Liberal tunnel vision: why vote for Romney?
In the lastest New Yorker, John Cassidy writes:
In my neck of artisanal, hormone-free Brooklyn, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which shows Mitt Scissorhands leading “The First Gay President” by three points, landed with a nasty thud. “I can’t believe he might lose,” my wife said when she spotted the offending numbers on the Web. “People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”
The rest of the article is an attempt to fire up the troops, an exhortation to liberals to take the threat seriously but not to be afraid, because it doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot yet. But I focus on the paragraph above because I think it captures the essence of a certain liberal mindset, what we might call the Pauline Kael syndrome.
You may remember that Pauline Kael, film critic at that very same New Yorker, whose lengthy tenure there (1968-1991) was extremely influential in shaping the viewpoints of the cognoscenti, was supposed to have said, in response to Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory, “that she ‘couldn’t believe Nixon had won’, since no one she knew had voted for him.”
Kael’s real quote appears to have been more nuanced. As best we can tell, she may have actually said this:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
That’s a more interesting statement because it owns up to its own insularity. The speaker is well aware that she lives in an echo chamber in which she not only is not exposed to other viewpoints, but can’t even fathom them. Whether she would like to understand better or not is another question; my impression is that the speaker is rather proud of only associating with the elite, and really isn’t interested in finding out what the great unwashed might think, or why. I read into her remarks a certain disdain for those who voted for Nixon; whatever their reasons might be, they certainly couldn’t have been good.
That’s where Cassidy and his wife come in, all these long years later. There’s the same kneejerk dismissal of the views of others, the same concomitant inability to understand them and reluctance to try (conservatives may be intolerant of the views of liberals, or even hate them, and certainly can misunderstand them, but my distinct impression is that they spend an inordinate amount of time at least trying to fathom them, and tend to know many liberals rather well).
The assumption is that no one could possibly have rational reasons to vote for the obviously—obviously what? hateful? incompetent? evil?—Romney, and so the only impetus for supporting him must be hatred of Obama. Which brings us to another interesting point: people who will be voting for Romney are assumed not to merely disapprove of what Obama has done or not done as president, but to hate him. The motive is personal, malevolent—and quite possibly racist (although the article doesn’t say that). Politics as pure emotion.
The funny thing is that I think Mitt tried to be accepted by this group for most of his life. He had the money and proper degrees/prep school background. Provided his Mormonism showed up only as tee-totaling and no coffee, he would be superficially accepted (after all no one in upper crust boston was offended about his private equity business until he ran against Ted Kennedy).
But like Jews at Harvard in the past, he never could really be accepted. He may not fully understand Joe the Plumber, but he really does get the Obama crew.
This includes knowing that they will ultimately overreach and cannot change course at the last minute.
I also found this part to be the most interesting:
“People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”
The most generous reading I could put into it is that she was speaking, whether conciously or not, of the swing voters, the independents, the ones who will ultimately decide the election. They, almost by definition, are capable of voting either way (and have in the past) and if Obama is behind it’s because they are siding with Romney. And they must really hate Obama to fathom doing that. The rest, the ones who would vote for Romney no matter what, well, I’m not sure they’d actually fall into her definition of “people”. Just read the sentence with that in mind and see how it plays.
Like I said, that’s the most generous way I can read it. If that’s not the case then she’s simply a clueless liberal who doesn’t understand there are tens of millions of people out there who don’t hate Barack Obama but who would never consider voting for him because his vision of life in the US is one they have no attraction to. What he stands for they don’t agree with. If she doesn’t get that, then she is truly out of touch.
I terminated my subscription to The New Yorker several years ago because of its strong liberal bias even though I did like its cartoons and news/articles about the entertainment and culture there.
There truly are people in certain parts of NYC who are astounded that persons could think other than in a very liberal way. They live in a cultural bubble and perform mental masturbation at their dinner parties.
“In my neck of artisanal, hormone-free Brooklyn”
Brroklyn! Brooklyn? When the hell did Brooklyn go artisanal and hormone-free and why wasn’t I told? What am I going to say when someone asks me where were you when Brooklyn went artisanal and hormone-free?
I am flabbergasted. What the hell is happening to this country?
What fascinates me most about that article is the comments. I read the New Yorker semi-religiously for many years and fully concur with texexec as to its strong liberal bias, which finally drove me away. I’d have guessed that by now its readership would consist almost exclusively of liberal bubble-dwellers. But look at those comments! I read through the first 30 or so and almost all of them were harshly critical, either of Obama or of the parochial nature of Cahill’s article. There were one or two from Democrats announcing their plans to vote for Romney, and I saw only one claiming that anyone not planning to vote for Obama is a racist. Isn’t that something! It may be that the times, they are a-changin’.
