Tag Archives: elitism

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Two things that were striking in reading local news in Puerto Rico while we were there:

One of the dominant stories was Rumsfeld’s much-anticipated list of base closings, which Puerto Rico’s Buchanan ultimately escaped. What generally goes unstated in news write-ups of the process by which base closing decisions are made is what all the major players – the Secretary of Defense and his commissi on, the President, the US House, and the US Senate – have in common: no one in Puerto Rico gets to vote for them, or for the people who appointed them. While it goes without saying in local papers, it’s striking from an outsider’s perspective, and deeply problematic from a Heldian perspective that understands democracy as a measure of control over the decisions which shape one’s life, though arguably no more so than the situation of groups like the poor in the continental US who – largely – have the formal franchise but face significant obstacles to political mobilization and to getting a hearing from economic elites, or of the people’s of other countries which while not US territories are drastically affected by policies of the US government and its delegates over which they have no form of democratic control.

The other dominant story was an intensifying showdown between the territory’s Popular Democratic Party Governor and its New Progressive Party-controlled legislature over the Governor’s Cabinet appointments, especially his appointee for Secretary of State, whom the legislature voted down but who began serving in the job anyway. What was really striking to me as an outsider to Puerto Rican politics, but almost as true of coverage of the struggle over judicial appointments in the US Congress, is the total suffocation of any kind of issue background by horse race coverage – that is, speculations about who’s winning. Over five days of reading articles about this fight, I was unable to find a single sentence discussing the ideologies of any of these appointees or the issues at the heart of the power struggle. I know that Governor Acevedo Vila thinks Pont would be an excellent Secretary of State, and that NPP leaders think she’d be terrible, but I honestly could only guess what the areas of contention are. Seriously, if you know, I’m pretty curious at this point. And I doubt I’m the only one. Meanwhile, pundits in the continental US complaining about how boring the filibuster fight is to the American public should consider why the very real ideological issues driving forward the collision – like the power of the American people to harness government to pursue racial and economic justice – have been sidelined in the presentation of that fight.

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I got some skepticism from my family after we saw The Incredibles when I said I enjoyed it but I didn’t like the politics. But it really was the most conservative movie I think I’ve seen since S.W.A.T.. What’s interesting is the way it turns the liberal paradigm of a super hero film like Spiderman 2 on its head. In Spiderman the basic conflict is one extraordinarily powerful man’s struggle to resist, and then comes to terms with the great responsibility that comes with his great power. His exercise of great power for just ends is critical in facing down society’s great enemy: A creature seeking to consolidate all power for itself, at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society.

In The Incredibles, the victims are not the powerless, but the empowered. The movie is soaked in what Jon Stewart called “the anger of the enfranchised.” Society’s superior, more powerful members are held back by the resentment of the masses who are driven by jealousy to bring them down. Armies of lawyers and reams of regulations are deployed by the masses against their betters, leaving the super heroes bored and petulant and the masses unsafe. And who’s the ultimate adversary this elite must spring into action to confront? A scientist who resents that he couldn’t be a super hero. What’s his dastardly plan? To use science to give the masses super powers of their own so that they can be special too. And, various characters contend throughout the script, “If everyone’s special, then no one is special” (Says who?). The society of Spiderman is threatened by Enrons and Halliburtons; the society of The Incredibles is threatened by affirmative-action-admits and welfare queens.

The question posed by these movies, then, is which represents the real threat. Is America more endangered by those working to empower the disempowered, or by those working to further consolidate power for a narrow elite? I think it’s clear where I come down on this one.

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A few thoughts on the McCain and Giuliani speeches last night:

How exactly has John McCain determined that Al Qaeda was weakened by the War in Iraq? Does he know something the rest of us don’t? Because there’s plenty to indicate that Al Qaeda’s been strengthened by the diversion of resources to Iraq and the gestures towards religious crusade. If McCain can prove the contrary, that would seem to be the kind of information we’d be hearing about at the Convention. I mean, it’s not as if the Bush Administration has been shy about leaking classified information for electoral gain.

