Carping in the Faculty Lounge

I am an equal-opportunity hater. Neither left nor right is safe from my significantly-less-than-rapier wit. Exhibit number A: Angelo Codevilla's essay/rant in the latest issue of the American Spectator.

Codevilla's complaint, in brief, is that 1) America has a ruling class and 2) Said ruling class stinks. Oh, how it stinks! Badly enough for Codevilla to go on about it for a dozen-plus pages.

This piece is what journalists call a "thumbsucker." Instead of doing the usual journalistic busywork--looking up statistics, interviewing sources, reading the literature--the author sits in a dark room, sucks their thumb for a vir, and writes whatever comes to mind. Journalists like this because it's easy, and because there are no damned statistics to break up the glittering perfection of their argument.

Needless to say, most thumbsuckers are wrong. I think Codevilla's essay falls into this category. Though I don't have the cerebral wattage to make a coherent critique, I would like to pick out a couple points and subject them to a world-class snarking. Let's begin!

From Codevilla: Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.

Codevilla argues that the present ruling elite are the products of an Ivy League education, with all the softness and moral decadence that implies. This fact might surprise Vice President Joe Biden, graduate of the notoriously elitist University of Delaware. Or Rahm Emanuel, a Sarah Lawrence grad, or Trinity College grad Nancy Pelosi. On the other side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell attended Louisville and John Boehner attended Xavier--hardly bastions of academic decadence.

When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind.

Really? I follow politics pretty closely, and I've yet to see any poll remotely like that. It's also worth noting that voters choose candidates, not parties, which makes a huge difference. In the Washington Senate race, for instance, you have three candidates: Democrat Patty Murray, mainstream Republican Dino Rossi, and Tea Party Republican Clint Didier. According to SurveyUSA, 37% of Washingtonians support Murray, 33% support Rossi, and only 5% favor Didier. Ah, well...maybe Washington isn't real America.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes.

Hate to repeat myself, but do you have any statistics to back up the grand assertion that "Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters?" Or if not statistics, at least some anecdotes? Or if not anecdotes, then something, anything more than your own opinion? Sentences like this are the essence of thumbsucking.

Learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Codevilla spends 99% of his essay arguing that fancy degrees don't amount to jack squat. Unless, of course, the people bearing those degrees favor conservative causes. Which means that Ivy League PhDs are untrustworthy when they argue against tax cuts, but they suddenly become worthwhile if they dispute the existence of global warming.

Getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile...it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages.

This is simply insulting. Students work hard to get into Ivy League schools and work even harder when they get there. Yes, some are lazy legacies, but you find those types at every level of education--at the University of Wyoming as much as the University of Pennsylvania. And does Professor Codevilla really think that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are second-rate institutions? I see plenty of foreigners flocking to American colleges, but I don't see many New York or California suburbanites applying to the Ecole Polytechnique or University of Tokyo.

The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Yes, many intellectuals did fawn over the Soviets and Nazis. So did many normal Americans, the "common people" that Codevilla fetishizes. If Ivy League professors praised Mussolini's Italy, so too did Italian-American clubs. And if pointy-headed intellectuals sang Stalin's praises, so too did many working-class laborers. Socialist Norman Thomas got nearly a million votes in the 1920 presidential election--were they all from college professors?

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class.

What is this, a name-dropping contest? Codevilla tells us that the meritocrats are wrong to think their intelligence gives them authority. And he shows them up by...flaunting his own intelligence with boasts that he knows more about sociology than they do.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it.

How do you know that? I said, how do you know that? Did you ask every physician in America for their opinion? Perhaps there's a poll out there proving this point...too bad Codevilla doesn't bother to cite it. Oh well! Just have to take his word for it! Again, behold the essence of thumbsuckery.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices.

Codevilla posits the "country class" as the noble opposition to the spineless ruling class. So the country class want to rise only virtue of "sheer competence," eh? Guess that explains why so many small farmers reject federal subsidies and insist on making money the old-fash...oh, wait, they don't actually reject subsidies. The sad truth is that nobody ever turns down free government money. Not even the enlightened country class.

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle.

Yes it does. The Tea Party has many virtues, but diversity is not one of them. It is overwhelmingly--even exclusively--white, conservative, and Christian. This is not a bad thing; being white does not make you a racist, and being Christian does not make you a bigot. But please don't argue that the country class is a "rainbow coalition," because it simply isn't true. Codevilla falls into the old liberal trap, the assumption that diversity is inherently good.

While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake.

No. No they don't. Again, the country class has good things going for it. Its people are energetic, practical, and idealistic. They are firmly grounded in faith. They are kind and friendly. They do not, however, have terribly good taste, and Codevilla's fantastic image of the noble laborer who works with his hands all day and then goes home to read Aristotle and listen to Bach is plain silly. The country class does not stress classic culture. Period.

But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Yes, the GOP hated Ronald Reagan. That's why they nominated him for the presidency. Twice. And that's why the modern GOP treats him as a secular saint.

Agh...sorry to rant for so long. Really, I'm no better than Codevilla. But some of his points were too stupid to go unchallenged. As long as conservatives indulge in this sort of half-paranoid half-triumphalist dreaming, they won't get anywhere.