Barack Obama, anti-intellectualism, and the way forward

By R.K. Barry

An idea has been rattling around inside my head since the midterm elections, which I have been leaning on to help me make sense of the Democrats' meltdown. It's Richard Hofstadter's notion of "anti-intellectualism in America," about which he writes:

The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas, which I call anti-intellectualism, is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to minimize constantly the value of that life.

He continues, in explaining the attitude of those who hold the view:

The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in schools.

I don't want to discuss the reality of this bias at great length, though I encourage you to consider the number of presidential candidates who, over the years, have felt the need to don jeans and a plaid shirt in campaign ads to prove their connection to the American people, despite the fact that they would never otherwise be caught dead in such an outfit.

In this last campaign, the right made great use of the concept of "elitism," which is the other side of anti-intellectualism, to denigrate liberals as being out of touch with the average American. It was argued that Democrats had pursued policies that were "tone deaf" to the lives Americans lead and the troubles they face.

For a while now, conservatives everywhere have been making great use of the idea of "common sense" to describe their approach to politics. By extension, this is offered to voters as a bond to suggest that both conservative politicians and those who might support them have a better grasp of what needs to be done to move the country in a more positive direction.

Liberals, frequently Ivy League-educated liberals, may have a great deal of formal education, but, it is argued, they just don't seem to grasp how things work in the real world in the rough and tumble required to get things done.

Parenthetically, the term "egg-head" was first used in 1952 and 1956 in American politics to ridicule the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stephenson, who was running against Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stephenson was clearly a very smart man and Eisenhower was clearly at least perceived as a very practical man who knew how to get things done, like saving the world for democracy.

It is, however, very important to grasp a distinction that Hofstadter makes about "anti-intellectualism," a distinction that is sometimes lost by those who criticize the right. As Hofstadter writes:

Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves and say, "Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea."

The point is that as much as the election just passed was about anti-incumbency and the state of the economy, it was also about a strain of anti-intellectualism that wants to believe the world is not all that complicated, and that America's best days are ahead of her and that if we only use common sense and the work ethic of our fathers, everything will be okay. Anti-intellectualism / elitism is in part about people being forced to listen to things they don't want to hear from people who think themselves so immensely clever.

It is also about the confidence people have in their own common sense view and their interest in political communication that respects that self-image.

I am not suggesting that Obama tell convenient lies to the American people to get them on side, but I do think that there are lessons to be learned.

One of the smartest things I ever heard said about politics is that "if you are explaining, you are losing." To the extent that Obama is an intellectual, and he is a pretty smart guy, he too often comes across as the "Explainer-in-Chief," and that just doesn't work that well in politics.

Strange thing, but people don't like having things explained to them, especially bad news. They like to have pictures drawn for them, powerful mental imagery that comports with a new reality they hope the country can achieve. Reagan's "Morning in America" motif or Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech come to mind. To put a fine point on it: Tell them where you will take them; don't get too caught up in describing the roads you intend to use.

Politics is an emotional game, as someone as smart as Bill Clinton knew. At its worst, it is about manipulating people's emotions with half truths and lies in order to pander for votes. At its best it, is about finding a language that relates to the lives that people are living and the challenges they are experiencing. At its very best, it is about making people see a way forward that addresses their problems and improves their lives.

There is a fine line between pandering and inspiring, and this is what makes politics so difficult. Whatever else President Obama has done over the past two years, he has failed to make that common-sense connection with enough American voters. And, much to his detriment, the Republicans sensed the void and filled the vacuum.

Somewhere along the line I think I heard Sarah Palin criticize the president for being like a university professor at a lectern. She hasn't been right about much, but she is right about this.

The bias in America is to distrust politicians who seem to be mostly about ideas and not enough about execution. It may be unfair; it is almost certainly an unfair dichotomy in Obama's case, though that is the perception, which he needs to change.

