We liberals! Let’s face it—as a group, we’re just this side of hopeless.
We’ve gotten our brains beaten out in the messaging wars of the last thirty years. Roughly speaking, this corresponds to the time in which the world of wealth and power began fighting back against the losses they had sustained in the New Deal and World War II.
With great clarity, Paul Krugman described this history in his 2007 book, The Conscience of a Liberal. Hacker and Pierson described the same pushback in last year’s book, Winner-Take-All Politics.
But do you see liberals discussing those books? Of course not! Books are hard! Yesterday, though, in the Washington Post Outlook section, you did see this call to action from “activist Sally Kohn.”
Kohn’s piece consumed the top half of Outlook’s front page. Kohn is a liberal activist who believes the following:
KOHN (4/17/11): It’s as though Democrats think we’re at a polite tea party, while Republicans are fighting an ideological war. The GOP’s budget plan for 2012 would essentially dismantle Medicaid and Medicare, end social supports for poor families and give tax breaks to business and the wealthy. Realistically, Obama seems to understand that, at least in the short term, liberals have lost control of the conversation and have to play by the rules that the extreme right has made up. That means Democrats have to do something regarding the deficit and spending.
Kohn believes that liberals have lost control of the conversation “at least in the short term.” She seems to believe that Democrats “have to do something regarding the deficit” for this reason alone. Why then did even the liberal Paul Krugman say this in Friday’s New York Times?
“My own view is that while the spending controls on Medicare [Obama] proposed are exactly the right way to go, he's probably expecting too much payoff in the near term. And over the longer run, I believe that we'll need modestly higher taxes on the middle class as well as the rich to pay for the kind of society we want.”
Why does Krugman favor spending controls on Medicare and modestly higher taxes on the middle class? Does he favor those things because “at least in the short term, liberals have lost control of the conversation and have to play by the rules that the extreme right has made up?” To all appearances, that’s what activist Sally Kohn thinks. But then, Kohn’s piece is littered with the type of foolishness with which we liberals flatter ourselves. She starts with a list of liberal laments—Obama bailed on the public option!—then turns to a standard account of why we have failed through the years:
KOHN: What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength—our deep-seated dedication to tolerance.
We liberals are simply too tolerant! This resembles the joke about the candidate who is asked to describe his own character flaws. “My biggest problem is that I’m sometimes too honest,” the pol forthrightly says.
Kohn goes on to say that our “dedication to tolerance” has turned us into a gang of “suckers.” But she never so much as considers the possibility that Obama bailed on the public option because he couldn’t get it passed. (For the record, we don’t know why he bailed.) And soon, she’s citing the kinds of brain research phrenologists and racial cleansers have applauded down through the ages. This is completely foolish:
KOHN: Social science research has long dissected the differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals supposedly have better sex, but conservatives are happier. Liberals are more creative; conservatives more trustworthy. And, since the 1930s, political psychologists have argued that liberals are more tolerant. Specifically, those who hold liberal political views are more likely to be open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences, while those who hold conservative political views are more likely to be closed-minded, conformist and resistant to change. As recently as 2008, New York University political psychologist John Jost and his colleagues confirmed statistically significant personality differences connected to political leanings. Brain-imaging studies have even suggested that conservative brains are hard-wired for fear, while the part of the brain that tolerates uncertainty is bigger in liberal heads.
To Kohn, size matters, at least when it comes to the amygdala, “the part of the brain that tolerates uncertainty!”
Question: Do you think Kohn has the first clue on earth concerning these “social science research” issues? Almost surely, she does not. (Most recently, the amygdala research tracks to British actor Colin Firth, who said, “I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise: I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don't agree with me.” The resulting study was conducted on 90 British students.) But so what? From a very important media platform, Kohn dithers about who has better sex. (We do!) Inevitably, she presents an overall view which largely favors her own gloried tribe, which is “more likely to be open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences.” By the way: Do you really think that conservatives are more trustworthy? Absent a verydetailed study of the research, why would anyone with an ounce of sense sign up for that belief?
So it goes when a liberal activist get her chance, on a very large stage, to argue for her own tribe.
Kohn, of course, is only one person. But over the past decade or so, we liberals have persistently vouched for our own superior smarts and goodness, even as we get eaten alive in the political wars. We have dragged our numbskulls out on the stage to discuss conservatives’ limbic brain structure; in our comment sections, we persistently rage about the obvious dumbness of those who are kicking our keisters in the public debate. We have swallowed such patent nonsense, even at our high amateur levels.
Have we liberals “lost control of the conversation in the short term?”Please! We lost control of the conversation long ago, in virtually every major area. Sadly, we haven’t turned out to be smart enough—or honest enough—to see how our failure works. Read this Digby post from last month if you want to understand your side’s thirty-year failure to construct winning responses to the other side’s disinformation campaigns.
Digby’s post concerned the status of the Social Security trust fund. She reprinted an accurate but technical explanation from Paul Krugman, the liberal world’s MVP—but even at this very late date, Digby doesn’t see how useless Krugman’s (accurate) explanation is within the public debate. Digby is good at spotting the racists—but she still doesn’t understand why “people are confused about Social Security.”
That doesn’t make Digby a bad person—far from it. It does help explain why your side has lost so many debates—has given so much political ground in the past thirty years. The other side had good clear disinformation. Despite our obvious well-known brilliance, westill don’t have good clear replies.
Krugman has been our side’s MVP. But for the most part, our liberal “career leaders” are part of the press and political Money Culture—and they endlessly act like it. We amateurs haven’t been able to see the way we get played in the process. We stumble, fumble, flounder and fail—and we keep following the lead of very weak leaders. We also keep insulting the citizens whose help we will need to turn the tide against plutocrat power.
