Yesterday on Montana Headlines, we took note of Montana Democrats distancing themselves from Sen. Obama over his recent comments at a San Francisco fundraiser.
While there has been a lot of ink spilled over Obama’s “guns and religion” comments, today’s piece by George Will is particularly worth reading. We’ve been enjoying Will more of late — he is drifting back toward his more old-fashioned conservative roots. Like the recently passed dean of conservative writers and thinkers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Will has been increasingly critical of the Iraq War and the abandonment of the principles of limited government and fiscal discipline by many Republicans in recent years.
In this column, Will reminds us that Obama’s statement is just part of a continuum of American liberal thought that has a long history:
When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.”
He quotes Michael Barone as writing:
“Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture - the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”
Will continues by saying that Obama’s comment is in line with an approach pioneered by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter:
The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders - a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.
One recalls Lionel Trilling’s famous comment in the post-war era that American conservatives had no ideas, only “irritable mental gestures.”
Anyone who has read Albert Jay Nock, Donald Davidson, or John Don Passos knows that Trilling was exaggerating about the right having a lack of intellectual credibility (but to be fair, all one has to do is read Jeffrey Hart’s New Criterion retrospective on WFB’s mentor at Yale, Wilmoore Kendall, to know that the “irritable” part wasn’t exactly groundless.)
Such attitudes toward the right are convenient — the progressive/liberal wins debates by default because the opposition simply has psychological “issues” and is not worthy of debating. And so the endless task of reminding the public that there are options — preferable options — to the solution offered by Sen. Obama. That solution is a sort of progressive ”end of history” notion in which we will be swept up by the rapturous winds of change and converted to the true faith. And because it is so inspiring and wrapped in colorful “post-partisan” rhetoric — we aren’t supposed to notice that it’s just the same old leftist pablum, preached with the same aloof hauteur that we have come to know so well.
I certainly don’t envy Jay in his self-imposed task to re-brand the Democrats as the party of Fiscal Responsibility. His effort to de-brand the Republican party isn’t as difficult a task as it should be. Some in the GOP lost their way, and for too long the philosophy of small government got lost. But it was the Party - not the philosophy - that failed.