Despite the fact that Republicans have argued that Obama has done too much and in the wrong direction, I would argue that a lot of Americans are mostly unimpressed with his record to date, seeing him as too timid and perhaps too cerebral. And before anyone decides to list his significant legislative accomplishments, it is the lack of overarching narrative that concerns.

Who would have believed that the mightily gifted campaigner Barack Obama would have so much difficulty as president connecting with the American people and getting them to believe that he has the kind of passion, plan, and vision to get things done in a world where so much needs to happen right now?

Quantum mechanics, immigration, and the elite

By Capt. Fogg

So who's really the softie on the subject of illegal immigration? As with all things in America, the answer will be found in the alternate reality you prefer and not necessarily the one in which "is" means "is." Being elitists (because some of them are rich), the party of the working man is usually accused of being "soft on immigration," although what that means is hard to tell, but I'm taking the words of the other side for it, because they and their corporate sponsors can't have all that money and be wrong.

Those corporate sponsors however are pouring large sums of money into Republican candidates who may be expected as quid pro quo to go along with their requests that immigration quotas be substantially increased or dropped entirely. Sponsors such as -- you guessed it -- Rupert Murdoch, who according to the propaganda from the party he gives millions to and those who believe it, isn't a Republican or an elitist. Then there are the barons from Marriott, Texas Instruments, Hilton, and Intel, and many, many, others who want to bring in more immigrants, too. Some might be persuaded by the fact that they're universally Republicans who donate to the GOP and to their think tanks and own propaganda outlets for Republican viewpoints that they are Republicans. Welcome to America. Here we do not address such things as facts -- we take polls, and the polls, even when they contradict each other, tell us Rupert Murdoch is not a Republican or an elitist.

To be sure, and to try to keep in touch with sanity as much as possible, I have to say that Republicans differ on the issue of quotas and there is resistance in those quarters to the idea of increasing them. Both skilled and unskilled workers in sufficient quantity will depress wages and more surely because the idea of a minimum wage is also under attack from the same parties that want to open the gates further. Owning all the money and wanting much more at the expense of the struggling classes hardly makes them elitists though, nor is it class warfare -- not if the polls say otherwise.

I guess that favoring the welfare of the corporations at the expense of workers isn't considered elitist any more, while advocating a decent minimum wage is, but that being true, the word becomes awfully hard to define unless those tiny curled up dimensions mathematicians like Calabi and Yao assure us probably exist, come into play here. Reality is a very complex thing. After all, if a particle can be both wave and solid, and if, as Dr. Feynman said, with a nod to Messrs. Bose, Einstein, and Heisenberg, that photon has been everywhere in the universe along it's path from the sun to you, perhaps one can be an elitist regardless of one's position as long as one other disagrees with him. Then, too, things are relative, as Einstein proved, Jewish elite liberal that he was. If you skipped school like Ms. O'Donnell, it's probably just as much a myth as evolution, and who is to say she's wrong? That would be elitist, which is much worse than being right.

Certainly being for "smaller government" means being in favor of more agencies and more employees and more interference with private matters and morals while covering it up with Orwellian equivalences. Wasn't a farleftliberal and potential antichrist president the only one actually to shrink government amidst overwhelming protest from the small government howler-monkeys? By the way, if they evolved into Obamahaters, are they still doing it? I don't know for sure, perhaps Eisenhower did too, that lefty, but as Reagan and Cheney, amongst others, said, debt doesn't matter, and perhaps, as has been demonstrated with photons, there is no unique history. Everyone's right, left, liberal, conservative, and yes, elitist, depending on your framework. The same goes for smart. Even the suggestion that the guy with doctorates makes a better doctor than someone not quite qualified to be a union plumber is elitist although the perception is that being elite themselves, the smartest guys in the room have the least credibility. (Are you getting all this, camera guy?) That makes everybody else the real smart people, doesn't it? People like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin and the host of Tea Party "experts" on history, economics, paleontology, and nearly any other discipline that is supplied by matriculating through a night at a Holiday Inn Express. They must be the real smarties because the polls say so.

