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Wednesday, January 05, 2005
From the Bar©
A barfly who shall remain anonymous recently said something along the lines of “liberals, you know, have no original thoughts. They simply parrot the soundbites of their gurus. Makes it hard to tell them apart, eh?”
It was a silly little aside—not at all reflective of an otherwise very intelligent man, which is why I won't use his name—but it did set me off on the following rant...
The left, as in mainstream liberals, have no original thoughts. No mainstream politician has original ideas. Our system is structured that way. Optimists know it's been that way since 1791, pessimists know it's been that way since 1798.
A two-party system is structured to keep original thought out of mainstream politics as much as possible. In a horse race with two contestants, you do not win by having original thoughts. You win by adopting the thinking that pleases the majority.
It is a conservative system in the Edmund Burke sense of the word. New ideas can only enter the mainstream slowly, incrementally: they begin outside the mainstream, as fringe movements, or in other countries, or as the platforms of unsuccessful third parties. If they develop a constituency, one or the other of the parties will adopt the idea and, hopefully, it's constituency as well.
In other words, since politicians can only adopt ideas that are already popular, they can never have original ideas.
As I said, it's been that way since 1791, or 1798, depending on your point of view. The Founders were original thinkers. They took the work of others, reasoned it out, built on it, and constructed a new system of governance: representative democracy. And they did a good job, too. Since then, our law has been derivative of their thinking; the optimists view things as mostly derivative of the Bill of Rights (1791) and the pessimists as mostly derivative of the Alien & Sedition Acts (1798). Either way, the only real change in the American system of government was when Lincoln replaced a federation of states with a unified nation. (And, debatably, when Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and ended the idea of a “peacetime nation.”)
In any case, it's not just our system that is unkind to original thinkers. People, in general, find original thought bothersome. It is, by definition, something they have not heard before, and something they have to think about. Far easier to select from the menu of talking heads and put your brain on autopilot. You can go with Falwell and maybe go to heaven; or go with Cheney and maybe get rich; or go with Nader and maybe get high; or go with Gavin Newsom and maybe get laid; or go with Arnold and maybe get laid—with a woman. Whatever your particular brand of political chloroform, original thinkers will be few and far between.
So all that being said, I resent the implication that the left is any more intellectually bankrupt than the right. This is categorically untrue.
First of all, the greatest original thinkers simply defy categorization and cannot really be placed on the left-right spectrum. Witness that both sides claim Jefferson as their own. Witness that both sides claim the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. as their own, if not the man himself.
Second of all, of the thinkers who can be placed—tenously—on the left-right spectrum, there are quite a few liberals. While not great thinkers on the order of Jefferson or King, Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag* are—or were—highly intelligent people. John Maynard Keynes was not a dumb person.
Yes, disagree with these people. I do it all the time. But do not accuse a movement with the historical strength of Thomas Hobbes, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire as having no original ideas. Do not accuse a movement with thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hernando de Soto and John Kenneth Galbraith of being parrots.
I do not disparage the great conservatives. You have Winston Churchill on your side, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Jay and Benjamin Disraeli. Your pundits and politicians may be shallow, and I will not pretend to respect Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter or the aptly-named Michael Savage. I don't ask you to respect Paul Begala or Bob Shrum or even Nancy Peolosi.
In fact, I agree with you that so many liberals “merely parrot the soundbites of their gurus.” But so do most conservatives. That is the order of things. And—more importantly—both sides have some damn good gurus out there.
*A note on Susan Sontag: She is, lamentably, remembered for saying that the 9-11 hijackers were not cowards. The text of her remarks is available on her wikipedia entry and, in context, is entirely correct. People who are not nearly as smart as Susan Sontag (i.e., Andrew Sullivan, Ed Koch) are going to make sure that her forty years of writing and thinking are less remembered than a single out-of-context sound-bite. That is a terrible thing.
It was a silly little aside—not at all reflective of an otherwise very intelligent man, which is why I won't use his name—but it did set me off on the following rant...
The left, as in mainstream liberals, have no original thoughts. No mainstream politician has original ideas. Our system is structured that way. Optimists know it's been that way since 1791, pessimists know it's been that way since 1798.
A two-party system is structured to keep original thought out of mainstream politics as much as possible. In a horse race with two contestants, you do not win by having original thoughts. You win by adopting the thinking that pleases the majority.
It is a conservative system in the Edmund Burke sense of the word. New ideas can only enter the mainstream slowly, incrementally: they begin outside the mainstream, as fringe movements, or in other countries, or as the platforms of unsuccessful third parties. If they develop a constituency, one or the other of the parties will adopt the idea and, hopefully, it's constituency as well.
In other words, since politicians can only adopt ideas that are already popular, they can never have original ideas.
As I said, it's been that way since 1791, or 1798, depending on your point of view. The Founders were original thinkers. They took the work of others, reasoned it out, built on it, and constructed a new system of governance: representative democracy. And they did a good job, too. Since then, our law has been derivative of their thinking; the optimists view things as mostly derivative of the Bill of Rights (1791) and the pessimists as mostly derivative of the Alien & Sedition Acts (1798). Either way, the only real change in the American system of government was when Lincoln replaced a federation of states with a unified nation. (And, debatably, when Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 and ended the idea of a “peacetime nation.”)
In any case, it's not just our system that is unkind to original thinkers. People, in general, find original thought bothersome. It is, by definition, something they have not heard before, and something they have to think about. Far easier to select from the menu of talking heads and put your brain on autopilot. You can go with Falwell and maybe go to heaven; or go with Cheney and maybe get rich; or go with Nader and maybe get high; or go with Gavin Newsom and maybe get laid; or go with Arnold and maybe get laid—with a woman. Whatever your particular brand of political chloroform, original thinkers will be few and far between.
So all that being said, I resent the implication that the left is any more intellectually bankrupt than the right. This is categorically untrue.
First of all, the greatest original thinkers simply defy categorization and cannot really be placed on the left-right spectrum. Witness that both sides claim Jefferson as their own. Witness that both sides claim the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. as their own, if not the man himself.
Second of all, of the thinkers who can be placed—tenously—on the left-right spectrum, there are quite a few liberals. While not great thinkers on the order of Jefferson or King, Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag* are—or were—highly intelligent people. John Maynard Keynes was not a dumb person.
Yes, disagree with these people. I do it all the time. But do not accuse a movement with the historical strength of Thomas Hobbes, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire as having no original ideas. Do not accuse a movement with thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hernando de Soto and John Kenneth Galbraith of being parrots.
I do not disparage the great conservatives. You have Winston Churchill on your side, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Jay and Benjamin Disraeli. Your pundits and politicians may be shallow, and I will not pretend to respect Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter or the aptly-named Michael Savage. I don't ask you to respect Paul Begala or Bob Shrum or even Nancy Peolosi.
In fact, I agree with you that so many liberals “merely parrot the soundbites of their gurus.” But so do most conservatives. That is the order of things. And—more importantly—both sides have some damn good gurus out there.
*A note on Susan Sontag: She is, lamentably, remembered for saying that the 9-11 hijackers were not cowards. The text of her remarks is available on her wikipedia entry and, in context, is entirely correct. People who are not nearly as smart as Susan Sontag (i.e., Andrew Sullivan, Ed Koch) are going to make sure that her forty years of writing and thinking are less remembered than a single out-of-context sound-bite. That is a terrible thing.
