Elitism

Animal Law, Enforcement Gaps, and Anti-Intellectualism

We’re a little late to this party, but not so long ago, Cass Sunstein, the sitting administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, came under fire for a “controversial” article advocating for some form of “animal standing” — a way for third parties (non-owners) to stand in the shoes of an animal and allege a violation of an existing law.

On that definition, the parade of horribles urged by the radical right doesn’t really come to pass. Cass isn’t talking about leveraging murder laws against factory farmers, or generalizing laws that protect humans, or, really any attempt to kill the meat industry. He’s addressing solely the enforcement gap in animal law that arises because (1) not all animals have owners capable of advancing their interests, and (2) the state isn’t equipped to pick up the slack.

This should be noncontroversial. American law already has a delightful privateer element to it in almost every other aspect: private citizens can enforce rights that others can’t, and that the government can’t be bothered to enforce. Citizens can sue on the government’s behalf, in qui tam suits, under a complicated series of rules that just aren’t worth explaining here. Even though the statute doesn’t expressly so provide, aggrieved citizens can sue for securities fraud, because the SEC isn’t really equipped to handle every significant violation of the Securities & Exchange Acts. And the class action mechanism lets groups of citizens take on a enemies out of all proportion with their ability to act alone, and bring large wrongdoers to heel from a position of strength. Government can’t be everywhere policing wrongdoing; but citizens with lawyers can. Why not here too?

Cass had a good idea, and caught flak for it. Perhaps that’s the larger point: years of distorting the records of intellectuals has primed the public to accept similar narratives. When we hear that a prominent academician said something crazy, our first thought is not to investigate, but to shake our head at the out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals. This is a luxury we no longer have. We need smart solutions to tough problems, and creativity should be rewarded.

Kill All The Lawyers

Per Hot Air, the demonization of the informed takes an expected turn, with a Republican candidate questioning why we need lawyers in the Senate:

Our candidate’s statistic is less remarkable when one looks to the history: a full 25 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers; another 5 doctors or scientists; and a only 15 “merchants.”  7 of the first 10 presidents were lawyers (Washington, Jackson, and Harrison are the exceptions). The architects of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Jefferson and Adams, were both lawyers, and Adams an unpopular one, following his defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

None of this should surprise; we’re a particularly legalistic culture, owing partially to our British heritage, but more, perhaps, to the country’s foundational conceit, that the common law, which required mediators to interpret and apply, is inadequate to the defense of liberty. Our particularly Protestant approach to constitutionalism defines our respect for the laaw, but also compels some distrust of lawyers, because average men and women should be able to understand and interact with the law. This is clearly true. But a decent respect for specialization is all that’s needed to understand that lawyers might be over-represented in political careers because they’re particularly trained for those careers. Shooting holes in statutory regimes is what we’re payed to do; and the guys that know how to break the system probably should be in charge of keeping it in working order.

Interesting, too, how brazenly the Republican Party, or at least this Republican candidate, is willing to write off the entire lawyer vote, and any fundraising that group could provide. It’s true that lawyers are a particularly liberal bunch. I suppose the right’s viscerally appealing but intellectually hollow approach to constitutionalism has been repelling those who know what they’re talking about for years; but stunts like this won’t help.

Mitt Romney Slumming It in Buckhead

From Mitt Romney’s Twitter feed, one sees he stopped to have lunch with the regular guys at the OK Cafe, a restaurant in Atlanta. The presidential implication is that Romney’s in touch with the “common man”; but as Atlanta residents will tell you, the OK Cafe isn’t really the common man’s lunch spot. It’s in the middle of residential Buckhead, at West Paces Ferry and Northside Drive. One has to drive for five minutes to not see a house worth upwards of two million dollars. As such, it’s fairly expensive (by Atlanta standards), and serves mostly the upper-middle and upper class students & parents of the three nearby private schools (Pace, Lovett, Westminster).

Don’t get me wrong. I love the OK Cafe. I used to live and go to school not ten minutes away. Mom & dad had lunch there all the time (before we moved away). But this all demonstrates just how easily the optics of any situation can be manipulated to make it look “populist” or “elitist.” Romney’s decision to sit with the guys from Marietta, wearing baseball hats, and not with the business-dressed men and women surrounding them, makes the staging pretty obvious.

