I Want a New Left

More on Perceived Intentions

A couple days ago I talked about perceived intentions among political commentators (here), and one such perception is the one among leftists that all Republicans are racists. Here is a doozy of an example. Joan Walsh at Salon insists that Republicans are racist because they spurned invitations to celebrate the 1963 march by Martin Luther King, Jr. She quotes an organizer:

“We had a very concerted effort, because this is not a political moment,” said Rep. Leah Daughtry, executive producer of the commemoration. “This was about us coming together as a community, so we wanted to be sure that we had all political representations,” Daughtry said. “We attempted very vigorously to have someone from the GOP participate and unfortunately they were unable to find someone who was able to participate.”

And because the Republicans refused to attend, they must be racist, or as she puts it, “The fact that no leading Republican bothered to attend the 50th anniversary commemoration shows how far to the right they’ve moved on race.” But here is the Republican side, which Walsh doesn’t give explicitly but which she alludes to, namely that a black Republican senator was not invited. Why not? Here’s what she said: “The fact is, the organizers were reaching out to national GOP leaders, and Scott is not one of them. His hostility to everything the Congressional Black Caucus stands for also makes him an unlikely and provocative choice as speaker.”

But the earlier quote doesn’t say that they were reaching out to “national GOP leaders.” The quote by Daughtry merely says they tried to have “someone” from the GOP participate. And the second reason is just as bad, since Daughtry says that “this was not a political moment”; if so, then there was no reason not to invite Scott, even if he is hostile to “everything the Congressional Black Caucus stands for.” Look, either it’s political, or it isn’t. Either it’s about “coming together as a community,” or it isn’t. If the former, then Scott should have been invited. It’s as simple as that. The other Republicans had every right to decline the invitations, which had nothing to do with racism.

Perceived Intentions in Political Discourse

I don’t look much at leftist sites these days, because I pretty much know what I will find, for example, a lot of talk about helping the poor, but not much in the way of actual action. So, I’d rather read their critics, and that means looking at sites on the right. But yesterday, curious to know how the left was dealing with the enormous gap between what they expected of Obama and what they’re actually getting in terms of his being different from Bush on war, I looked at an article on Syria at the Daily Kos. This bit struck me:

We're meant to believe that this imminent military action is the solemn moral duty of the U.S. to punish any state using chemical weapons and that it has nothing to do with the larger geopolitical struggle in the Middle East and the U.S. role in it. [here]

“Larger geopolitical struggle? And the U.S. role in it?” I thought. What the...?

Let me explain. I was tutored in analytic philosophy, and in analytic philosophy one takes another’s words and extracts formal arguments from them in order to analyze whether they are valid or not. Notice that intentions have no place in this method; actual words are looked at and not some will o’ the wisp that can be only guessed at. And when those of us doing the history of philosophy find something seemingly stupid that a great person said, we try to use what’s called the principle of interpreter’s charity in order to explain that the person’s intentions weren’t as stupid as they seem. That is, we try to make them sound good, unless there's an awful lot of evidence that they weren't very good.

So, it was jarring to see the way that the author at the Daily Kos casually insinuated that there is some larger point to all of the talk about a strike against Syria. Part of the reason it was jarring was that I think a good case can be made that this is just a humanitarian gesture, given that our secretary of state John Kerry recently met with some Syrian refugees (who no doubt indirectly pointed out to him that the leftist reflex never to get involved so as to avoid killing innocent people has its own innocent victims). Partly it was jarring because most of us see the U.S. as having a diminishing role in the Middle East and that this has been Obama’s intention, so I had to wonder what role they were talking about. Partly it was that if our government had some wider intention, it is hardly likely that they would have waited till now to jump into the Syrian fray. And finally, it was partly that there were plenty of ways to strongly criticize this move without looking for some underlying intention; why not stick with those ways instead of going off on a wild goose chase?

Anyway, having ignored leftist rhetoric for so long, it takes some getting used to, but a lot is clearer now, especially when it comes to race. A couple days ago I posted about a column by Doug Giles that I thought had a rather harmless bit of advice for inner-city blacks, but no, it was immediately pounced on by a leftist as showing him to be racist. The obvious reasoning behind this is that those on the right cannot be trusted so that what seems harmless almost certainly isn’t. Consider this list from columnist John Hawkins entitled “15 Moronic Things Liberals Call Racism Since Obama Was Elected.” And he’s right. Every one of them is moronic. But if you don't trust the right and think they're racist, then seeing racism in everything they say is what you will find intelligent.