For these and other reasons, we often find ourselves thinking about Mark Twain’s ineffectual mob.
Mark Twain’s ineffectual mob assembles itself in chapter 21 ofHuckleberry Finn, a well-known American novel. (For the full text of what follows, just click here.) In an Arkansas river town, a loud but harmless fellow named Boggs has arrived from the hinterland “for his little old monthly drunk.” (How harmless is Boggs? “I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten me, 'cuz then I'd know I warn't gwyne to die for a thousan' year,” one wag jests as Boggs roars up the street.) On this occasion, Boggs declares that he’s come to town to kill Colonel Sherburn, by whom Boggs says he’s been “swindled.” Calmly, Colonel Sherburn tells Boggs that he must stop his insults by 1 P.M. When Boggs absent-mindedly fails to comply, the colonel shoots him dead as Boggs’ daughter looks on. (A nastified variant of this tale occurs in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider.)
And that’s where the mob comes in! After the town entertains itself by reciting the tale and viewing the body, a fiery lynch mob assembles itself, apparently inspired by a fellow named Buck Harkness. The mob swarms up toward Sherburn's house; once there, they visit their fury on the colonel’s fence. “Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave,” Huck explains. But uh-oh! “Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word.”
What follows is one of the most comical portraits ever set to parchment. Colonel Sherburn mocks the mob, informing them they’re a gang of cowards. And sure enough! Soon, the mob turns tail and runs, fleeing back toward town:
TWAIN: Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave sucked back.Sherburn never said a word—just stood there, looking down. The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-gaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it.Then he says, slow and scornful:"The idea of YOU lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a MAN! Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a MAN? Why, a MAN'S safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.”
You’ll have to admit—it’s hard not to think of the way we liberals flatter ourselves on our fiery blogs, calling the roll of the nation’s racists and saying how stupid the other side is. But let’s get back to the colonel’s remarks. As it turns out, Sherburn has lived in the north and the south. He knows how people are:
TWAIN (continuing directly): "Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you're just AS brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it's just what they WOULD do.
Again, it’s hard not to think of the way our blogs and cable shows tell us we’re brave moral giants—brave moral giants who are verysmart. But the colonel wasn’t finished yet—and by now, the mob was nervous:
TWAIN (continuing directly): "So they always acquit; and then a MAN goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought PART of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn't had him to start you, you'd a taken it out in blowing."You didn't want to come. The average man don't like trouble and danger. YOU don't like trouble and danger.But if only HALF a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts 'Lynch him! lynch him!' you're afraid to back down—afraid you'll be found out to be what you are—COWARDS—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man's coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is—a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE—and take your half-a-man with you"—tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.
“I could a stayed if I wanted to?” In short, Huck “broke all apart and went tearing off” too, though he knew how to put a good face on it.
One hundred years later, Harper Lee created a similar scene, in which a single man talked down a whole mob. (Helped by the innocence of his adorable daughter.) But in Lee’s scene, that lone man was Atticus Finch, the most moral white man in the whole town. And the lynch mob was wrong in every way—wrong on the facts; wrong in their motives; wrong in their preferred procedure. Lee’s famous book has helped millions of people think through the meaning of race in America. That said, Twain’s scene is a bit more complex and perhaps a bit more evocative. In his case, the mob is basically right on the merits of the case—and the lone man who talks them down has just killed a defenseless man, before his daughter, for no better reason than that he needed killin’.
Clicking around on line this weekend, we think we learned this:
As Twain originally wrote that scene, Colonel Sherburn’s friends had to help him escape from town. Twain then put the book aside; at some point he added a note suggesting that Sherburn should end up getting lynched. But after three years, he returned to the book, creating the scene as it now exists. Just a guess: It may have taken a while for Twain to see that in this case, as in most such matters, a humorist is better off letting his scenes go with the joke. Three years later, he removed the traces of his own moral disapprobation and gave us a wondrously comical scene in which the standard lynch mob gets turned on its ear—a scene which lets us ponder the ways real people actually act.
In the very next paragraph, Huck is suddenly at the circus, where people from the same town show a different side of their character. They suspend disbelief in a different way; soon, Huck describes a scene in which “everybody clapped their hands and went just about wild.” (With “everybody just a-howling with pleasure and astonishment.”) Even here, Huck misunderstands what is happening several times. But he does display his good moral sense. Huck feels pity for the ringmaster, mistakenly thinking that he has been humiliated.
Despite his earlier misconduct, Colonel Sherburn had good sound advice for that ineffectual mob. “Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people,” he told them—“whereas you're just AS brave, and no braver.” That same advice might just as well be handed to us liberals. We’ve been tooken about a million times over the course of the past thirty years; we’ve been tooken by our career intellectual leaders and by our own failures to comprehend. But have you ever seen even one liberal leader ask Frank Rich why he pimped Candidate Bush the way he did, trashing Candidate Gore in the process? And do you recall what you brave liberal leaders did when they saw Keith Olbermann “spout[ing] misogynist garbage?”
Of course! They broke all apart and went tearing off every which way! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/28/11, to recall how brave yourside is.
In our view, the liberal world would be well advised to learn from the colonel’s vast knowledge. We are no better than all the rest—and in the long run, we will need a bunch of of their votes to affect real change in this country. We liberals might actually get some things done if we’d stop believing in our own greatness. If we’d kick the keisters of people like Kohn, who can’t stop playing phrenologist with everyone else’s noggins.
We’ve had our keisters kicked for forty years—and we still think we’re the cocks of the walk! So smart! So moral! So tolerant! So open-minded, flexible and interested in new ideas and experiences!
Mark Twain knew all about us! Tomorrow, a brand-new special report concerning our vast racial greatness.
Starting tomorrow: Ed Schultz’s well-hidden hour
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