On a completely different topic, twice as I typed the words above, my iPad incorrectly tried to correct my grammar by changing “its” to “it’s,” without even asking me. Be warned!
My son lives in Brooklyn, George Pal, and I am sorry to have to tell you that the description is correct. I don’t know when it happened — before he moved in — but it certainly has.
George Pal: some parts of Brooklyn are among the most yuppified and liberal places in the US. And it’s been true for several decades.
George Pal –
Gentrification, man, gentrification. My impression, from when I was looking for apartments in Brooklyn a few years ago, is that about 51% of the borough is now “artisanal and hormone-free” (Most recently, Greenpoint, the newest hipster haven, last I saw).
I had to live in the Bronx, though, which I can assure you is still non-artisanal and hormone-addled 🙂
Mrs Whatsit: I’m afraid the comments are somewhat skewed to the more conservative in this case because the article was featured on RealClearPolitics today. That would draw quite a few people from the right, who might not be the magazine’s typical readership.
@Mrs Whatsit, it seems like conservatives are starting to use the ‘net and social media after all. Whether that’s the old guard learning new tricks or youngsters growing up into conservatives, I’m not sure.
Nolte has a good article up on it:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/05/15/Twtter-Conservatives-War-Essay
What is really weird about the bubble dwellers is that they are so sure they know what’s best for the poor minorities. I’m pretty sure none have ever been near a public housing development or talked with a welfare recipient.
Right on, expat…and I bet they aren’t able to understand or are unwilling to admit that the government spending money it can’t afford on causes that are supposed to help poor people eventually results in a severe tax on them via inflation.
So sad, to think Brooklyn has succumbed, and can no longer be included in Rick Blaine’s formulation: “Well, there are certain parts of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try and invade.”
gcotharn: only parts of Brooklyn. Not the whole thing.
This plugs into a point Jonathan Haidt makes in his new book – and it should be said, it is a point conservatives have been making for decades – namely, that liberals do not understand conservatives (and, by extension, they can’t understand how anyone could vote against a liberal and for a conservative).
I made an argument below one of neo’s posts a while back that this is primarily because liberal ideology, at its root, is about emotions. Consider Jonah Goldberg’s recent opus. I’ve seen him on some programs getting interviewed, and one question that keeps popping up is this: given that Goldberg (correctly) argues that all partisans have an ideology, what then IS liberal ideology? Goldberg’s best answer is that it amounts to the proposition that “the state must do good whenever and wherever it can.”
As a statement of the practical import of liberalism, that’s fine. But the actual belief system is premised on what they mean by “good.” I submit that “good” has no ideational meaning in liberalism, boiling down to something like, “Whatever makes people who lack a commitment to any objective moral code feel like they too are moral.”
We can point out that commitments to maximum equality of result, maximum freedom, and a gigantic state are mutually incompatible ’till we’re blue in the face. They don’t care, because feelings trump ideas. This is also why they frame everything in terms of care, compassion, love, hate, inspiration, fear, hope, and so on. They call thinking in terms of trade-offs and scarce resources “pessimism,” as if it is some emotional fault on our part rather than a way of thinking based on simply looking at the world. Likewise, crazed utopianism is called “optimism,” as if pining for the impossible were commendable on its merits as a sheer feeling of love for the perfect.
To return to Haidt, he almost gets it right when he hypothesizes that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals do conservatives because they live in a richer, more multi-faceted moral universe – conservatives are working in six dimensions, as it were, while liberals are working in only two. The way I would put this is that every normally functioning human being feels compassion and anger at unfair and unjust inequality – little children feel both. As we grow older we learn that there are other considerations that are morally relevant, and that, when it comes to public policy, our feelings one way or another are usually not much of a guide to anything.
Put simply, liberalism is a kind of amputation of a fully developed moral sense, lumbering around on the two stubs that children are endowed with. Conservatism is, in my understanding, the attempt to consider both morality and politics in their fullness, and then to cash out a workable set of policies for a decent and prosperous society. That is why when we go to work, we get Burke, Hayek, Jouvenel, (the real) Kolnai, Voegelin, and, say, Sowell and Hanson, while when the liberals go to work they get Comte, Marx, Keynes, Dewey, Rawls, and the like. Sowell was too right when he grouped the former under “the constrained vision” and the latter under “the unconstrained vision.”
Good point, Neo, though disappointing. Howsomever, the New Yorker does require commenters to register and to provide quite a lot of information during that process, which must discourage many drive-by comments. I prefer to cling bitterly to my initial optimistic assessment that things might not be so bad after all, possibly even in artisanal Brooklyn (and as to that, I apologize to those more knowledgeable for confusing my son’s unquestionably hormone-free neighborhood with the whole borough.)
Further update on the iPad: it thinks people who type “optimistic” meant to type “optimal.” Or at least mine does.
New York City liberals are more likely to have been to France than to Ohio.
