Just to be clear, when Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest speculates that I might have greater tolerance for nonsense because I'm younger, and therefore haven't seen the news repeat itself as much, he's just so wrong. I'm not only pretty impatient, I'm not a gen-Xer. Although I'd love to accept the compliment, alas I was on the streets of Berkeley in 1969, hitch-hiked the PCH, and had a pair of homemade bell bottom jeans that some fetching young hippy woman sewed with triangles of colorful material. (I wonder what she's doing now?) And that's all I'm going to share about myself from that era, on the grounds that...
At any rate, when I criticize folks like Joe Klein for having an emotional attachment to their generation's "coming of age" experience, I'm talking about my own generation. I was part of the cohort that went off the rails. I even spent some five years as a very good political fund raiser (canvasser) for Citizen Action, the group that swiped the term "progressive" from Teddy Roosevelt's legacy.
But I had the good fortune to know Seymour Martin Lipset who, even though a lifelong Democrat, wasn't fooled by the rhetoric of the Left. In fact, he was huddling in that alcove at the City University of New York (called "City College" then) with Irving Kristol, having an epiphany about the fact that Joe Stalin wasn't an accident, but the unavoidable consequence, of Marxism. And it was Martin and Irving's good fortune to have been pried loose from the socialist idealism of their youth by Leon Trotsky. But that's another story.
Up until the time I knew Marty I really felt like a "stranger in a strange land" in my homeland. I always sided with America's enemies, because the culture of my own country was just a mystery to me. And I would have agreed with Orville Schell that smarter people tended to be more liberal. (Although, what he actually said was that better educated people tend to be more liberal, and less rowdy, which is sort of ironic coming from a Berkeley Don.) (hat-tip: Daily Dish)
After working as Marty's RA for awhile my own country became less of a mystery. In fact I could see rather clearly that I was, myself, a rather typical American. Even in my days on the Left I had been more anti-authority than pro-statist, and the "new left" that emerged during the sixties was more anarchistic than its European counterpart. I simply found ways to discount my distrust of the state, because I saw no other way to employ the interventions that I felt necessary. But though I had begun to see myself and the US more clearly, I wasn't quite prepared to abandon some vague longing for an equality of condition, and in ameliorative social conviction. I stuck up for a "middle way" in seminars with James Buchanan, who was an extraordinarily patient man. And although I was beginning to be skeptical of Noam Chomsky's rants about the return of socialism, I was inclined to give him a pass, because I frankly sympathized with some of the ends.
During the Florida recount debacle I was even more pro-Gore than many of my friends in San Francisco's Marxisant subculture. So my first instinct after 9/11 was to wish that someone other than George Bush was at the helm. I groaned every time he gave one of "those" speeches, looking like a victim on a hostage tape. But Marty, who was flat on his back from a massive stroke, uttering mostly one word responses, managed the eloquence to observe rather matter-of-factly that if the US somehow succumbed to terrorism the rest of the liberal democracies would probably follow. The terrorists knew this, which was the main reason we were the prime target. And so when the Chomskyites found a way to blame the victim, they just lost me for good. I decided that you really had to be rather dense to believe that sort of thing. And with all due respect to Professor Schell's observations about the correlation between education and ideology, the real situation is slightly more complex. As education level increases people tend to become more conservative until they reach graduate school.. For reasons that probably have less to do with intelligence than with the quasi-feudal society that persists in graduate schools, people who earn advanced degrees tend to develop highly left-oriented values.[1]
And even the link to advanced education is changing. Fifty years ago City College became the birthplace of the neoconservative movement because a group of students had some doubts about the "conventional wisdom" touted by their profs. As Irving Krystol has observed, it was not the faculty at City College that made it such an interesting and exceptional place. Furthermore, we have known for a long time that though the professorate is overwhelmingly leftist, their values just don't stick with their undergrad charges. Whatever ideological biases undergrads are inculcated with they seem to be unlearnt pretty quickly after they enter the "real world," outside the Academy. And since 9/11 the new pro-Democracy movements that have emerged not only in Iran, but at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brandeis, Columbia and a number of other top-ranked colleges, to promote the transition of failed and autocratic regimes to liberal democracy are largely student movements. Since many of these activists are (for the first time perhaps) in graduate schools, they may eventually influence the ideological bias of the professorate. The hegemony that existed in higher education for as long as I can remember may be on the verge of big change.
[1] In addition, Professor Schell isn't even empirically correct in his comparisons involving the Berkeley environs. Even though the San Francisco/Berkeley area is probably the most left-biased population in the nation, the most highly educated counties aren't there, but in northern Virginia, close to where the third 9/11 plane struck. According to the 2000 Census the proportion of the population over 25 years of age with at least a bachelor's degree was 45% for San Francisco County and 51% for Marin County. In Virginia the proportions were 60% for Arlington County and 55% for Fairfax County. I believe either Fairfax or Arlington also had the highest concentration of graduate degrees in the nation.
Mr. Van der Leun is deeply ashamed for assuming youth on the part of yourself, sir. He humbly apologizes and hopes that, in the past, he did not step on your feet while running from the shotgun blasts at People's Park.
He would also like you to know that those jeans were made by the hippy girl that he had as his first wife and she's no fun at all these days.
Posted by: Van der Leun at October 13, 2003 07:08 PM