19 Comments

1. Kevin P:

Roger:

Great article! As you stated this tale is becoming more common everyday. The most ironic thing about the Left is how similar they are to the religous fanatics they loathe the most. There is such rigid dogmatism on the left that their reactions to anyone who strays from the party line is to subject them to Inquisition style banishment. You either submit totally to every shiboleth or you are no longer in the fold. And once you are outside the fold you are evil and no longer considered human. The Secular Orthodoxy crowd make the Reformation Popes look like backsliding wimps.

Aug 27, 2004 - 3:57 pm 2. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

“…how much of my own liberalism was a narrow tribal outlook largely founded on class prejudice”…very true. I think that modern liberalism is not really a coherent political or philosophical stance, but rather a set of markers for social status.

Aug 27, 2004 - 4:20 pm 3. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Very interesting in several ways.

How can people in the leftist environment not realize the closed nature of their information sources? It would seem that the elite intellectuals of New York were/are as parochial as someone in small town America. But the leftists, at least the more successful, have the means to travel, and they have plenty of opportunities to find out how other people think. I always talk to servicement who come to my house (well, I talk to everyone) and it’s interesting. Do these folks do that?

The other interesting item is the observation that modern conservative intellectual life has run off the rails. I don’t see that, but I’m curious if others do. He mentions Hannity and Coulter, who certainly don’t hold up the intellectual side of conservatism. But we still have the writers of many outlets - WSJ editorial page, National Review, Commentary, Weekly Standard, etc.

Roger, I’m curious if your observation on this, and if you read any of the standard conservative journals.

Aug 27, 2004 - 5:14 pm 4. Mike_Nargizian:

Very good article.

A few points -

Brock had actually put his finger on something here, something that distinguished me and other New York conservatives from the zealous ?movement? types down in Washington. New York conservatives?especially the branch called ?neocons,? to which I belong?are a particularly diffident bunch. We instinctively hold the zealots at arm?s length, regarding them as not just a different branch of the movement but a different species altogether. And for those liberals who are dreading the descent of thousands of Republicans this week, it may be comforting to know that we conservatives are dreading it, too.

He sordove but not completely explains his point here.

Is he saying that he is a conservative lite more based on intellectualism and ideas (Buckleyesque) not dogmatisms?

While the retrograde attitudes on display there frequently shocked and offended the Upper West Sider in me, I couldn?t help but admire the pressmen?s unvarnished humanity. I learned that in the real world you had to take people as they were, not as you thought they should be. The experience also made me see how much of my own liberalism was a narrow tribal outlook largely founded on class prejudice.

He doesn’t make his point clear here either.

I think he’s saying that unlike the painted evil incarnate image painted among his like minded ‘tribe’ growing up, the “right wingers” were different but good and decent people whom he actually liked, just with different viewpoints?

I had the same reaction to Rush when I started listening to him btw. He’s not a fascist, lol!

I resented the fact that there were ideas you couldn?t discuss and opinions that were considered immoral. Nor did I share the existential panic of most liberals over the emergence of conservative Christians as a political force.

How about a few that came in my own shift - FIRST -

Naming terrorists and the dogmatism that led to it is news, not being fed it through a PC monitor.

1) If you vote for W it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

2) Republicans are not all evil mothers and Bush is not Hitler nor is it ok to call him a fascist.

3) What the NY Times tells you and doesn’t tell you, as well as Dan Rather (Peter Jennings) is not the true reality of the world, just one biased view of it. See 2000 election, abortion, taxes, etc….

4) All people against abortion are not evil religious fanatics, a lot of middle of the road people are against it.

Should an impregnated teenager have to also look at a picture of what’s inside her as well as talk to someone from “planned parenthood”?

5) Discussing border control in a rational fashion doesn’t mean you’re a freekin fascist.

6) Profiling potential terrorists is exactly what airport security is supposed to do, not be politically correct. Discussing it doesn’t mean you’re a fascist.

7) Anything the ACLU says is not always noble and valiant for ‘democracy’. They have become an oppressive partisan group with an agenda they want to impose on you like it or not.

The NY Times is not all the “news” that’s fit to read. Why does the paper still get away with referring to Jesse Jackson as the “civil rights activist” that was on the porch when Martin Luther King was shot?

9) Rush Limbaugh is not an evil Nazi, but the dogma from many mosques in this country is fascistic and mentioned nearly as much as it should be?

10) Just because someone is black does not mean they have to be a liberal. Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Armstrong Williams, Larry Elder etc..