That’s a more interesting statement because it owns up to its own insularity. The speaker is well aware that she lives in an echo chamber in which she not only is not exposed to other viewpoints, but can’t even fathom them. Whether she would like to understand better or not is another question; my impression is that the speaker is rather proud of only associating with the elite, and really isn’t interested in finding out what the great unwashed might think, or why.
Interesting, neo. I don’t know the answer to the question, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume what you surmise here, that Kael is proud of her insularity and feels disdain for the Nixon-voting “other.”
I’ve long been a fan of her movie reviews (or essays on film)– though I find *a lot* to disagree with, they’re thought-provoking and I recommend them. Anyway, in my Kael reading I’ve observed that, when she ventures into political commentary in her movie reviews, the target of criticism is just as often (or more often) “liberal” as/ than “conservative”. Not because she considers those liberal ideas wrong and conservative ideas right, but because the way those liberal ideas inform a film may be e.g. insular, cliche-ridden, simplistic, tendentious, sanctimonious, facile, hypocritical, preachy, mawkish. Which makes it a bad film.
In other words, she critiques film as *film*– not as propaganda to be judged on whether it conveys the right (bien-pensant, PC) ideas. Of course, this is in stark contrast to most contemporary movie reviewers, who so often praise or pan a film depending on its political or ideological “correctness” (whether it’s in accord or not with the reviewer’s own political views). If anything, I’d say Kael is tougher on her own like-minded kind, as it were. Tougher on films that lazily, simplistically, uninterestingly rely on the like-minded insularity referred to in that quote– which just preach to the choir and revel in their own self-righteousness. She tends to like tough, complicated films that challenge an audience, as opposed to films that flatter an audience (especially an audience of her own kind).
In that sense, I’d compare her to someone like Camille Paglia. Not because of the content of their writings, but because they are cultural commentators of a (more or less) “liberal” persuasion who yet can be sharp critics of their own ideology– or rather, of the ways that ideology is manifest in cultural/ artistic works or phenomena.
rachel: your comments about Kael’s reviews are very interesting. I had a subscription to the New Yorker during almost all of the years in question, and probably read all her reviews, but at the time I wasn’t highly political (plus, I was liberal) and wouldn’t have noticed any of that.
Well I have never had the misfortune to actually meet the president in person, so I can’t rightly say whether I “hate” him as a man or not.
Oh what the hell. Yes I can. I hate everything he stands for; the manner in which he ran for every elected office he has ever held; every single infamous person he has considered over the years to be a friend, mentor or colleague; what he has done while in office (the manner in which he took full personal credit for getting Bin Laden even sours THAT singular accomplishment) and the direction he fully intends to take this country – via executive orders and other actions outside the constitution if he has a hostile congress.
So yeah, I’ve been motivated to vote for ABO, for quite some time, based in part on the emotion of hatred. And while no big fan of Mitt, I am at least thankful that the nominee is not Rick “Earmark” Santorum who would not even have his home state “in play” in November, or that sleazy, slimy, Washington insider scumbag who is on his third wife.
I confess to having been a former subscriber to O! (Oprah’s magazine.) It got too liberal for me and I canceled, but before I did I saw a prime example of the liberal bubble. During the 2008 election they ran a lengthy, well-researched article about whether women would vote for Obama or Hillary. I wrote a letter to the editor and said, “Believe it or not, half of us will vote for McCain!” Either it never occurred to them, or conservative women were simply beneath their notice. They didn’t print my letter, but then I didn’t expect them to.
“People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”
Is there a whiff of a belief that those against Obama are racists? Just this morning in our local rag there were a coupla letters to the editor that railed against those who “hate” Obama because of his skin color. If you believe Obama is doing a dandy job of running the country then you wonder why anyone would vote against him unless it was because of his blackness? There has to be at least a smidge of such a rationale in their thinking. Even though such elites are too, ah, sophisticated to go there right now.
It has become very difficult for me to separate my feelings about Obama’s policies from my feelings about him as a person. It is quite clear to me that I am suffering from ODS. (Obama Derangement Syndrome) Just the sound of his voice causes my juices to rise in a very Incredible Hulk sort of way. I don’t want to HATE him, but there it is. I especially don’t want to hate him because it makes me seem like a racist, except……….I can cite chapter and verse on his policies to which I am deeply opposed. As can any of the many regular commenters here. The fact that I would have voted for any of the Republican candidates over Obama, and knew it when the primaries began, pretty much says it all.
Here’s a good article on Kael that appeared in the New Yorker last year. Disagree with some of it, but it’s a good overview and touches on what I was getting at in my comment above. I.e., though I don’t know what Kael meant (in context) with her Nixon line, it’s unfair to say Kael is proud of belonging to an insular liberal elite: on the contrary, she delighted in being a contrarian, delighted in puncturing that insular liberal elite’s assumptions and pretensions.