It’s always been impressive how Republicans manage to contend on the one hand that they represent decent, faithful, virgin America and defend it against the coarse and the obscene, and on the other hand that they represent common, hard-working, tough America against the lilly-livered elite (Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? has an engaging the discussion of the need for the myth of the liberal elite as an explanatory tool for conservatives to exempt the smut they condemn from the explanations of laissez-faire capitalism they enshrine). But it takes truly stunning rhetorical gymnastics to elide both charges in a few sentences, as Giuliani does in celebrating Bush both for being comfortable with the vulgar language of the common man construction workers and for eschewing the vulgarity of the Democrats.

So Giuliani is opposed to undemocratically elected governments which use external enemies to try to distract their citizens instead of improving healthcare. Who knew?

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Andrew Sullivan is gloating over this column, perhaps because it exemplifies one of the most pernicious and persistent stereotypes of the left. Or at least, that’s why I’m groaning over it.

I do have some modest suggestions that might provide a start for discussion: an intelligence test to earn the right to vote; a three-significantly-stupid-behaviors-and-you’re-out law; fines for politicians who pander to the lowest common denominator and deportation of media representatives who perpetuate such actions.

…We can stop this sapping of our national integrity but we must do it soon, lest the morons become the norm and those of us who use our brains for more than memorizing advertising jingles are ourselves ostracized from society.

Such arguments play into the hands of the right. They belong in a Charles Murray rant, not under the flag of anything identifying itself as the left.

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Zach accuses me of “starting a blog war.” Nah – but I’ll finish it. This would perhaps be the place to warn Zach that we at LWB “will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” Or somesuch.

Zach takes me on for my suggestion that Limbaugh’s drug scandal, and the response from the media and the organized right, lend credence to the suggestion by certain ex-conservatives that the social agenda of the right operates primarily as a cover to advance its economic agenda. He argues that my argument is “mechanist,” and that it minimalizes the distinctive oppression of sexual and ethnic minorities and the stake of the right in that oppression by rendering it merely a by-product of an economic project. Perhaps unfortunately for those reading this site and Zach’s (you know who you are), again I don’t think my disagreement with Zach is as wide as it might appear. I argued yesterday not that social conservatism is merely a convenient superstructure over a material class war, but that conservatives lend credence to those who do think so when they take fundamentally libertarian stances on the failures of their fellow travelers to live by their social values. I would argue that the Right (capital “R”) of the past years is increasingly a libertarian one, and that there’s a great deal of deft politics and crass hypocrisy at work which makes it possible to draw on the libertarians at the Cato Institute as the brain trust of your movement and the Christian Coalition as your grassroots arm. Zach argues that Bob Barr’s suggestion that his daughter’s abortion is a private matter doesn’t detract from his work to make “the state apparatus to control people’s bodies in a fascistic linking of gender and power, of sexual reproduction and social reproduction.” Certainly, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous or any less real to those who suffer as a result. What it does detract from, however, is the integrity of the argument and the credibility of the stance. To argue that the right’s real relationship to its social values is soaked in classism does not, as I see it, suggest that sexism, heteronormativity, or racism are derivatives of classism. I would also argue, as I think Zach would as well, that the classism of segments of the right has a foundation of sexual and racial prejudice. The Wall Street Journal ran a long staff editorial a decade or so ago called “No Guardrails,” blaming the crime of a violent anti-abortion activist on the society that the left had fashioned for him to grow up in (strained already, yes, but it gets better). The basic thesis of the piece was that all things being equal, the elite might be able to dabble in drugs, sex, and pornography, but everyone should abstain because the lower classes don’t have the same reserves of strength so as not to be fully corrupted. This is to me a vital dramatization of the intersections of prejudice. All that said, I stand by my contention that the lifestyles and even personal beliefs of significant parts of the right elite are far less closely in line with their professed politics than are, say, their personal economic practices with their economics and that the right response to those who transgress its social agenda is often motivated by its economic agenda. I also strongly affirm Zach’s reminder that all oppressions are not the same and that economic determinism runs the risk of marginalizing both the nature and the victims of other types of oppression.

I should also note, perhaps, that I was not born with a copy of the Nation in my hand.

Zach ends with a call “to look more deeply at how racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism are both intertwined and sometimes contradictory as subjectivities from below struggle to reshape and have reshaped the social relations of capitalism.” Sounds good to me. But Zach, you’re gonna have to start that one off. Much respect to you as well.