Calvin gets it. Click to enlarge!

Death of the Statesman

Marco Rubio, insurgent tea party candidate in Florida, makes the case for disturbingly counterproductive anti-elitism explicit:

The republic works and isn’t designed to elect a bunch of experts. Really to be an expert in our republic means to know what life is like in the real world. I think that’s the promising thing of this election. I think the more you are in touch with the real lives of everyday people, the better you are going to be as a representative of those people in a republic.

How interesting to see the term “republic,” used by Plato to describe the importance of wise governance, abused in a paragraph disclaiming that very value, and its long heritage.

That said, Rubio and his tea party colleagues have something of a point: in a modern democracy, we shouldn’t, and can’t expect our statesmen to be subject matter experts, and when people like me criticize them for this error, we might be ignoring an important distinction.

Rather, the statesman’s expertise should be in the application of another’s expertise to public problems, which implies a respect for, and willingness to listen to, the knowledge of others. Rubio’s error is really in imagining that the wisdom of “everyday people” can substitute for the expert analysis, when it should, in fact, inform (but perhaps not always determine) only the application.

Such is the task of representation. It is not “populism,” and not noble, to give the people what they want, because they want it. We call that pandering, or demagoguery. Wise representatives both listen to and guide public opinion, but do not in the process ignore objective truths, even if those truths are unpopular.

To do otherwise, and let the people imagine away hard truths, is not populism. It’s just bad governance. True populism lies in the faithful discharge of the representative’s related task, ensuring that the proper, valid place of elites in government does not allow them to substitute their subjective policy preferences for those of the people, during the application process. The statesman heeds the elite’s advice when given in the interest of all, and the populist ignores it when selfishness takes over, or the elite’s competency ceases.

Tax policy, and especially the coming debate over Bush’s upper-class tax cuts, provides an easy example. The objective case for upper-class tax cuts has never been strong; so the statesman would consider letting them expire, while the populist would demand it outright. It is nothing short of stunning, and proof-positive of how warped our conception of the elite’s place in society has become, that this outcome remains in doubt.

Soooo Many White People

I count one (1) non-white person, a little kid, in this entire 1:20 video.

Also, there’s the meme, popular among the far-far-right, that Obama is “arrogant,” because he wears his intellect on his sleeve. How do we feel about a video, putatively about the “common people,” spattered with shots of adoring fans waving Sarah’s book, and concluded with a showy signature?

Yes, But What’s “Their” Job Description?

“Day By Day,” the conservative comic with oversexualized female characters, provides one of the more inane reactions to Terry Jones, the pastor who, for a brief time, threatened to burn a pile of Korans on September 11th. Maybe Jones shouldn’t burn the Koran, but where do these “politicians” get off telling him what to do? Last time I checked, they work for us!

Haha, sure. This is an accurate statement of very basic democratic theory. But more precisely, the relationship between the citizen, and his elected representative, isn’t just one of employment. It’s one of delegation. Citizens delegate the responsibility and duty to, with input from the “cleint,” honestly and aggressively represent the peoples’ best interests. This relationship implies a knowledge gap. It’s implausible that any and every citizen will acquire subject matter expertise in international relations, science, defense policy, etc., but the representative acquires that knowledge and uses it to vindicate the citizens’ policy preferences. Like identified cleaning products, they work hard so we don’t have to.

Consequentially, in a functioning republic, sometimes the representative’s expertise, and responsibility to his client, will suggest a conclusion contrary to the client’s policy preference. When that happens, it’s not always an indication that “elitism” is at work. Sometimes — but, I stress, not always — the politicians just might know better. Specialization works, and makes a democratic republic inherently superior to a true democracy.

A Synthesis on Elitism

Yesterday, the most-viewed column at the Wall Street Journal was exactly what you’d expect — “In Defense of Sarah Palin,” with a snide subtitle to boot:

She understands that the U.S. has been a force for good in the world—which is more than can be said of our president.