It’s funny, isn’t it: the line she is perhaps most commonly known for (the Nixon line) is quoted by others to criticize an elite insularity which Kael is taken to represent; but she’s probably one of the first– from the belly of the beast, the New Yorker– to make that critique herself.
Kolnai,
Your comments almost always knock me out, but this is the best one yet. So incisive.
Neo should do a post about Jonathan Haidt. He is really the first liberal to breach the gap, and his work is important.
Have you noticed the way that liberals, when they finally DO acknowledge tragic realities, actually boast about how long it took them to admit the truth?
I meant BRIDGE the gap!
The latest Fox poll has Obama now leading by 7 points. I guess the artisanal hormone free Brooklynites can breathe easier again, but what is going on with these crazy polls?
I second mizpants comment on Kolnai’s comment.
“”Put simply, liberalism is a kind of amputation of a fully developed moral sense””
kolnai
Christianity operates from a premise that all humans will do wrong and fall short of being moral. In a sense, it recognises all the catch22’s humans unavoidably encounter in even attempting to be good in a complex world.
Liberalism turns that on its head by suggesting you can be a fully good person 24/7 if you simply block out all results of your actions and focus only on your intent.
LisaM: now, that’s a pretty good example of tunnel vision.
Lisa M & neo,
That reminds me of a poster or ad I saw during 2008 election season, something like:
McCain/Palin is not a woman’s choice.
“Just this morning in our local rag there were a coupla letters to the editor that railed against those who “hate” Obama because of his skin color. If you believe Obama is doing a dandy job of running the country then you wonder why anyone would vote against him unless it was because of his blackness?”
The other side of the coin is that the editor believes that because BHO is ‘black’ and has a (D) after his name he must be doing a dandy job.
rachel: and remember, Sarah Palin isn’t a woman.
ref Kael and critiquing films as “films”.
Really want to find it. An earlier feminist, also a critic, reviewed “Taming of The Shrew”–the play, not a performance–with great sympathy for the heroine, approving her actions and roles and even her ultimate decisions.
Not at all what feminists are supposed to want, but there appear to be a few who can separate at least some of their professional life from their ideology.
Can’t think of her name, dammit.
Really like kolnai’s comment from 5pm 5/16, esp: ‘Likewise, crazed utopianism is called “optimism,” as if pining for the impossible were commendable on its merits as a sheer feeling of love for the perfect.’
It’s also called “idealism,” a word often used about the ’60s radicals. I was there and “crazed utopianism” is a much more accurate term.
About the Kael quote: I do agree that the way this is normally misquoted makes her sound more insular and less self-aware than she deserved. However, the “I can feel them” part suggests the sort of shuddering paranoia that liberals often seem to indulge in.
In an article in USA Today earlier this week (free at the hotel, I would never pay for it), they gave the reactions of several black Christian pastors to the gay marriage decision. All but one were soft on President Obama.
What it would take for any of them (except the one) to come out against him?
I’ve flirted with ODS and O-hate (and in totally non-racial sense), but I’ve managed to reach down into my deepest Christian beliefs to avoid anything other than flashes. My traddy-ish Catholic belief is that the evil one has completely deceived Obama, and I pray that he opens his heart to the Light of God. I have nothing else.
I would think it’s hard to believe that someone would vote for Romney because he is incredibly bland and insincere, seems infinitely distanced from anyone outside his surroundings, and you can never know what his position on any given ssue at any given moment?
You don’t mean David Maraniss’s “autobiography”, do you? You mean his biography of Barack Obama.
“Just the sound of his voice causes my juices to rise in a very Incredible Hulk sort of way. I don’t want to HATE him, but there it is.”
I hear ya.
Nowadays, the mention of that name has become like that of a particularly offensive cuss word: a big no-no in our household. My husband realized that I became a nasty b!%@# the moment he or my (then-toddler) daughter mentioned his name, and that was when I was still pregnant with her little sibling. She started to have this bad habit of doing so to make me angry so she could have a good laugh, but we stopped that very quickly.
So, to make sure she never does that again, and to make sure I don’t go nuts, he usually is mentioned as “The One” or “He Who Must Not Be Named,” but never by his real name, and not in front of the kids. Because kids can be a bit gossipers and tell others, particularly their teachers…
One afternoon, I was listening to Rush inside my minivan after I picked up my daughter from preschool. After a few minutes, she asked me, “Mommy, does ‘Obama’ mean ‘stupid’?
I bit my tongue…
Needless to say, now I only listen to Rush on my iPhone, with headphones, on iHeartRadio.
Of course, I already voted in the TX primary, for Romney. Call me a “h8er” or a “Racist!” all you want, but I’d rather have a Mormon President ten thousand times four years than the glittering jewel of total incompetence occupying the WH today.