A Philosophical Take on "Liberal Condescension"

Oh well, I though I would just sit this one out because it involves a colleague I admire and like but, since no one reads this, then what the heck. I can make some other philosophical point in the process. Gerard Alexander recently published a high-visibility piece in the Washington Post which you can find here. If you ask me, I think it is an appalling piece of nonsense and many other liberals and progressives are saying that. Now, before I go on, I should add that I have mixed feelings about the whole affair. At some level, I'm glad that Gerard is getting notoriety. I honestly like him. On the other hand, I don't think this is the notoriety he deserves. Probably I'm not in the best position to evaluate his work, but I've interacted with him in several professional settings and, believe me, he is one very smart and articulate scholar. It somehow pains me that he is coming under fire as if he were a regular party hack. (Well, the piece definitely reads as if it was written by a party hack, there's nothing I can do about it.) 

I don't want to spend a lot of time commenting on the obvious problems of the piece but there are a few that stand out. First, Gerard lumps all "liberals" and all "conservatives" together. So all liberals have the same narrative about all conservatives. Baloney. For instance, Thomas Frank has generated a lot of discussion among liberals. Larry Bartels, who I suspect is a liberal, and has definitely influenced Krugman, has little time for Frank's thesis. Then, whenever a liberal says something rather untoward, even if it refers to one specific conservative, it is presented as the ultimate liberal gospel. But if a conservative says that, I don't know, that liberals are traitors (as Ann Coulter does for a living), that's just an occasional "media gadfly". Gerard cries foul because liberals accuse conservatives (some conservatives, I would hasten to add) of practicing the "paranoid style of politics." But when Jim De Mint says that under Obama the US is in a situation reminiscent of Germany in 1933, isn't that paranoia? When James Inhofe gets waist-deep in conspiracy-theory territory to deny climate change, isn't that paranoia? What is one supposed to do? If Gerard is concerned about the style of debate, he could have told Senator De Mint to S.T.F.U. Gerard is an expert on Western European politics, and I mean it. (Again, he is a serious intellectual.) He could have told De Mint what it really was like in Germany in 1933. 

Then, at the end of the day, Gerard's complaint is that liberals don't listen to conservatives. Let's see. The stimulus package included 30% of tax cuts suggested by conservatives. The health care reform bill is designed to keep intact the employer-provided system and, from the get-go, avoided single-payer. At every turn, the health care reform effort of the Democrats has tried to give as much as possible to the market. The cap-and-trade plan is the mainstream, textbook, market economics solution to an externality problem. You may disagree with the specific contents of these policies, but they have an unmistakeable input from conservative thought. 

I guess the problem Gerard has with liberals is that they are not as conservative as he is. Well, that's hard because most people aren't. I also whine that liberals are not as socialist as I am and, again, most people aren't. But that's my problem. And Gerard's. But then neither he nor me should go on hectoring liberals to stop being... liberals.

Anyway, that stuff has already been picked apart by many commentators. What I'm interested in is something else. There is definitely something to the self-perception of liberals and, in general, the left-of-center as the "party of reason." 

I am a leftist, but also a social scientist, so I don't want to take the facile view that "well, you know, the left is rational because it's rational and so, by exclusion, the right isn't." I want to probe the idea that there are some socio-historical reasons that ground this.

First, the left is over-represented in academia (yours truly being an example) at least in the US but also, I believe, in many other countries. It's not that leftists are smarter. It has to do with well-known facts. For instance, leftists are less likely to go into the private sector. (This was a point made by Hayek and I'm shocked that Gerard didn't mention it.) In many places academia was a relatively free and secure outlet for left-wing political expression. Whatever the causes, yes, a lot of science is done by people a bit to the left of their respective citizenry. 

Second, and here I get more to what I believe is not often remarked, there is a strong tradition in the left that tries to make up for lack of political and economic resources by marshaling intellectual resources as a legitimizing device. The early generations of socialists resembled a bit the early Christians in that they had to burnish their scholarly credentials in front of an establishment that was very hostile and that looked down on them as an unwashed and uneducated rabble. 

Notice what I'm trying to do here: I'm trying NOT to take for granted that appeals to reason are sufficient grounds for legitimation. Precisely that is the interesting question. I'm trying to avoid taking for granted the primacy of reason, something that is hard for me to do because I am, to the bone marrow, a social scientist and rationalist. But the fascinating thing here is that social sciences as a vehicle for legitimation are a relatively recent thing. 

As a matter of fact, sometimes I wonder if the left isn't too secular and too rationalistic. There was a time, not too far back, when Catholicism was a hotbed of socialist mobilization, led by the Liberation theology. As much as I am a secular bourgeois, I have to admit that it was a potent force and the socialist movement is all the poorer for its lost.

This leads me to another consideration. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to rationality to legitimize their views. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to some notion of religion to do the same although, at least in the current Western culture it is more the right that does so. But there is one source of legitimation that is available only to the right: the appeal to tradition and it so happens that that is particularly salient in the US. As a foreigner I'm always amazed at how far you can go in American political discourse simply by saying "here we don't do that." Just stating, without any further argument, that, say, nationalizing banks is "not American" is good enough. The same goes for things such as "class warfare," "socialism," "equality of outcomes" and so on. Unlike Gerard, I'm not claiming that all conservatives appeal to this kind of thing, but some do. And not because of some particular perfidy, but because it works, because it is a respectable way of legitimizing your own discourse in American society. If I was not so intent on playing nice, I would even call this "volkisch" because to some extent it coincides with the old, innocent definition of the word. I know that "volkisch" is now a contaminated term so I'll drop it here. But the point is that, given the way American political culture works, it is no wonder that one side is disproportionately more "rational" than the other one. After all, one side has more choices of legitimizing language than the other for which rationality is almost the only game in town.