Right. Because rejecting invasion as a force for good is tantamount to rejecting America as a force for good.

Podhoretz doesn’t muster much of an argument — it’s confined to these operative paragraphs:

[T]he derogatory things they say about Sarah Palin are uncannily similar to what many of their forebears once said about Ronald Reagan. [. . . .]

[T]he same species of class bias that Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers is at work among the conservative intellectuals who are so embarrassed by her. When William F. Buckley Jr., then the editor of National Review, famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, most conservative intellectuals responded with a gleeful amen. But put to the test by the advent of Sarah Palin, along with the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Party movement, they have demonstrated that they never really meant it.

We’re not to exclude her because she’s dumb (which he concedes); we’re to hold her up as a model of democratic virtue. Because she’s dumb.

I’m going to break with precedent and make a stunning admission: to the extent that Bill Buckley, quoted above, argues that picking a politician because he’s smart is just as foolish as picking a politician because he’s dumb, he’s probably right. The electorate’s calculus ought to be more complex than to simply gravitate to the stronger mind — although it does make for a good tie-breaker. Similarly, though, the conservative tendency to embrace anti-elitist narratives has long since outgrown its usefulness as either a justified backlash, or an attempt to find a proxy for common sense — especially when, as in Palin’s case, the underlying value itself is nowhere indicated (seriously, to pick one example among thousands, where’s the down-home country sense in demanding that your child be born in Alaska, when making the trek means he may not be born at all?).

Thankfully, there’s every indication that Podhoretz is the last of a dying breed. Palin’s supporters decrease as fast as, and perhaps in direct proportion with, the number of moderates left in the Republican Party. Over attempts to salvage her reputation, the right continues to bleed anyone with a degree of intellectual credibility. At least it’ll make for a fun primary.

Quasi-Book Review: Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society” Discounts 100 Years of Ideas

Whenever you hear the phrase “ideas have consequences,” be skeptical. It’s basically a shorthand, designed to conceal the fact that the writer is about to invent his own, fanciful set of consequences for a wholly innocuous set of ideas. So it goes with Thomas Sowell’s new book, Intellectuals and Society, heralded as one of the year’s “hottest conservative titles.” Tragically, Sowell saw fit to blog his book’s thesis, thus depriving us of the pleasure of having to read his tome before commenting on it. Ah well.

On trial in Sowell’s book is nothing less than the entire corpus of knowledge earned during the twentieth century, accused of, quite simply, destroying the century. It’s the kind of affair that would make Q smile.

Naturally the villains, though, are the producers of ideas — the “intellectuals,” a caste of effete liberals who’ve never done a damn bit of good in their sorry lives. Now hold, you may say. Technology cleans our water, protects us from disease, and prolongs our lives. These inventions, and their “intellectual” creators, can’t be naturally evil. True. But technology is a product of ideas, not an idea itself. Ideas are evil, as are their creators and their consequences; their intended physical products, however, are not. Only one who thinks towards a concrete, tangible goal can avoid being reckless, or indeed evil, by generating useless ideas.

All these people [twentieth century engineers] produced a tangible product or service and they were judged by whether those products and services worked. But intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas, and they are usually judged by whether those ideas sound good to other intellectuals or resonate with the public.

Yes; Thomas Sowell’s “hot conservative title” is an argument against thought for its own sake, be it art, philosophy, or even (one imagines) music, because the consequences of such reckless thinking are unpredictable.

What makes someone write a book like this? We’ve long acknowledged, candidly, that ideas can be dangerous, but the answer has always been (and should always be) temperance and trust. Sowell takes this modern lesson and extracts from it an unresolvable class warfare, between those who keep to themselves, dependent presumably on “common sense,” and those who invent, for better or worse. Is it just anti-elitism run amok? Surely his argument for intellectual complacency deserves NRO’s “conservative” appellation, at least by one definition of the word, but there’s a line between “standing athwart history,” and actively pushing humanity back into the past.

