are just one of the tools in your kit. It is now called 'cap and tax' in starboard literature and considered a toxic emanation of big guvmint liberalism. No doubt these markets can be ill-structured in ways that leave opportunities for rent-seeking. (I'd wager this meme was started by some lobbying firm that had a client whose interests might be injured by cap-and-trade, who then snookered the columnists. Haley Barbour I'm thinking of you).
4. A certain share of the babble about tax policy (e.g. the insistence that marginal rates must never go up) seems shtick and pride driven. Which leads me to the problem with the TEA party. It's defenders are loath to get down to brass tacks and figure out which run of public spending they'd like to be rid of or their suggestions are utterly half-assed ("why do we have a Commerce department?").
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/01/2014 at 05:45 PM
Well, yes, your last item is a killer. Some at-least-double-digit percentage of our serious problems are bound up with that disconnect, I think. Almost nobody will support any reduction of public spending that inconveniences them, even if it is directly opposed to their stated principles.
It seems an indicator of the complexity and intractability of the problem that you said "the problem is three-fold" and then listed four things. Personally my tendency is to fall into economic romanticism, but I make a point of questioning it.
Your item 2 is very, very much in evidence here. The city of Mobile now includes de facto a lot of suburbs that are not de jure part of the city. The people would have no reason to be living there if it weren't for the city proper. But they adamantly and noisily refuse to become part of it and pay taxes there. I think that borders on the contemptible.
I certainly didn't mean in that one remark to account for all the diversity of opinion on the right, or to sweep it *all* away. But the sloganized wish list of lower taxes, smaller government, strong defense, and free market just doesn't seem plausible to me as a way of addressing the deep problems we have. The health care problem is a good example. I think Obamacare will prove a millstone around the neck of the country, and there are some conservative thinkers who have alternatives that might well be better. But they are not well-known (either the thinkers or their proposals) and when it's time to hit the campaign trail "conservative" candidates usually have little to offer.
Posted by: Mac | 09/01/2014 at 09:34 PM
"...the nexus of which the Democratic Party is a part reflects very much the interests and priorities of articulate people."
Yes, I noticed that many years ago. Somewhere I ought to have a copy of a print piece I wrote about it back in the '80s. To be articulate is in those eyes not only to be intelligent, but to have a higher moral standing than the inarticulate.
Posted by: Mac | 09/01/2014 at 09:38 PM
But if you have the articulateness of Buckley, you're a snob.
Posted by: Robert Gotcher | 09/01/2014 at 11:22 PM
Yep. Though Buckley did have kind of a supercilious manner, in addition to being very articulate. But in general a right-wing pundit is going to be considered either a yahoo or an out-of-touch egghead.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 07:17 AM
Christopher Hitchens was a big fan of George Orwell and mentions him a lot in his writing. Hitchens became a US citizen and was notably right-wing when it came to politics (not religion, of course). Probably to the dismay of his "leftist" friends - Rushdie, Amis, etc.
What all of you write is interesting. I am liberal, but do not think that I have any contempt for the working class. I feel the other way - which I am sure is also a stereotype - that the right wing politicians pretend that they have any interest in or want to help the working man. Of course in large part I do not think most politicians want anything for anybody except for themselves to be re-elected and stay on the Gov't "tit".
But what about Obama & B. Clinton - Democrats who speak well and appear quite intelligent? Compared to GWB - most likely a smart guy with public speaking issues. I hate to even mention Sarah Palin because she is such a nothing and I do have contempt for her - so I am rather than defying that stereotype! But back to GWB - and when he ran against Al Gore. Gore notably had his own persona issues with the public - came across as a stiff - so you could say he had public speaking issues too. And you mention Buckley (and Will?) being "eggheads" - Gore was thought of in that way too.
I for one miss Wm F. Buckley and others like him because it seems that the idea of civil discourse from both sides is now gone. I guess I really don't know because I no longer watch any political discourse on TV, but I assume it is still vitriolic and crazy. Don't tell me you can watch Sarah Palin rant and think anything except she is crazy - almost as nuts as Ann Coulter. Are there really any left-wingers that bad?
Posted by: El Miserable | 09/02/2014 at 07:53 AM
Pelosi. Reid. But the thing is, there is a certain amount of eye-of-the-beholder in this. Some years ago there was a joke formula going around that took the form "I-you-he"--"I am principled; you are rigid; he is a fanatic. We all naturally tend to think the other side's crazies are crazier than our crazies. More later, must work.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 09:16 AM
Chris Matthews come to mind.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 09/02/2014 at 01:04 PM
The thing about crazies on the left (excepting Chris Matthews) is that they DON'T rant. They are very sophisticated (in both the current and original meaning of the word) and they are calm and self-assured and better than you are, but often say very over-the-top things that are either ludicrous or untrue. Of course, I can't bring anything to mind at the moment but I listen to NPR all the time and the net time I hear something that fits the bill, I'll try to remember to tell you.