The left’s take on the Trayvon Martin murder is much more explainable when one realizes that leftists are always looking for the deeper story below the appearances. Sure, George Zimmerman got acquitted, but we know what was really going on: full-fledged racial profiling together with racism by the police for not arresting him. That is what we must assume whenever there’s any killing of a black person by a white because of the horrible history, or so the left reasoned. Yet, this isn’t the way they reason when they see a Muslim women in a hijab. Somehow, all that history of sexism in the Muslim world has been overcome, so that when Muslim women are wearing hijabs in Europe, they must have made this decision as fully free and liberated women. Right.

To get back to Trayvon Martin, the right looked at the left’s reaction, and it seemed so over the top that they spun their own theories on what was really going on. Since Zimmerman wasn’t exactly white, since Martin’s activities could be questioned, and so on, they decided that this was all about keeping everyone thinking it was still the 1950s so that the race hustlers would not lose influence. In fact, the right’s general assumption about what the left is doing is always that they are interested in control and not what they say they are (helping the poor, helping the environment, etc.).

It took me a long time, but I eventually came round to their view, though I see the left’s interest in big government as partly about control and partly about providing great jobs for wealthy leftists. It was watching the way that tenured leftists in academia treated the poor that turned me around, since they (tenured leftists) obviously didn’t give a damn about them (academics from poorer backgrounds).

Incidentally, notice that the article never mentions Obama. As Instapundit would say, Heh.

There Will Never Be a Peace President

At least, not for the foreseeable future. Every president since I was born has been involved in some foreign military adventure, so why assume that we will ever have a peace president? There are too many horrible things happening in the world for us to stand idly by not doing anything. This is something that those who want us never to intervene have never understood. They always assume that intervention means the death of innocents and never that failure to intervene also means the death of innocents.

Since we will never have a peace president, that means it is pointless to engage in the loud and shrill demands that accompanied Bush’s Iraq war. If your own guy is going to act just the same, please just keep your mouths shut.

The Left and Islam: A New Beginning?

This essay is a criticism of a critic of Richard Dawkins – hat tip: Mark Spahn – and perhaps it represents the beginning of some pushback by some secular leftists against the leftist establishment by those who are just a little tired of hearing so much about how we have to respect all Muslims. (After all, when I signed onto the left, supporting religious conservatives just because they were from the Third World wasn't part of the contract.) Is there a change happening? In March, we saw the first time that a progressive actually said no to some Muslims (at a talk in the U.K. at which men and women were separated in the audience; see here). Then came Dawkins’ tweet, and now comes this defense.

Well, one swallow does not a summer make, and it’s way too early to tell if things are changing. During the late 1990s, there was a sudden surge of interest among young people in swing dancing and the associated music. Was this the end of rock, or at least the beginning of a new big band era in music? No. It was nothing but a short-lived fad. And so far, the signs that some leftists are fed up with Islamophilia are much weaker than the swing dancing craze of the 1990s.

Class Matters

Yes, the form of this title is a cliche. When first used, it was clever, but now it isn’t. I’m going to use it anyway. At this site, a man who graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, way back in 1964 reflects on the way that his alma mater has been politicized. He mentions a few of the classes he has found when perusing the college catalog, and I agree that they look awful.

My advice for him and for others like him is to ask why there aren’t courses devoted to class issues. There are plenty of courses devoted to race. There are plenty of courses devoted to gender. But courses devoted to class just don’t seem to exist.

I have commented on this failure of academics to take an interest in class issues before. At the big medieval conference at Kalamazoo, for example, there are seldom any talks on class, though there are plenty on women, gays and lesbians, Muslims, etc. But about the peasants and serfs, there is almost nothing.

