Here's an article in The Weekly Standard entitled "The Philosophers' Blog" about a new blog run by professors from around the country. They want to convince voters of the error of their ways, i.e. voting Republican. Article excerpts:
OF ALL THE LEFT-wing responses to Bush's reelection--the crying jags, the applications for Canadian citizenship, the bulk orders of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint--perhaps the strangest of all can be found online at left2right.typepad.com, where a roster of academic all-stars have embarked on a mission to save American liberalism, one blog post at a time. There was no shortage of volunteers for the job: Left2Right, as the site is dubbed, boasts an astonishing 26 co-bloggers, representing 19 American universities and including such luminaries as Princeton's Kwame Anthony Appiah and Stanford's Richard Rorty (who has not yet, alas, contributed a post). ...
The first wave of posts from Left2Right's contributors--no great surprise here--were thus concerned less with reformulating liberalism than with re-shouting its most strident talking points from the political rooftops. For Seana Shiffrin, of UCLA's philosophy department, the lesson of November was that Kerry should have made Abu Ghraib the "centerpoint" of his campaign; for Elizabeth Anderson, who teaches philosophy and women's studies at Michigan, the best way to "get through to the Right in the face of its mass mobilization of individual and group antipathies" was "by standing up for ourselves, proudly defending our positions, ideals, and identities, and exposing the Right's tactics for what they are: ugly, nasty, small-minded bigotry. . . . It is time for the Left to make the Right feel ashamed of its nastiness."
So it's going to be tough love for red America once the philosopher-kings finish revamping American liberalism. But at least the Left2Righters weren't falling into the trap of talking down to conservatives--except when Anderson called the Right's ideas "benighted," or when J. David Velleman of Michigan explained that the religious publishing industry feeds off people who feel a "widespread sense of personal disorientation and directionlessness."
Those lapses aside, there was no condescension at all. Except, perhaps, for this explanation, courtesy of K. Anthony Appiah, for why so many GOP-voting types seem to resent academic elites:
Some of those right-wing evangelicals apparently care whether or not we have a good opinion of them. (If they didn't, the resentment they display toward the "liberal media" would make no sense.) Whereas I know no one among the liberal media elite or among liberal academics who cares very much that many right-wing evangelicals have contempt for us. We care how they vote--for instrumental reasons; we may even care that they are mistaken, for their sakes; but we don't feel diminished by their contempt. . . . (The situation is analogous to the one that obtains with respect to social respect in class-and status-based hierarchies: a peasant can spit when milord walks by, but it won't damage his lordship's self-esteem. But when milord brings his handkerchief to his nose as the peasant approaches, the peasant is stung.)
It's just an analogy, right? It's not as if Appiah is saying that evangelicals actually are peasants, and that he and his co-bloggers actually are noblemen, is it? ...
[T]here are enough bright, theater-of-the-absurd moments to repay an occasional visit to the site. Consider the post in which Jeff McMahan, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Rutgers, seems to discover "support our troops" bumper stickers for the first time:
Vehicles in New Jersey are covered with decals representing little ribbons inscribed with the legend: "Support Our Troops." I have done a lot of driving recently and have noticed geographical disparities in the distribution of these symbols. . . . They are also disproportionately displayed on SUVs and vans, which isn't surprising given that the owners are disproportionately reliant on the oil supplies that our soldiers are in Iraq to protect (among their other purposes). . . . What is it exactly that these decals exhort us to do? How can I, or anyone, support the troops themselves? What can we possibly do for them? It seems that the message is really an exhortation to support the war.
Having cracked the peasants' code, presumably Milord McMahan will turn his attention to the implicit warmongering in The Star-Spangled Banner. With intellectual enemies like these, do conservatives really need friends?
Recent Comments