As for myself, I prefer my crazies to have the appearance of crazies. I find this to be much safer.
Of course, I really don't much care for any of them, but then, I don't watch TV at all (except shows on Netflix)and I only listen to the radio about half the time I'm in the car.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 09/02/2014 at 01:10 PM
next time, not net time. The x key on my keyboard needs to be banged hard or it refuses to play. It's not so bad usually, but yesterday when I was typing a lot of stuff about taxes it was a real pain.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 09/02/2014 at 01:11 PM
I don't think Christopher Hitchens can be accurately described as right-wing. He departed from the left on the question of the Iraq War, and in general about military response to militant Islam. But otherwise he really didn't change that much.
I'm not sure what you mean about Obama and B. Clinton. I certainly don't mean that no Democrats are ever criticized for having problems communicating, or for being eggheads. In the latter case especially, though, the reaction of fellow liberals is to say "Poor guy, he's just too smart to get down to the man-in-the-street level." I've seen many variations of that about Obama from his supporters, and before that about Gore. Whereas a Will or a Buckley is considered just out of touch.
For left-wing craziness, one couldn't do any better than point to the recent reaction to the Hobby Lobby decision. Or, since we mentioned Sarah Palin, the feminist who insisted that Palin was not a woman. (It's not that I'm a fan of hers, btw, I just thought she was treated unfairly.) And Harry Reid's behavior is often about as disgusting as anything I've ever seen from a politician: e.g. repeatedly asserting during the last election that Romney was a tax evader, while offering no evidence whatsoever.
But we agree about the loss of civil discourse.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 01:17 PM
Cross-posted with Janet. And if I hadn't needed to get back to work was going to say something along the same lines about the different styles of crazy. Not to mention mean. There's red-faced ranting mean, and cold sneering mean. The right, at least in the popular media, tends more toward the former, the left toward the latter. Though both sides have some of each.
I've never watched Jon Stewart very much, but it seems to me that his main talent is for smirking.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 01:27 PM
Jon Stewart can always fall back to being a comedy show on "Comedy Central" or whatever that network is called, while the other entertainers (comedians?) are on FOX, MSNBC, CNN, etc. :-)
Posted by: El Miserable | 09/02/2014 at 01:33 PM
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...:-)
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 01:37 PM
ha
Posted by: Janet | 09/02/2014 at 04:17 PM
You can add Australia to that list.
As for more Orwell, you've seen this?
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Posted by: Louise | 09/02/2014 at 06:07 PM
Hitchens became a US citizen and was notably right-wing when it came to politics
Uh, no. He was a contributor to The Nation until about 2002. He broke with the pinko/adversary culture gauche over a discrete range of issues concerning military action in the Near East and Central Asia.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/02/2014 at 07:18 PM
e.g. repeatedly asserting during the last election that Romney was a tax evader, while offering no evidence whatsoever.
It's a reasonable inference that someone in the organization shipped his tax returns to Reid's office. The IRS is a scandal.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/02/2014 at 07:20 PM
Your item 2 is very, very much in evidence here. The city of Mobile now includes de facto a lot of suburbs that are not de jure part of the city. The people would have no reason to be living there if it weren't for the city proper. But they adamantly and noisily refuse to become part of it and pay taxes there. I think that borders on the contemptible.
About 2/3 of your urban settlement is in the core city, and some of your sketchy neighborhoods appear to be in a suburb named Prichard, so you're doing better than we are up here. Municipal annexation disappeared in New York in 1924, so the core city where I grew up is about 30% of the total settlement. I think in Harrisburg, Pa, its more like 12%. It appears that about 2/3 of Mobile County's population is in the concentrated settlement and 1/3 dispersed.
You might suggest that Mobile be reconstituted as a federation of boroughs (as is done in Canada, I believe), and Mobile County be partitioned. Revised Mobile County gets the countryside and the discrete small settlements, while the concentrated urban settlement is rechristened Greater Mobile and consists of about 9 incorporated components. You have your constituent boroughs as the default service providers and nuisance regulators and reserve the police department, the child protective apparat and foster care system, arterial transportation, and land use decisions over large projects to the common metropolitan government. The boundary between the metropolis and the county can float, with new boroughs being incorporated and added to the metropolis every twenty years or so. If the Daphne settlement tops 50,000, you can do the same with the county across the bay.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/02/2014 at 07:33 PM
Don't tell me you can watch Sarah Palin rant and think anything except she is crazy - almost as nuts as Ann Coulter.
