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September 5th, 2008 7:58 am

The Boston Phone Book, “Harvard,” and Sarah Palin

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche [a reader suggests that "metonymy" would be more accurate--maybe he is right]. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. What are the lineaments of that consensus? In God and Man at Yale (1951), Bill said that, for him, “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” and he went on to observe that “the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” The liberal consensus–the liberal “orthodoxy” as Bill sometimes put it–is on the side of atheism and collectivism. It takes its emotional weather from Rousseau, its economics from Marx, its theology from Nietzsche, its sexual etiquette from some radical disciples of Freud.

Other semantic markers: “Harvard” is suspicious of patriotism, disdainful of small-town values and entertainments, enthusiastic about big government programs and transnational initiatives like the World Court and the EU. It is “homeopathic” at one remove: that is, it harbors a sentimental affection for the Third World, “traditional” medicine, native tribes (”native” anything, really, except “nativism” and “natality”) but only so long as it is filtered through the scrim of Western affluence and “progressive” values. (By the way, I keep putting the word “progressive” in scare quotes because progress suggests a movement forward towards a desirable goal whereas “progressive” in the Harvard sense embraces the rhetoric of progress while advocating policies that stymie it.)

One other point about the Boston phone book-Harvard faculty dichotomy: in preferring the first two thousand names from the Boston phone book, Bill was not thereby repudiating high culture, intellectual seriousness, or moral refinement. It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

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28 Comments

1. LFB:

Thanks for articulating what’s been rolling around in the back of my head these last several days, “Wouldn’t William F. Buckley have been pleased!”

Sep 5, 2008 - 8:18 am 2. LSD:

Well put! -It’s nice to be reminded of the great Bill Buckley.

What I find interesting about Obama and company, is his apparent embrace of ‘direct action.’ It reminds us all that he is, not only a product of Harvard, but a product of Chicago as well.

-Maybe this critique of yours will trigger a swarm of the faithful attack bots.

Sep 5, 2008 - 8:36 am 3. Paul:

Roger:

With most of what you say and with the general intent of what you write here, I am (as usual) in full agreement. Here, however, you quote Bill Buckley as though you admired the thought and accept it as valid:

‘Bill said that, for him, “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” and he went on to observe that “the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”’

This is nonsense. There is indeed a struggle between individualism and collectivism (assuming, of course, that we can agree on the definition of those two words). But that it is the same thing as the strudggle between Christianity and atheism (which certainly goes on) is nonsense. Christianity is individualism? Indeed, any of the Abrahamic religions is “individualism?”

I avoid using an impolite word and starting a long essay on the loveliness and nonsense of Cardnal Newman.

Warm greetings,

Paul

Sep 5, 2008 - 8:53 am 4. KvS:

“it harbors a sentimental affection for the Third World, “traditional” medicine, native tribes (”native” anything, really, except “nativism” and “natality”)

Maybe especially “Nativity”!
Thanks for a great article and a bracing reminder of what’s at stake.
Katie vS

Sep 5, 2008 - 9:50 am 5. srlucado:

Good Lord, could there be better validation of your point than a reference to Sarah Palin as “trailer trash”?

If she’s trailer trash, I’m selling my house and buying a double-wide.

Scott

Sep 5, 2008 - 10:22 am 6. Vinny Vidivici:

” . . . sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté.”

Amen. Those who offer passport ownership as a self-congratulatory demonstration of multi-culti-global-citizen bona fides are often quickest to project their parochial values upon the rest of the world.

Cloistered in intellectual hothouses where conciliation, compromise and non-judgmentalism are valued reflexively over confidence, conviction and decisiveness, they connot understand that in the more Hobbesian neighborhoods of our planet, such a posture is viewed as a weakness to be exploited and as an invitation to aggression.

They do not understand that pacifism, metrosexuality and the cheap moral vanity available to those within the safety of the West are only possible if the world’s predators agree to play along or those predators are proactively kept at bay.

Sep 5, 2008 - 10:35 am 7. gaetano catelli:

“trailer trash”?!?

my, my, my. well, we can’t all be a GQ coverguy.

Sep 5, 2008 - 3:25 pm 8. Steynian 238 « Free Mark Steyn!:

[...] ROGER KIMBALL on The Boston Phone Book, “Harvard,” and Sarah Palin: “The liberal consensus–the [...]