In the history that seems apparent from my viewpoint, the people with the most and most expensive lobbyists and creative propagandists want more green cards issued and want to pay the lowest wages possible. I should probably state that the other way around because that's the way the vector of causation points, from my elitist point of view. One might be expected to think that the guys (and most of them are guys) with the lion's share of the nation's wealth would be elitists and likely to view the "masses" as little more than customers to be milked and the labor they use as a commodity to be bought as cheaply as possible. One does know that they view having to pay more in taxes as a result of the privileges that allowed them the power to get so rich is Communism although Adam Smith advocated it and Marx did not. That doesn't make them elite though, since the less than scrupulously washed sign carriers out in the street who just had their taxes cut are demanding even lower levels for Mr. Marriott and Mr. Murdoch, so, again, we can't really assign an absolute value or definition to the term, leaving it to be used ad libidum and as it appears in the vernacular, it simply means anyone you're jealous of. Republicans tend to be a jealous lot. They struggled for everything they have, you know, while others had it handed to them: lazy shiftless others, and elitists.

Of course, this is a populist, mob-motivated culture, isn't it? Polls determine what is true and truth is opinion -- even if the opinions of that mob correlate more heavily to the opinions they're required to have to expedite their oppression and build the wealth of Marriotts and Murdochs, friends to the common man. So if the mob believes that the Democrats are "elitist" by dint of having just as much money and perhaps a less tenuous connection with education, so it is. It's a relativistic world. It's a quantum world. the history and nature of what we call reality will always have been what it needs to have been to maximize power and wealth. If the Republicans win the presidency again, it will always have been some other way. The uprising of the oppressed masses will be both Marxist and Free Market fundamentalism, the underdog the elitist, the czar and the peasant indistinguishable; hard and soft, yin and yang: it all blends together in some uncertain, cimmerian mist and quantum foam.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

How the Other 100 Live.

by Distributorcap

Unless you live on Klingon or have a brain the size of Snookie's (which is about 40% of America) - it comes as no surprise that the US Senate is completely out of touch with the reality of America. On Sunday July 11 - Senator John Kyl of Arizona, who is one of the biggest assholes to ever grace the halls of Congress, appeared on Fox News and stated that the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire this year, should renewed - even if they are unpaid for or not met with matching cuts in spending.

In other words - Kyl (who found his new inner deficit-cutter on 1/21/09) wants to let the rich get richer even if it grows the deficit.

This is from the same man douchebag who is one of the many Republicans holding up the extension of unemployment because - (are you ready) those dollars for the out-of-work Americans will increase the deficit.

I cannot fathom how any die-hard teabagger can justify this complete dive into this bizarro world of illogic - but they will. The hate of liberals and democrats and humane people manages to bring the best in justifying the un-justifiable.

Back in March, Kyl, ever the bundle of warmth and humanity said

Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

from Steve Benen

Kyl said what he actually believed: he wouldn't pay for them at all. Spending requires budget offsets, tax cuts don't. Indeed, in Kyl's confused mind, one should "never" even try to pay for tax cuts.

It's quite a message to Americans: Republicans believe $30 billion for unemployment benefits don't even deserve a vote because the money would be added to the deficit, but Republicans also believe that adding the cost of $678 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy to the deficit is just fine.

The US Senate is an enigmatic (or maybe phlegmatic) organization. You have 100 elected officials deciding the fate of millions of Americans when it comes to things like war, infrastructure, medical care and an unemployment safety net. For most Americans (probably even Snooki), all they know about the Senate is that it is one of the two legislative houses of government, that there are two from each state, and they give a lot of money to rich bankers.

What they don't realize is that the Senate is one of the world's most elitist and unbalanced organizations, designed to get the Constitutional convention beyond a stalemate. Each state has equal representation with absolutely no tie to that state's population. For example, the two asswipes Senators from Kentucky (population 4.3 million) have as much voting power and clout as the two Senators from California (36.9 million people). Washington, DC - which has more people than Wyoming - has NO Senate representation. Seems pretty stacked huh?

