With Friends Like These...
As I listen to the Phils in the process of dropping another ballgame to the Washington Nationals, it occurs to me that ideally I should have posted the following item a few weeks back, when it was a bit more timely. Suffice it to say that there was a good reason for not doing so, and that I hope the larger theme here holds up today as it would have in mid-March. This item is adapted from a letter I sent to the New York Observer, which I'm pretty sure they didn't publish (at least not online).

There's a certain sub-stratum of the punditariat that seems to get its kicks, and make its money, through little acts of fratricide. Two in the vanguard here are Fred Siegel, a professor at Cooper Union and culture editor of BLUEPRINT, the official publication of the Democratic Leadership Council; and Joel Kotkin, a prominent academic based on the west coast who frequently pops up to comment on issues of politics, urban development and demographics. Both self-identify to some extent as Democrats; both derive their prominence from attacking their notional co-partisans.

In his recent column, “Radical Professors: The New Brain Trust?” Siegel relied upon stereotypes in blasting neoconservative bugaboos old and new—-those radical academics, that freaky Howard Dean—-rather than seriously examining the interrelationships between academia and political thinking. Siegel rightly deplores the absence of substantive thinking on the part of some anti-Bush partisans, but has no comment regarding their counterparts on the right side of the political spectrum, such as those College Republicans in Philadelphia a couple months back who stood outside a forum on Social Security and chanted, "hey hey, ho ho, Social Security's got to go!" His reference in the article to “fascist writers from the 1930s” perhaps would better refer to those charmers who've taken to wearing t-shirts that read "Imagine No Liberals." Or the spirited folks at February's Conservative Political Action Conference in Virginia who cheered when Ann Coulter called for giving liberals "some of that McCarthyism they're always whining about."

For that matter, I wonder what Fred has thought upon listening in to just about any right-wing radio broadcast over the last twelve years or so.

Presumably, it’s hardly a newsflash to a professor like Siegel that young people relate to politics more from emotion than reason or rational policy analysis. Actually, there’s no need to limit this by age group; I'd argue that the vast, vast majority of the electorate does this. Hence we see minimum-wage earners opposing the "death tax," and single parents working for pittances in economically distressed communities voting for Bush because "he makes them feel safe" from terrorists.

"Voices of reason" like Siegel and Kotkin, who recently joined in the assault upon the straw man of “senile Deaniac liberalism” seem to have no understanding of Howard Dean’s record or views. Rather than digging into the issues, they seem lazily content to offer a slightly more tempered version of the Club for Growth attack advertisement from January 2004 that castigated Dean’s “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." Though I’m not particularly interested in defending Dean’s campaign, and I don’t believe that he would have been a successful general election presidential candidate, for his current position as Democratic National Committee chair I think it’s worth keeping in mind that governor of Vermont, he balanced budgets every year; was applauded by non-liberal groups from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council to the decidedly right-wing National Rifle Association; and generally drove left-leaning activists in his state crazy. And that he'd planned to run his presidential campaign on a platform of fiscal conservatism and health care reform—issues that presumably even the likes of Siegel and Kotkin would deem legitimate and worthy of discussion.

Regarding Siegel's thesis, it’s easy, and certainly understandable, to fixate on the weird and ugly statements of fringe academics like Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad. It would be nice, however, if more responsible public thinkers like Siegel spared some of their tut-tutting for people like Pat Robertson, who has suggested that 9/11 was God’s punishment for the excesses of feminists, secularists, gays and lesbians, and other “enemies”, and once called for a nuclear bomb to be detonated at Foggy Bottom, thus obliterating the U.S. Department of State. Or the aforementioned Ms. Coulter, who “joked”, in the same Observer, that she wished Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had driven his truck into the New York Times headquarters. These are individuals with much wider reach and greater visibility than some oddballs on the far left, spewing bile to a very limited audience of bored undergrads.

Finally, if Siegel is sincere in his disdain for "postmodernism," perhaps he should take up the issue with Bush administration officials who have paid off columnists, supported a male prostitute turned partisan operative amidst the White House press corps, and distributed canned “news” segments amounting to propaganda to broadcasters across the country. They're the master practitioners of this “trick.”