Sep 5, 2008 - 4:06 pm 9. Cristina:

Paul:
I don’t know William Buckley’s work, and I don’t know if what Mr Kimball’s words adequately represent it.
“Individualism” and “collectivism” are modern notions that can’t be discussed in the context of monotheistic religions without allowing for a mutatis mutandis and quotation marks.
However, you surely know that in Christianity the central concern is personal salvation and the person’s relationship with God, the person’s fight with evil in his own heart, which extends to doing good for the community with service and prayer. It has its own form of extreme “individualism,” eremitism, cave-dwelling, complete isolation, surviving alone on prayer and meager resources, in the “wilderness,” away even from the monastic “collective” seen as a barrier to a personal communication with the Trinity (Monasteries throughout Eastern Christianity still have monks who leave the enclave to find salvation on their own).
Saint Simeon Sylites decided to get up on a pillar and live his life there because he was annoyed by the intrusion of the “collective” in his life which disturbed his prayers and his particular and very egocentric communication with God.
Don’t you ever again dare imply that Christianity is “collectivistic” or even “communist.”

Sep 5, 2008 - 5:43 pm 10. Cristina:

Correction of a typo:
Saint Simeon Stylites

Sep 5, 2008 - 6:23 pm 11. Roy Lofquist:

Dear Roger,

I certainly can’t match your erudition or your vocabulary. So, in the vernacular:

It’s Saint Joan, Xena and The Barracuda against Hahvad Yahd.

I’ve got a deal for you if you’re a betting man.

Regards,
Roy

Sep 5, 2008 - 9:17 pm 12. Delphine:

Roger, you are brilliant. Thanks.

Sep 5, 2008 - 11:03 pm 13. Roy M:

Roger,

Your friends characterization of Sarah as trailer trash was clearly unfair and over-heated. However, his calling you out on your ‘largest state in the country’ nonsense was entirely reasonable.

Look at it this way. Sarah Palin is a beauty pageant winner. Does the fact that the pageant was in the ‘largest state in the country’ make her the most beautiful women in the America? Or is it more realistic to point out that it was in Alaska, and even I could win a beauty pageant in Alaska. I expect that you could do quite well in an Alaskan beauty pageant if you got a nice frock.

Regards,

Roy

Sep 6, 2008 - 1:07 am 14. Peter the Lawyer:

I have always thought that lefties love the traditions of more primitive cultures because such traditions allow these folk marxists to indulge in conservatism by proxy. In that way they get to have their their cake and eat it too. After all, as Margaret Thatcher once said: “the facts of life are Conservative.” All of us recognise this deep down, in what Coward called our private lives. Even lefties know this. But somewhere they have an intellectual and emotional deficiency, a need for double-think, that means tat the can only experience reality at a remove.

Sep 6, 2008 - 4:06 am 15. Never Yet Melted » “Harvard” Hates Palin:

[...] Roger Kimball savors Sarah Palin’s arrival on the political scene as a kind of Joan of Arc of the culture wars. [...]

Sep 6, 2008 - 4:48 am 16. Graham:

I grew up in a blue collar suburb of Detroit. I graduated from a Catholic high school and a public university (Wayne State). I worked in New York publishing — Doubleday, Putnam, Wm. Morrow — for eight years. I recall an executive editor’s comment about the mail room: “if they had anything on the ball, they wouldn’t be there.” I should have replied that I had worked my way through high school and college in hospitals, factories, mail rooms, and loading docks. In law school I would encounter a similar provincialism. Both my parents grew up in Appalachian poverty during the Depression. Today TV and movies freely refers to people like my mother and father as “white trash.” You bet I’m supporting McCain/Palin. I may get behind in the New Criterion…but I’ll catch up in November.

Graham

Sep 6, 2008 - 8:26 am 17. Polemicscat:

A passage that the left would do well to copy for study each morning as a lesson in acquiring humility and self-knowledge:

And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable.