The Fraught Relationship Between Democracy and Science

Courtesy Julia Galef, a great friend of mine and a gifted writer. Look for a joint blogging operation between Ms. Galef, myself, and a few others sometime in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, read this post of hers, exploring the perilous situations that emerge when America’s anti-elitist tradition falsely flags science as an enemy. An excerpt:

Dubious scientific claims also get a boost from an attitude that scientific theories merit the same pluralistic treatment as personal beliefs. America’s respect for diverse opinions and value systems is one of our core democratic principles. But science isn’t democratic. It has right answers, and it has wrong ones. “Maybe it’s the logical extension of the American ideal of wanting to be open-minded and fair. The instinct is good, it just doesn’t work in science,” says Offit. American populism and pride in autonomy have made the CRC’s second brainchild, “Teach the Controversy,” another wildly successful sound bite for creationism. The implication is: “Let us make up our own mind, we don’t want somebody in an ivory tower telling us what to think,” says Scheufele. And just as the ambiguity of the word “theory” helps the anti-evolutionists’ case, so does the ambiguity of the word “belief.” Whether unthinkingly or in an effort to be extra-judicious, journalists have been known to refer to people “believing in” evolution (as opposed to accepting it), adding more fuel to the fallacy that science is a matter of personal opinion.

That misguided pluralism in science coverage plays right into the media’s natural love of conflict. “The problem on the global warming story is that the science just keeps confirming that we’re in a tough situation and it’s getting worse, and that news does not lend itself to the kind of reporting that the media likes to do,” says Dr. Joseph Romm, editor of the blog Climate Progress. So in the name of “balance” and an interesting story, the media turns clear-cut scientific issues into he-said, she-said stories. “Frankly, it’s intellectually lazy,” Offit opines. Just like the instinct to treat all views equally, seeking a compromise may be a fine way of accommodating different preferences in a democracy. But it’s a misplaced impulse in science, where a “compromise” between a right answer and a wrong answer still yields a wrong answer. Elizabeth Culotta, contributing news editor at Science magazine, recalls, “I was once misquoted by a local reporter on intelligent design and called him to complain, and he apologized, then said, ‘But I was looking for some sort of middle ground.’”

Well done. In Adams’ words, “fact’s are deaf — deaf as adders! — to the clamor of the populace.”

More than a Feeling

The right’s ever-present critiques of “judicial activism” are probably best understood as expressing discomfort with the notion of the Constitution as a sword, a way of not just halting, but affirmatively rolling back prior encroachments by the majority into the minority’s solace. How curious, then, that Obama’s ascendancy would coincide with conservative attempts to use the Constitution as a means of social change — in the opposite direction, and without the intellectual backing that continues to power the progressive Constitution.

More and more, we hear conservatives tout the Constitution as a document of “limited government,” therefore antithetical to everything President Obama stands for (e.g.). Although we’ve previously addressed that question specifically, and legally, we might be giving our opponents too much credit. While the Constitution does create a “limited government,” no conservative commentator has ever truly traced the logical steps between that point and the conclusion that, say, health care reform would be unconstitutional. Rather, most commentators seem content to rest conservatism’s case on the general sentiment that government is and ought to be “limited,” whatever that means.

For a political theory premised elsewhere on the idea that constitutional “feelings” shouldn’t compel constitutional rules, this intellectual laziness is unforgivable. The “rights” revolution that, over the course of the twentieth century, transformed the Constitution into a profoundly countermajoritarian document relied upon a rigorously intellectual attempt to re-ground the Constitution in democratic theory, addressing its flaws while preserving its strengths. At the movement level, progressive rhetoric on rights has always been accompanied by well-grounded legal arguments, originalist or otherwise. By omitting this intellectual core and proceeding on rhetoric alone, the conservative “limited government” movement manages to do little more than become their own straw-man version of liberalism in reverse.

The Constitution was drafted by men who understood that sentiments and feelings have little meaning unless reduced to rules by which we must all abide. The 20th century’s progressive leaders — those men and women who gave us Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, and a new way of addressing the countermajoritian difficulty — appreciated the distinction.  Middle-aged men dressed up as Revolutionary soldiers, waving the Gadsden Flag and wielding Obama/Joker posters, can hardly claim to be the equal of either.