Tough, chum. I'm telling you.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/02/2014 at 07:36 PM
My experience of Palin is actually pretty limited. I heard her speech at the Republican convention that year (acceptance speech, I guess?), and thought she was very promising. As I recall it was really a pretty sensible speech. Granted, people on the left wouldn't be expected to like it, but it was not crazy, and the hysterical reaction from the left was eye-opening, because so much of it seemed to be essentially snobbery. I think she did go further into standard right-wing boilerplate later.
I've always thought of Ann Coulter as basically somebody who was just trying to be funny. And she often was, years ago. I haven't read her for a long time--she seemed to sort of go over the top at some point.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 09:30 PM
"..some of your sketchy neighborhoods appear to be in a suburb named Prichard."
Indeed. Poor Prichard, in every sense. It's a town in its own right, and something of a basket case. It was in the news a few years ago for not being able to make good on its pension obligations.
I will pass your recommendations along to the Mobile city government, Art.
Posted by: Mac | 09/02/2014 at 09:33 PM
For whatever reason, Coulter has pretty much squandered her life on cheap entertainment. She was amusing about 15 years ago (one good column was a sardonic report on a Democratic fundraiser held at the Playboy Mansion. Title "The Viagra Cotillion"), and still offers a sensible observation every now and then (e.g. her remarks on the psychology of people obsessed with Obama's birth certificate). The thing is, very few people have enough material that they can bring to their mind to make a living at topical commentary, and Coulter is not one. Mike Royko, Henry Mitchell, Joan Beck, Wm. F. Buckley, Richard Cohen, George Will, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Michael Kinsley, Thomas Sowell, and perhaps Carl Rowan were about the only ones a generation ago who were consistently satisfactory, and Rowan took occasional heat for employing a research staff. Jeane Kirkpatrick, no fool, tried her hand at it and gave it up. Coulter would have been better off practicing law and writing occasional pieces on the side. It's been so long since she cracked a law book that who knows if she could do it anymore. She never had a family, either, for whatever reason.
Posted by: Art Deco | 09/03/2014 at 08:31 AM
The thing about crazies on the left (excepting Chris Matthews) is that they DON'T rant. They are very sophisticated (in both the current and original meaning of the word) and they are calm and self-assured and better than you are
I think it was you, Maclin, who linked some time back to a study by a psychologist that found that conservatives have a much clearer understanding of liberals' positions and reasons than vice versa. Both right-wing ranting and left-wing contempt fit this. If I understand what you think but disagree with you, I conclude that you are wicked, and I rant; if I don't understand what you think but know it to be wrong, I conclude that you are an idiot and I sneer.
Posted by: Anne-Marie | 09/03/2014 at 01:15 PM
Fifteen years ago is probably about the time I read things from her that I thought were pretty funny.
I don't even recognize all the names in your list of worthwhile pundits. I remember thinking Georgie Ann Geyer was pretty good some years ago.
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 01:19 PM
I was replying to Art--cross-posted with Anne-Marie.
A-M, I agree--except that so many on the left do consider conservatives to be evil. In fact I might argue (only might--pretty tentative) that it's more often the other way around, with conservatives seeing liberals as idiots and liberals seeing conservatives as evil. I've certainly encountered both on both sides.
It does seem pretty broadly true, though, that the public demeanor of liberal journalists etc. is cooler than that of their counterparts on the right. I've heard a fair amount of very heated rhetoric from the left in conversation and on the net, but less on the public stage.
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 02:01 PM
Speaking of crazy:
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/alabama_democratic_congression.html
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 02:28 PM
Today he apologized pretty graciously:
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/jt_smith_congressional_candida.html
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 02:31 PM
Re: Art's proposal to combine penumbral boroughs under a "Greater Urban Center" municipal government, that's what was done here in Toronto some years ago. I don't know how it has worked out from a budgetary point of view ("consolidation of services", and so forth) but politically it has had some unintended consequences.
For instance, it is largely because of the vote from the peripheral boroughs that our current mayor -- yes, that one -- was elected, and, much to my surprise, he is still a contender in our upcoming mayoral election on the strength of the same votes. My theory is that those voters don't really consider themselves residents of "Toronto", but of the smaller borough where they live, and derive a certain satisfaction from foisting a train-wreck mayor on the downtowners. There is certainly a strong political polarization between the urban core and the surrounding areas.
Posted by: Craig | 09/03/2014 at 03:53 PM
The GOP worse than ISIS?
Yeah, right.
Posted by: Louise | 09/03/2014 at 04:05 PM
Unintended consequences always have to come along and spoil everything.
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 04:21 PM
And then there's Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
I think she's probably a good instance of the differing perceptions of this stuff from right and left. Most people who lean right think she sounds more or less unhinged a great deal of the time. People who lean left probably think she's at worst a little excessive, but not that far off the mark.
Posted by: Mac | 09/03/2014 at 05:02 PM