Sep 7, 2008 - 8:50 am 18. katrina:

On Sarah Palin:
if sarah palin were a man in terms of sex (and not male in gender since she does have a wife, todd…) she would not have been on any list for VP, not even close. Historically, she can’t make up her mind about much of anything, barely made it through junior college, lied about her accomplishements about the bridge,pok money that she decided it was best to keep after all, and the jet sale which lost the state treasury 600,000, all of which researchers have unearthed in just two days. she tried to cover up her own hypocrisies as a super hockey mom with her “you betcha” slang! She in incapable of performing as a mother and as a politician. She’s very simply a big fat, and I do mean fat, NOBODY. She’s not a “barracuda” and she’s no beauty queen. She was a mere contestant, and came in second place. She’s got a retarded child that she bore out of her own stupidity at 44. Her husband, or should I say, her wife, todd, is going to need a crash course in reform school, and her pregnant daughter is getting stuck with that kid who has stated publicly that he doesn’t ever want kids just to save ehr political career. what a joke. McCain camp will need all the votes they can scrounge up on this ticket. It’s obvious they are going to lose and are using this scam to keep the media busy away from finding out what McCain is really doing wrong beyond his bogus POW story that is far from being true. McCain is no POW, and Palin is just an excuse to fail this campaign.

Sep 7, 2008 - 5:40 pm 19. Roger:

Katrina,
Please continue to sit back and drink your magic kool-aid. But please, leave the thinking to people who will actually use their brain for more than a hat rack. Thank you and goodnight.

Sep 7, 2008 - 8:27 pm 20. chrisa798:

stay left-classy, katrina.

Sep 7, 2008 - 11:01 pm 21. jvsp:

Katrina,
“It’s obvious they [McCain] are going to lose.”

If the above is obvious, why state it?

As for Obama and Harvard, an Ivy League education a president does not make. President Wilson far surpassed Obama in this regard and he gave us nothing but a legacy of failure.

Furthermore, ex cathedra arguments are of little force. We might ask, given that it is claimed that he is soooo bright, where his law articles are, his client list, his publishing (one is expected to do that as president of the Harvard Law Review -he is the anomoly), and who offered him a clerkship. Obama is no intellectual.

Lastly, that he spent 20 years enraptured by the intellectually bankrupt black liberation “theology” offers good evidence that he is a moron, and you, consequently, one too.

Sep 8, 2008 - 12:51 am 22. Ted Tedford:

Katrina: Hilarious parody of deranged, synthesized liberal outrage – almost pitch perfect. The only slightly false note you struck was the use of ‘retarded’ to describe a child (baby) with Down’s. This is the kind of hate-speech that would normally be associated with the likes of Coulter. Otherwise – great work. Keep reflecting for liberals the true extent of their mean-minded, incoherent, shallow, petty bigotry.

Sep 8, 2008 - 3:33 am 23. Roger’s Rules » The Palin Portfolio, Phase Two: Damage Control: or, The Clash of Civilizations comes home:

[...] few days ago, I posted some reflections on Bill Buckley’s famous declaration that he would rather be governed by the the first two [...]

Sep 8, 2008 - 6:51 am 24. jwc:

mr kimball, im a subscriber to your great, great journal but i have to disagree. i think wfb would have been appalled by the choice of gov palin, simply b/c of its recklessness. whenever i see gov palin on tv i cant help but think of the title of wfb’s aborted tome ‘revolt against the masses.’ gov palin IS the masses, and as a conservative you ought to look at her candidacy with a bit more skepticism than you have. i cant help but wonder what prof hart thinks of all this.

Sep 9, 2008 - 12:35 pm 25. Evangelicals, Lies, and Politics « The Reformed Pastor:

[...] Elitist to the max, that’s what we Yanks are. Unless we’re theocratic, fundamentalist trailer trash. Then we’re just [...]

Sep 10, 2008 - 11:19 am 26. Roger’s Rules » On disagreeing with a friend about Obama, with a coda on plagiarism:

[...] presiding over the canapés. Why? Well, I enumerated some reasons in a couple of posts last month (here and here.) As it happens, these pieces took off from Bill Buckley’s famous mot about [...]

Oct 12, 2008 - 6:00 am 27. Gabriel Austin:

I believe that Chesterton would have warmly welcomed the candidacy of Mrs. Palin. That she was a contestant in a beauty pageant likely has the liberal ladies gnashing their teeth. Her great experience is that of motherhood; so great an experience is it that she never considered killing her last child.
Would it be crude to ask of many of the liberal ladies whether they had abortions? There is a ferocity to their outcries that makes one suspect it.

Oct 14, 2008 - 9:18 am 28. Stupid conservative tricks: metaphor madness, schizo Springsteen, specious Sowell | Re:harmonized:

[...] and “things,” you could tell just about any story you wanted to. (Back in September, Roger Kimball explained Buckley’s zinger in multisyllabic and historic detail and then patted himself on [...]

Jan 20, 2009 - 2:46 am