Proles Have Gotten Under the Egalitarians’ Skin
A. BARTON HINKLE TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Shakespeare himself could not have chosen a better foil for Barack Obama than Sarah Palin. The professor and the hockey mom make the perfect pair to dramatize the ongoing contest between liberal condescension and conservative populism.
A lot of ink and pixels have been expended lately to castigate what Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek, terms the "childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." Time's Joe Klein likewise casts his gaze across the land and sees only "a nation of dodos," who are "flagrantly ill-informed" because they think federal stimulus funds have been misspent.
Writing in The Boston Globe, Renee Loth terms Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race a "collective primal scream." The "lesson of Massachusetts," says the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten, is: "Anger." In The New York Times, Charles Blow finds that as America has become less enthralled by Obama it has become more "angry," "riled," and filled with "bloodlust." The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne tries to comprehend the "rage" and "venom" of the Tea Party movement and, after careful consideration, decides they are owing to two things: Many members of the movement are racist, and the rest are simply oblivious to facts.
This is nothing new. Those with long memories, such as The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, recall nightly news anchor Peter Jennings' reaction to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Comparing Americans to a 2-year-old child, Jennings concluded "the voters had a temper tantrum." Gerard Alexander, a professor of politics at UVa, goes back even further to recall Lionel Trilling's view that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
It's a common theme in public discourse: My side is full of passionate idealism -- your side is just a bunch of angry fruitcakes. Both sides play the game, but some progressives manage to achieve a level of disdain that approaches the Olympic. The Tea Party movement's proletariat and its de facto leader, Sarah Palin, seem to bring out the worst among those who profess to care about the little guy. Calling her and her supporters dimbulbs and buffoons only stokes populist resentment, of course, so the mockery plays right into her note-covered hand.
Could all this talk of the angry mob represent a case of projection bias? After all, the mob is largely made up of working-class folk like Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who had the temerity to question candidate Obama's proclivities about the redistribution of wealth. Progressivism purports to protect the toiling and exploited masses from the amoral rapacity of big banks, big insurance, big tobacco, and whatnot. It must be exceedingly frustrating to have the toiling and exploited masses turn against the policies you have designed for their own good.
But there is something else going on here, something Thomas Sowell put his finger on a decade and a half ago in The Vision of the Anointed. The progressive elite, he wrote, "do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."
As The New York Times' David Brooks wrote earlier this year in a column condescending to the "Tea-Party Teens," the Obama administration "is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country's problems." Those problems are presumed to be primarily economic: investment bankers making too much money, insurance companies charging too much for coverage, and uninsured Americans' inability to afford medical care. Offended by such disparities of wealth and want, progressives have expended vast amounts of energy to produce greater equality.
Yet as J.R. Lucas wrote more than three decades ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize "an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made." Members of Tea Party Nation may simply prefer to tolerate monetary inequalities rather than to hand more power over their lives to progressives who, while purporting to care about the great unwashed, sometimes treat them with casual contempt.
It is bad enough to have the proles reject the specific policy proposals of the good and the wise. But what may infuriate those liberals who have been castigating the idiocy of the angry mob even more is as follows. Their program is premised on believing a select group of superior people should be empowered to organize everyone else's affairs. The Tea Party proles who reject the interference, reject also the premise that the Obama administration and its progressive supporters constitute a superior class: America's would-be overseers really are no better than anyone else. For those who profess to care about equality, this must be terribly hard to hear.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A. BARTON HINKLE TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Shakespeare himself could not have chosen a better foil for Barack Obama than Sarah Palin. The professor and the hockey mom make the perfect pair to dramatize the ongoing contest between liberal condescension and conservative populism.
A lot of ink and pixels have been expended lately to castigate what Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek, terms the "childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." Time's Joe Klein likewise casts his gaze across the land and sees only "a nation of dodos," who are "flagrantly ill-informed" because they think federal stimulus funds have been misspent.
Writing in The Boston Globe, Renee Loth terms Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race a "collective primal scream." The "lesson of Massachusetts," says the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten, is: "Anger." In The New York Times, Charles Blow finds that as America has become less enthralled by Obama it has become more "angry," "riled," and filled with "bloodlust." The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne tries to comprehend the "rage" and "venom" of the Tea Party movement and, after careful consideration, decides they are owing to two things: Many members of the movement are racist, and the rest are simply oblivious to facts.
This is nothing new. Those with long memories, such as The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, recall nightly news anchor Peter Jennings' reaction to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Comparing Americans to a 2-year-old child, Jennings concluded "the voters had a temper tantrum." Gerard Alexander, a professor of politics at UVa, goes back even further to recall Lionel Trilling's view that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
It's a common theme in public discourse: My side is full of passionate idealism -- your side is just a bunch of angry fruitcakes. Both sides play the game, but some progressives manage to achieve a level of disdain that approaches the Olympic. The Tea Party movement's proletariat and its de facto leader, Sarah Palin, seem to bring out the worst among those who profess to care about the little guy. Calling her and her supporters dimbulbs and buffoons only stokes populist resentment, of course, so the mockery plays right into her note-covered hand.
Could all this talk of the angry mob represent a case of projection bias? After all, the mob is largely made up of working-class folk like Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who had the temerity to question candidate Obama's proclivities about the redistribution of wealth. Progressivism purports to protect the toiling and exploited masses from the amoral rapacity of big banks, big insurance, big tobacco, and whatnot. It must be exceedingly frustrating to have the toiling and exploited masses turn against the policies you have designed for their own good.
But there is something else going on here, something Thomas Sowell put his finger on a decade and a half ago in The Vision of the Anointed. The progressive elite, he wrote, "do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."
As The New York Times' David Brooks wrote earlier this year in a column condescending to the "Tea-Party Teens," the Obama administration "is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country's problems." Those problems are presumed to be primarily economic: investment bankers making too much money, insurance companies charging too much for coverage, and uninsured Americans' inability to afford medical care. Offended by such disparities of wealth and want, progressives have expended vast amounts of energy to produce greater equality.
Yet as J.R. Lucas wrote more than three decades ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize "an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made." Members of Tea Party Nation may simply prefer to tolerate monetary inequalities rather than to hand more power over their lives to progressives who, while purporting to care about the great unwashed, sometimes treat them with casual contempt.
It is bad enough to have the proles reject the specific policy proposals of the good and the wise. But what may infuriate those liberals who have been castigating the idiocy of the angry mob even more is as follows. Their program is premised on believing a select group of superior people should be empowered to organize everyone else's affairs. The Tea Party proles who reject the interference, reject also the premise that the Obama administration and its progressive supporters constitute a superior class: America's would-be overseers really are no better than anyone else. For those who profess to care about equality, this must be terribly hard to hear.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow