Robert Weissberg writes: These are unusual political times but especially bizarre is the treatment of Donald Trump in many of today’s “conservative” magazines. I have not read them all, but of the three I do follow—The National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary, the treatment of The Donald can only be described as totally one-sided, sky-is-falling hysterical. Not the slightest semblance of balance, not even a tiny “horrible but the best we can do.” Everything is just pure, unadulterated vitriol.
Hating Trump per se is not the issue here (disclosure: I support Trump); the point is the ubiquity of the two-minute hate, and if each of these countless rants were an autonomous event, the odds of this uniformity occurring naturally must exceed a billion to one. Clearly, more is involved than just unmitigated aversion.
My understanding of this remarkable consistency is that the majority of today’s conservative pundits, whether pontificating for magazines, syndicated columns or conducting think tank research, are the modern equivalents of 18th century intellectuals whose livelihood depended on aristocratic patronage. These were the folk invited for after-dinner coffee to spice up conversations or whose witty gossipy chit-chat amused rich ladies at elegant salons. And, of the utmost importance, like their earlier clever and erudite predecessors, today’s intellectual entertainers know their place. To be a little cruel, they are “the help.”
What drives this arrangement is the power of a relatively handful of generous donors whose kindness permits Conservative Inc. to survive. Yes, Conservative Inc. does charge subscription fees, garners tax-deductable contributions from black tie dinners and even over-charges for meals-with-the-pundits Alaskan cruises but those informed of such matters tell me that behind every Right Wing enterprise stand a tiny handful of wealthy patrons (just observe the skimpy advertising in all conservative magazines to see the role of subsidies). And given that such donors are intensely courted elsewhere, keeping them happy is always the first order of business. This means never, never doing anything that would make them ashamed of their generosity. Imagine the reaction of a wealthy benefactor who encountered the Reverend Al Sharpton and a dozen raucous foul-mouthed middle-school students shouting “No Justice, No Peace” outside the Harvard Club to protest a conference he had sponsored? A few more of such discomforting incidents might mean taking his largess elsewhere.
The enforcement of ideological “no-go” zones in Conservative Inc. is generally well-hidden. The parallel are the “invisible fences” that keep Fido from running off—the cable is buried but the tip-off is a tiny devise attached to his collar and seeing Fido occasionally screech to a halt for no apparent reason. A man associated with a prominent conservative think tank once told me that a certain staff member in his shop was known as “the enforcer” for keeping fellow writers on the straight and narrow.
A particularly devious strategy to escape taboos is energetic dullness. Here discussions and publications are free of anything that might be “controversial” and thus serve as a guaranteed cure for insomnia. The Darwinian parallel is a fish that tastes so disgusting that all potential predators avoid it. So, rather than a conservative organization considering, say, the link between unchecked immigration and the growing US underclass, the topic will instead be the riveting, “Thomas Aquinas and the Medieval Concept of Moral Authority.” Hard to imagine the Southern Anti-Poverty Law Center getting upset let alone inserting a spy to “out” conference attendees. (One tip-off to the dullness strategy is the ratio of the half comatose state of those at conference panels versus noisy conference attendees at the hotel bar.)
More common, however, is sanitizing everything so as not to receive unwanted attention or, horror of horrors, cause a public embarrassment for major donors. Recall the old joke about how nudists dance—very carefully. I recall one event that focused on the travails of contemporary Detroit and how to fix the mess. Everybody in the room—maybe 200 or so—surely knew that Detroit was largely populated with lower class blacks prone to crime, violence, a reluctance to pay taxes and otherwise not behave in ways permitting Detroit to return to its pre-1960s glory days when the city was 90% white. Nevertheless, every attendee also sensed the invisible fence and thus politely ignored the source of Detroit’s problem—its residents. This delicate charade concluded when the speakers announced that Detroit could be resurrected by investing in infrastructure and importing foreign-born entrepreneurs. Tellingly, even in the Q and A, the race issue escaped notice.
I follow education policy and in the dozens of conservative conferences on this subject I have attended it is obvious that participants know the invisible fence boundaries. Want to help struggling kids in ghetto schools? I guarantee that the proffered suggestions will include vouchers and charter schools, de-certifying unions, holding school administrators accountable, cash bonuses for high-performing teachers, eliminating progressive pedagogy, restoring local control and for those inclined toward social engineering, “fixing” the supposedly dysfunctional black family. That none of these alluring interventions work as advertised is irrelevant—it’s totally cost-free to ignoring decades of contradictory research provided the “solution” is inoffensive. Absolutely unspeakable is the pointlessness of it all: that these kids and their parents don’t want a decent education, lack the necessary personal self-control and are incapable of learning much beyond the basics due to their low IQ’s.
In effect, much of the Right offers in the war of ideas is threadbare stuff. If I had a nickel for every time I heard lunchtime speaker at some fancy venue insist that the solution to African poverty was vigorous free-market competition, I would have at least $5.00.
I first became aware of this please-the-donor enterprise when I noticed the paucity of academics like myself at conservative sponsored events. I finally figured it out—professors are not big donors (most probably give nothing) and thus “have nothing to say.” Worse, we are inclined to pick apart high-sounding but weak arguments, not exactly a welcome activity when somebody is paying thousands for a fine chicken lunch at the elegant University Club. This is a literal marketplace of idea—those who can pay get to choose the ideas and better not annoy those who pick up the tab.
This is not to condemn as wrong what is produced by those dependent on donor generosity (disclaimer: I eat the chicken but don’t drink the Kool Aid). Rather, the rules of engagement make it difficult to defeat the Left. The parallel might be Galileo trying to satisfy Pope Paul V. What, for example, is a “domesticated” conservative to say when his university-based enemy insists that welcoming millions of Middle East Arabs and refugees from sub-Sahara Africa poses no problem since all can be integrated into a modern economy thanks to free community colleges? How does one respond to the oft-make claim that affirmative action has intellectually strengthened American higher education? It’s no wonder that the Left goes from victory to victory while the Right seems paralyzed.
Sadly, those conservatives who speak honestly about contemporary issues are few in numbers and spread thin. Despite flourishing on the Internet they are marginal to the public debate. Maybe we should return to the earlier era when the public debate included wealthy folk, “a gentleman from the country” as they were often called, who didn’t have to sing for their supper. It is no accident that Donald Trump buys his own Big Mac’s and fries.
COMMENTS:
* Conservatives who speak honestly will be purged from any job in the academy or journalism with a ruthlessness almost equal to that under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and if they are lucky, they will thereafter get jobs as truck drivers.
True story: several years ago, Ph.D. in hand, I managed to get a job teaching at a community college. (I was overqualified; as it turned out, the female Vice-President for Academic Affairs who hired me — and later fired me — had no Ph.D. But she was the “first woman” to hold her position…!)
I worked there as an adjunct, making a 120-mile round trip commute, before I got the full-time position. A semester after I was hired, I was put on a committee to hire a full-time professor of African-American History, to replace the lone black in the department. (All the committee members were white).
The Dean was pushing for us to hire a black kid who had not yet completed his Master’s. As we looked at his undergraduate transcript, we saw that he had failed out of, or withdrawn from, eleven undergraduate courses and had transferred from a highly selective institution to an “open admissions” institution before entering a Master’s program. There was a highly qualified, liberal white woman with a Ph.D. who wanted the job, but they refused to interview her.
I objected to the Dean’s preferred candidate, pointing out the obvious flaws in his academic history, and insisted that we get someone with a Ph.D. The senior members of the department agreed — but they were tenured, and I was not. Big mistake.
I got canned within six months on flimsy, contrived charges, after they found out they had mistakenly hired a conservative who wasn’t going to go along with “the program.”
As for the black hire, they couldn’t find an American black qualified to do the job, so they hired a Nigerian who could barely speak English, missed classes, couldn’t lecture coherently, didn’t grade exams or show up for office hours, etc. His performance reviews were so bad that they wanted to fire him, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, so they issued a recommendation of “no recommendation” on this retention report and kicked it upstairs — where the academic Veep rehired him anyway just to keep the “diversity” quota up.
He got tenure; I’ve never made more than minimum wage since.
* RW: Your tale is a bit extreme but it rings absolutely true. I served on various recruitment committees and these were exercises in self-humiliation. We had to recommend job candidates at a major research university that would not qualify for grade school classroom assistants. Down deep, nobody cared and most remarkably, the job candidate most likely believed that he or she was really qualified. Everything was surrealistic.
I doubt whether today’s academy will ever recover from the push for diversity. We are destroying the social sciences and humanities to keep the racial peace. I suspect that in the long run we would be better off to bite the bullet and have riots.
I began my career in political science in the mid-1960s, long before affirmative action hit full force, and the rot was already creeping in. I recall one distinguished political scientist, Ken Prewitt at the U of Chicago, arguing that since 85% of black mothers wanted their child to attend college, racial differences in education attainment were not due to culture. And so on.
As for economics, the problems are more serious than garden variety pandering. They are clueless about how to add culture to their equations and from what I can tell, nobody is interesting in solving the problem. For economists, regardless of ideology, all people are inter-changeable. Sure.
I’m a bit more optimistic regarding the academy. Places like Cal Tech and MIT seem almost entirely safe. Today’s scholars doing “controversial” research are learning to obscure their findings to outsiders but not to each other. But there is a problem and it may grow worse.
My overview view is that society, including universities, is self-segregating and as long as blacks can get decent jobs to fuel their consumer spending, we can live with things. At least they don’t run around randomly stabbing people. I view America’s race problem as yet one more necessary pay-off. Just add black to the list–the Mafia, corrupt police, dishonest building inspectors etc.
* I’ve always thought that the term “pseudo-intellectual” was tailor-made to describe George Will. His needling little columns have been irritating me ever since I was teenager, full as they are of recherche factoids aping the mien of deep knowledge and goal-seeked conclusions substituting for brilliant leaps of insight. Although he has revealed himself to be predominantly a scribbling whore of the donor class, I do believe that there is actually some narrow region of the ideological phase-space legitimately occupied by Will, Kristol, and their ilk—I just can’t figure out what would drive anybody to live there. Their whole concept of conservatism is so ironical, so self-negating, so Hegelian, so Straussian, so rarefied, so pointless, so beyond the ken of ordinary people, that it belongs in an anthology of intellectual oddities. They preach to a bizarre choir of six dozen highly warped individuals and then wonder why the masses aren’t clamoring to die on their barricades.
The problem is, they were always that way; yet they enjoyed decades of intellectual respectability before that fact became generally apparent. This means that the ideological slogans, motivating tropes, and rallying marching songs of Movement Conservatism have always been infected with a deep madness, the insalubrious consequences of which are now fully evident and frequently lamented. It is hard to say what exactly could be more useless than this so-called conservatism, which has not only capitulated entirely to the Leftist barbarians but also endowed them with a greater panoply of arguments, excuses, and rationalizations than any they could have manufactured on their own. The actual effect of this “Right” has been to function as the Left’s apostles to Middle America—to make Leftist ideas palatable to normal people who otherwise would have shunned or ignored them. It is a legacy of abuse, deception, and hypocritical nonsense culminating in treason and murder. They should all be shot, but silencing them is an acceptable expedient.
* The outsize role of a small coterie of very wealthy donors in determining how conventional conservatism (and liberalism) manifests itself in terms of the think tanks and idea formation, which is directly upstream from conventional politics, is a very underappreciated choke point.
* The problem, Bob, is that we’re not getting “racial peace.” To the contrary, race relations are getting worse. They have certainly gotten worse under the “first black president” — an affirmative action guy his entire life.
And it’s not just social sciences and humanities that are getting destroyed. It’s the “hard” sciences, too. Econometrics is the least normative and most objective methodology for providing quantitative data in the social sciences. But God forbid if anyone should ever run a regression inferring that race is the dominant variable predicting crime, poverty, low SAT scores, etc. Beyond that, natural scientists are afraid to formulate hypotheses contrary to the politically-driven global warming theory. And how, exactly, does homosexuality fit into Darwin’s discussion of evolution and sex selection? It doesn’t. I’d say the academy at large has been corrupted, not just the social sciences.
I grew up during the Cold War; I still can’t get over how Sovietized this country, and the academy in particular, has become in my lifetime.