And why is this? A little thought should explain it: Class is not as reliable for the left as it used to be. Many in the lower-class don’t automatically vote Democrat the way they used to. The drifting away of the white working class from the left is one of the big stories of the last forty years, but it is one that leftist academics don’t really understand. (I myself didn’t understand it for years.) And so they veer away from class when teaching. Look at it this way. Blacks are very reliable about voting for Democrats. Women are generally reliable too, plus if you spend enough time in academia, you start to think that those women who don’t vote for Democrats just are not representative of women. But with lower-class whites, it is just so painfully obvious that they are no longer in the fold.

And that is exactly why those who want to be subversive and throw stones at the leftist establishment need to raise class issues as often as possible. Bringing up the lack of conservative-oriented courses just means they will dismiss you as a horrible person, but bringing up class means they cannot do this, because they know that class is a traditional issue for the left. Many professors are not from modest circumstances but come from wealth (or at least what I with my lower-middle-class background would call wealth). They get uneasy when class is brought up because it’s so hard for them to relate to it, particularly the younger ones. They don’t know any poor people, they probably cheered when Obama sneered at poor whites who cling to guns and religion, and they are living in a bubble of privilege which they somehow don’t see. They’ve been fed a diet of garbage on race, gender, sexual orientation, and environmentalism, but don’t quite know what to make of class, because it was never emphasized. And if it was mentioned at all, they learned Marxism, but Marxism didn’t prepare them for lower-class people who want nothing to do with the left. They can call it false consciousness all they want, but the numbers suggest something else entirely is going on besides false consciousness.

And that is why I say to those angry at the politicization of our schools, just remember that class matters.

Inadvertent Racists

People become inadvertent racists when they fight so hard in favor of a group that they cut off all criticism of that group, even constructive criticism, with the result that they end up hurting them in unintended ways. We can see this happening with blacks in this country. For example, in this column Doug Giles makes what I thought was a perfectly acceptable criticism of blacks who become criminals, only to have the third commenter, with the name South Side of Chicago, call him a racist:

This pretty much sums up why people like me call people like Doug racist: he is applying the actions of a few individuals to the whole. He says pretty plainly here that he doesn't care about the plight of undeserved black youth because of two murders last week. Every teen in a hat and corn rows is a threat to irrational, scared white people who can’t help but stereotype.

Actually, Mr. Giles has statistics on his side. But my larger point is that inner-city blacks suffer from two self-destructive tendencies: engaging in crime and rejecting education because they perceive it as something white. Mr. Giles was simply giving them the advice that they ought to give up crime. There’s nothing racist in that, but those who don’t allow any criticism of blacks (except possibly by other blacks) naturally want to call any criticism racism.

But the situation is sad, and here’s why. My wife is a professor, and every now and then her department has to do a search to fill an opening. The administration leans heavily on them to hire a black, or at least to consider some blacks. But guess what? There are almost no blacks coming through the pipeline, and the few who are coming through have so many choices that they are unlikely to choose my wife’s college when they could choose Harvard instead. And so jobs that blacks could have for a song, if they were qualified for them, go to others. The reason so few are qualified? It’s because so many have chosen to take up a life of crime, or if not that, to reject getting a good education. And why are they doing this? It’s because of people like South Side of Chicago. No one can criticize blacks, so blacks who might otherwise get good schooling and good jobs become thugs instead.

It’s too bad, but the inadvertent racists like South Side of Chicago have more sway in our society than decent people do. And who is helped by the policies that he or she wants? Not the thugs themselves, because they are missing out on good jobs. And not the ordinary citizen because we are frustrated by the squandering of good potential – “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” – as well as the disruption in the lives of their victims. No, the people who benefit are the far left and the far right. The far right – and I don’t mean Mr. Giles – looks at black crime as proof that blacks are intellectually inferior. The far left can use black crime to talk about the racism of anyone who brings it up.

Another example of inadvertent racism is the Islamophilia that has overtaken our progressives. It used to be that if you mentioned the small number of scientific advances made by Muslims, enlightened people would wonder what could be done to help the Muslim world become more Westernized. But today saying such a thing ensures that enlightened people will call you a racist. And how does this help the world’s Muslims? It doesn’t help them at all. Consider those children (generally boys) who spend hours mindlessly memorizing the Qur’an and learning not much else. Of what use is this when they could be learning physics instead? I will be told that my viewpoint is a Western one and that Muslims obviously feel differently about it. It will be implied that I am racist. But while my viewpoint is Western, it is not exclusively Western. How many Han Chinese educate their children in such a stupid way? How many Hindus? Generally speaking, no one outside of the Muslim world thinks this is intelligent. Even the Western leftists who defend the practice wouldn’t want their own children to have such an education. Defending it, or at least attacking those who criticize it, is pure hypocrisy.