11) ITS NOT OK THAT schools and Universities indoctrinating youth to complete leftist ideals including bringing in representatives of CAIR which has ties to Islamic Extremists and terrorists, and is funded by the Saudis?

As well as teaching that America is the evil incarnate in the world and owes reparations.

….in 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom was a friend of my father?s, and I had spent the previous year at the University of Chicago taking courses with him on Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. Bloom?s attack on relativism and multiculturalism and his defense of the Great Books were bitterly condemned as racist, sexist, Eurocentric, and elitist. Many who denounced the book clearly had not bothered to read it, relying instead on hostile reviews that distorted it beyond recognition. This was a fatal blow to my esteem for the Zabar?s Left. For an earlier generation, it was the excesses of the antiwar and Free Speech movements that had pushed them into the conservative camp. For me, it was the intellectual dishonesty of the debate about Bloom?s book.

Does anyone know and can explain in Cliff Note brevity what this book was about?

Also, Brock seems to have railed around against the right now with his latest books after his book attacking Hill which Bellow published.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ix=books&rank=%2Bpmrank&fqp=author%01Brock%2C%20David&nsp=score%01proj-unit-sales%02bin-fields%01none&sz=10&pg=2/ref=s_b_np/002-3619212-5564021

Aug 27, 2004 - 5:21 pm 5. Roger:

John, since I am linking to them all the time, I imagine I can assume I read all the above publication pretty assiduously. In fact, you may noticed I was recently profiled in National Review. In fact, I’m going to their convention party on Monday night. You’ll get my blog report… maybe even photos.

Aug 27, 2004 - 5:22 pm 6. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Roger

Cool

My reading of all of them has been less thorough.

Aug 27, 2004 - 6:22 pm 7. Jamie Irons:

Roger,

I’ve never read anything that comes closer to my own political views.

And I am a great fan of Saul Bellow, too!

Jamie Irons

Aug 27, 2004 - 7:25 pm 8. Terrye:

Like I said before spend a few months on a British message board being lectured for the Salem Witch Trials, Puritanism, Wounded Knee, Slavery, our tardiness in not sending Americans to die in their wars sooner, our rebuilding their blood soaked continent and making a profit on it, our slaughter of the innocents from one end of the earth to another, capitalism and all of it’s ills.

You get my drift. I had one of those epiphanies [like Kerry had in Cambodia] in which I thought, this is why they call the looney left looney.

After that I noted that the left here are Euro wannabes. And I thought my God, all they care about is their own vanity.

vain silly creatures in a scarey world.

Aug 27, 2004 - 7:34 pm 9. blogaddict:

Well, yesterday my 90-year-old mother told me that she still loves me, even if I am going to vote for Bush! I consider that a testament to the strength of mother love.

On the other hand, I wonder what Adam’s dad (about the same age as my mom, by the way) thinks of his son. Adam is rather mum on the subject.

Aug 27, 2004 - 10:30 pm 10. AST:

Thanks for linking that article. I was raised Republican, but have never liked membership politics. I think that in an odd way, I came to conservatism through the ideas, just as Bellow did.

I decided early on that human beings just can’t be trusted to to govern well without being closely watched and on a short leash. The New Deal, with its assumption that the government creates jobs, wealth and well-being, has always struck me as a sophisticated Ponzi scheme.

I was a public defender for 13 years, and saw a lot of injustice from the established order. More grist for ideas about what conservatism really means.

I have a traditional sense of morality, but I believe that it has to be defended on the basis of reason, not just slapped down like a 10 pound Bible.

Aug 28, 2004 - 12:23 am 11. Vexorg:

In many ways, modern leftism has become as much a religion to its adherents as anything, although they would refuse to label it as such (it wouldn’t fit in with their profession of militant atheism.) In the religion of leftism, the idols are not of wood and stone, but of transnationalism (a fundamental tenet of which is the infallibility of the UN, and the necessity of the abolition of the soverignty of mations for progress to be made), militant atheism (far fron advocating the separation of church and state, these leftists instead advocate the establishment of atheism as the state religion,) environmentalism (there is no telling how many people in Africa starve needlessly because of the efforts of envoronmentalists to ban genetically modified crops, and suffer malaria because of the outlaw of effective pesticides.) Keep in mind that not all leftists partake of the relgion of leftism, but the fanatical devotion of the radical left to their causes, and intolerance of any sort of disagreement, resemble nothing more than they do a religion in its most extreme form.