To any person with a brain, this would seem like an obvious case of taxation without equal representation. Barbara Boxer's is the agent for 18 million people, while the insane Jim Bunning "talks" for 2.2 million. Until the enactment of the 17th Amendment in 1913 - those 100 senators (96 back then) were not even elected by the people - they were 'elected' by the state legislatures.

The seeds of this dysfunctional body go back to the creation of the US Congress. Under the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 (which passed 5-4, a vote tally that is all too familiar) - a bicameral legislature was created with an upper house (Senate) that had a fixed number of seats per state, and a lower house that have representatives based on the population size. The lower house was given the right to initiate all appropriation bills. Years later, Theodore Roosevelt described the Senate as “where every great fortune was incubated, every new commercial empire was sanctioned, every reform circumvented”. His words ring true today.

Combine this history with the fact you need to be worth millions to even run for Congress - and you have the perfect storm for the creation of the world's most plutocratic (not deliberative) body.

Kyl's idiocy and coldness can easily be explained away - he speaks for the place where he works and plays. And this playground is definitely more Southampton than Coney Island. In 2010, 66 of the 100 Senators are millionaires. Yes that is 2/3. Back when Bush was appointed in 2000 - only 34, or one-third were. That is double in ten years. Not only are they rich, they are very rich. The wealthiest Senator is Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, worth an estimated $215 million dollars. There are 18 Senators worth more than $10 million. The top 6 (Kohl, Warner, Kerry, Rockefeller, Lautenberg, Feinstein) are all Democrats. The average net worth for each of the 100 is around $14,000,000 - meaning the combined net worth of all US Senators is $1.4 billion dollars. (as a note of comparison, the total net worth of all 435 House members is about $2.1 billion. Darryl Issa is wealthiest Rep, worth $250 million). A great source for all this information is the Center for Responsive Politics.

It is a safe assumption that any member of the US Senate would have no idea what is was like to go down to the unemployment office, to count pennies in the supermarket or to worry if your home would be taken away by one of the banks propped up by the US Senate. $1.4 billion buys a whole lot of Starbucks and Perrier.

Ask the average American about net worth and they will know how much Lebron James, Cameron Diaz, or even maybe Bill Gates are worth. But those three (even the odious King James) are not making policy or keeping unemployment benefits from those unable (read NOT unwilling) to find work. You would think it would make a difference to the struggling Kentuckian that Mitch McConnell, who has continuously blocked unemployment insurance extensions, is worth $17 million. Or that Ben Nelson - another heartless soul blocking the funding - is worth $18 million. You won't see either of these guys looking for change to buy coffee or begging Dianne Feinstein to treat them to a donut. That $425 unemployment check - buys food for the guy who has sent out 2,500 resumes, but in the US Senate - that check would be used to clean up Larry Craig's last wide stance.

It doesn't take a brain much bigger than Snooki's to figure out why Kyl (who is one of the poorer Senators at a net worth of $800K) wants to continue tax cuts for the rich, I mean his friends. His recent statement on Fox just proves that the US Senate is actually designed to protect the interests of the wealthy in America, while disregarding the interests of the masses. And yet, election after election, the voters continue to elect people like Kyl and Inhofe and Demint and Bunning and McConnell and a whole slew of other aristocrats because, well I have no idea why. I can't see how a stance on guns, abortion or school prayer would outweigh feeding your kids and holding onto a job. But it does.

Welcome to the United States of Stupidity where Lindsay Lohan is much more important than oil in the Gulf. Where 5 million people watched Lebron James choose which team would pay him $100 million.

Poor John Boehner Snooki, so orange and so dumb - but even I would bet on Snooki to know that the the relationship between corporations, wealth, and US Senators is stronger than ever. Only when Americans begin to really vote their pocketbook (not the donation tray or their fear of those nasty terrorists) will you see their interests being represented in the government.

Until then - the show goes on.