Fact of the Day: The Rich Getting Richer...

From today’s Wall Street Journal in an interview with economist Richard Vedder at Ohio University:

Today, only about 7% of recent college grads come from the bottom-income quartile compared with 12% in 1970 when federal aid was scarce.

So, where is that federal aid going? Obviously, not to the poor. Face it, leftists, big government is basically nothing but welfare for the rich leftist.

Another ominous point:

“Thirty-percent of the adult population has college degrees,” [Vedder] notes. “The Department of Labor tells us that only 20% or so of jobs require college degrees.”

So, where in all that bureaucracy of the big government is there the program that will guarantee that those 20% of the jobs requiring college degrees will be distributed equally among people of all classes?

Some Blasts from the Past

I’m cleaning out some old files and found some gems I clipped:

1. From the leftist rag In These Times, August 6-19, 1986: “Analysts in Israel and the U.S., from the political right to left, believe that war between Israel and Syria is inevitable. The only question is, when?” Funny, I don’t remember that war happening.

2. From a newspaper (I think the St. Paul Dispatch) probably in late 1983 or early 1984. (I’m basing the date on a sentence telling about the Israeli withdrawal from Chouf, Lebanon, in “early September,” which was 1983.) The headline reads: “U.S. warning Syria with naval buildup.” Hey, this sounds like today (here). So Obama is channeling Reagan, eh?

3. And an item from September 15, 2001, concerning a soccer game in Iran between Iran and Bahrain: “The crowd in Azadi Stadium said a mass prayer for the victims of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in the United States, the Asian Football Confederation reported.” I wonder if this was sanctioned by their leaders.

The Perfidiousness of the Left on Race

See here. If racism is as bad as the left says it is, then the statistics about black-on-white versus white-on-black killings should lead to anti-black riots and the revival of lynchings. But since those statistics are not doing that, then racism just can’t be as bad as the left says it is. And they know this as well as anyone.

See here, also. Jonah Goldberg brings up a pertinent point: “the conversation that the conversation-mongers want is entirely one-sided; they only want to talk about why their ideological enemies are racists. Any other discussion is an incomprehensible and unjustifiable tangent distracting us from what they want to hear and say.” Goldberg doesn’t quite say it, but the obvious question to raise in the national conversation about race is, “Why are so many whites being murdered by blacks?” And also, what can we do to get the black crime rate down?

Am I racist for bringing this up? Of course not. I’d be just as upset if there were lots of murders of blacks by whites. In a race-blind society, we would expect the statistics to show that murders were committed based on the percentage of each group in our society and that they showed no pattern of racial animosity. That’s what we should be aiming for.

The left, of course, is fighting back against the right with nonsense (here and here). But the only reason the right is bringing up all this is because of the disgusting way the left targeted George Zimmerman.

They have only themselves to blame.

Camille Paglia Speaks Truth to (Leftist) Power

See here.

She says, “I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying ‘I take responsibility’ for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately.” Exactly my thoughts. She should have offered to resign, after which Obama could then have refused to accept her resignation and she could have stayed on. She then could have told people who criticized her, “I tried to resign, but they wouldn’t let me.” And if Obama had in fact let her resign, she could still talk about how she had done the honorable thing, which is pretty rare in a Democrat.

More important is this:

The escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve — and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win.

Again, exactly my thoughts. I’ve been trying to get through to leftists on this point for ages (as have many others), but they absolutely refuse to listen. Maybe her saying it will wake up some of them; then again, maybe her saying it will cause her to get so many death threats that she will have to basically disappear. That is the way that conservatives are treated when they say this sort of thing, but as a leftist (though a very unorthodox one), she may get better treatment. I seem to recall that Elton John made some kind of Islamophobic remark a few years back that no one paid any attention to.

But whatever happens, thanks, Camille, for saying it. It needs to be said (by those in the public’s eye) as often as possible.

[Hat tip: Mark Spahn]