Aug 28, 2004 - 1:20 am 12. Samuel:

Roger

Well this story feels familiar, but I would like to emphasize one thing that comes clear from this. I hear all the time about people saying in the mwdia they have met people that voted for Bush who will vote for Kerry, but not any who voted for Gore who will vote for Bush, the reasons are clear. First of all conservatives aren’t as “in your face” and many of us you have changed keep our mouths shut. November will make this fact clear, I assure everyone. -JSF

Aug 28, 2004 - 7:31 am 13. Demosophist:

Lots of stuff looks familiar. For me the shift started with a mentoring relationship with Marty Lipset, and the shift was completed when I observed the Marxisant/Chomskeyesque reaction to 9/11. But I wonder what one does when the change occurs in your fifties rather than your thirties, and you’re starting a new career in a field dominated by the left? Well, I’m still on the horns of that dilemma.

American Studies is no longer about the US and its deep values, as you know. It’s now about a kind of auto-immune disorder that sees the US as the fundamental problem in the world, rather than the solution. I recall going to an APSA annual meeting around the time I finally got my Ph.D. and with Lipset and David J. Armor on me C.V. I was crushed that I didn’t get a single request for an interview during the entire four days. I think I gave up my hopes of ever going into academe during that convention, and have been surviving on the periphery doing ad hoc consulting work ever since.

Right now I’m out of work, and just about broke. On the up side, I’ve discovered wheat beer, and I think I have a great deal of clarity about what the heck is going on. Just wish it paid something, though.

Aug 28, 2004 - 7:48 am 14. richard mcenroe:

AST ó Your Bible only weighs ten pounds? Heretic.

Aug 28, 2004 - 11:02 am 15. richard mcenroe:

Demosophist ó Write a book about the collapse of American Studies. Illiberal Education made Dinesh D’Souza’s rep.

Unamerican Studies, by Demosophist…

Aug 28, 2004 - 11:04 am 16. Catherine:

John Moore

It would seem that the elite intellectuals of New York were/are as parochial as someone in small town America.

Yes and no.

Some of the press-bashing we do here amounts to trading in stereotypes, and while I believe that stereotypes & cliches usually become stereotypes & cliches in the first place because they contain a grain of truth, that’s only the case at the “macro” level.

I met a fairly famous, high-level liberal NYC journalist at a dinner party awhile back who had been raised in the south. One of the guests said that John Kerry (who had just become the apparent candidate in the wake of Dean’s meltdown) would win, because “Americans are decent people and no decent person would vote for George Bush.” (I’m still steaming over that one.)

The journalist was completely pessimistic. He said Kerry didn’t have a chance.

He also said, “I was raised in the South, and we were the only liberals in town. So I still think liberals are a tiny minority.”

He explained that Washington D.C. is a much more conservative city than New York, which is why WAPO is a much more conservative newspaper than the NYTIMES. (This was true during the Vietnam War as well, which I’ve learned from THE BIG STORY by Braestrup.)

He was great. He had a built-in instinct for Bad Ideas in J-schools that made me feel much better about the press in general.

Aug 28, 2004 - 12:26 pm 17. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine,

An interesting anecdote, but it doesn’t really show a lack of parochialism.

On the other hand, when I lived in LA, I came to appreciate on greate advantage of a large city - lots of lectures and other intellectual events much more rare here in Phoenix (although if I were more of a go-out-in-the-evening type, I’d still find a bunch).

Occasionally Mensa has an interesting gues for a forum, but not very often.

But the descriptions above gave the impression of a universe in which everyone had the same idea.

I sure don’t find that here (unless I go to the University). ASU fired a drama teacher for teaching Shakespeare instead of something “modern.” So even here in the desert, the insanity is common.

Aug 28, 2004 - 2:11 pm 18. Charles Waldie:

Roger:

Thank you for posting the excellent article on the transformation of Adam Bellow. I had a similar transformation a while back, in which I lost the false idealism that had been so insidiously planted by University professors. Although the culture I was raised in (Austin, Texas) is a far cry from the Upper West Side, there are many things which keep us all connected. The things we believe and the things we fight for are bonds that hopefully will never be broken.

Aug 28, 2004 - 3:04 pm 19. Yehudit:

“I hear all the time about people saying in the mwdia they have met people that voted for Bush who will vote for Kerry, but not any who voted for Gore who will vote for Bush.”

Samuel, show them this.

Follow all the links. Have fun!

Aug 28, 2004 - 10:04 pm

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