[Above: A Conservative Anthropologist Surveys the Contemporary American Cultural Scene]
Whoops -- never get out of the boat. Or not. But while we're in the jungle, this article by Peter Wood of the rather interesting The King's College (located, I shit you not, in the Empire State Building) is illustrative of something I was discussing here, so let's dive into it. (It's also gotten a tart response here.)
If you'll recall, I was arguing that Movement Conservatives are obsessed with discovering substitutes for the cultural capital they sense they lack. They have a peculiar attitude towards academia: on the one hand, they condemn it as a place of worthless Leftist indoctrination, and on the other, they're intensely and sometimes almost touchingly excited to show off any sort of academic stripes they can sew onto their sleeves like so many Kiss Army patches.
The King's College itself would seem to be a case in point. It is, it appears, a college. It is accredited, by the NY Board of Regents, which is a recognized accreditation body (no, really) -- although "with condition," which could mean a lot of things. I know nothing of the school's specific situation beyond what's in the public record and on its website, but accreditation by the NY Regents is a bit unusual -- look at the list of the other NY colleges that do this. (Middle States is the usual route.) Maybe it's just because the place is relatively new. Well, good luck to 'em. At any rate, Roy may be pleased that someone took his advice.
Because, quite explicitly, the school is a wingnut factory. Take note of the award they announce they have won on their homepage, for instance: they are included in "The Intercollegiate Studies Institute Guide to All-American Colleges," a publication which you can read about here, complete with an approving blurb from noted scholar Phyllis Schlafly:
All-American Colleges is a terrific guide to help conservatives choose a college that’s not committed to left-wing indoctrination. If you graduate from one of these lesser-known schools, you might even become president of the United States-just like Ronald Reagan did.
Right. More likely, though, you'll just have it made in the wingnut subculture, where you can never really fail. Because one of the most Solemn Principles of the Free Market is, if you run around spouting enough bullshit about the Solemn Principles of the Free Market, some happy asshole who's actually managed to make piles of money in the Free Market will very likely want to buy you a condo.
But be that as it may. I have no real complaint with The King's College, have fun, live long and prosper, whatever. (Waves pale, waxy hand in despairing gesture; adjusts monocle; pours more $3 booze into cobwebby plastic container.) My point is that there is a close structural correspondence between the wingnut claims about the "MSM" and the wingnut claims about the academy. You have the formation of Fox News, and you have the formation of The King's College.
In both cases we may observe the implementation of a radical agenda under the guise of a false corrective in the direction of objectivity. That is to say, Fox calls itself "fair and balanced" and yet splatters the screen with the thin, watery stuff Tony Snow melts off his testes. But this is OK -- after all, Wolf Blitzer is a Hardcore Stalinist, so it all balances out. Likewise, in academia we have The King's College -- but other than that, for most of the rubes, I hear Noam Chomsky teaches 45,234 sections of freshman composition all across the country every fucking semester.
In both instances, it's an attempt to grab the center, to control the high grounds of the reasonable in the name of a specific group with a specific ideological agenda. The really fun part is that both Fox AND the Academic Arm of the Consevative Movement (the balanus pennae) are basing their appeal to legitimacy upon the authority of Journalism or the Academy -- but for both institutions, any authority they have rests upon their status as objective participants in the general field of public discourse. Thus, we have this ironic, even clownish appeal on the part of "conservative" cultural forces: "Don't listen to them! They are unfair and biased! Listen to me! I am also unfair and biased! But differently so! Because I love AMERICA and JESUS!" Feh.
Sad to say, Peter Wood, your man the Provost of The King's College who went after that angry unhinged leftist Jon Chait so ferociously, would seem to be rather shameless in this class of dishonesty, in this subordination of the academic enterprise to cheap partisan ends. Let's explore, shall we? Yes! Let's!
Wood's thesis is roughly the following:
I devote a chapter of my new book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to tracing how American politics got infected with a distinctly contemporary style of anger that I call New Anger. This is the anger of show-offs and eager-to-ignite match-heads. It had been gaining ground in American culture for decades before arriving in mainstream politics. When it did arrive in politics, New Anger found homes on both the Left (e.g. Howard Dean) and Right (e.g. Ann Coulter), but the Left provided much more commodious quarters.
Speaking politely, as from one academic to another, this is all my balls. It's Malkinism in tweed; for the rebuttal, see here and passim. Or, see common sense: Dean is a centrist by any rational measure, but he once yelled on the campaign trail and was so nutty as to be correct that the Iraq war was a dumb idea. Ann Coulter is just plain nuts in a very boring way.
But it's not so much the thesis as it is the impressively lame way Wood goes about defending it. It's actually pretty funny. First:
When I discuss the Left’s embrace of New Anger with people across the political spectrum, two not very satisfactory explanations keep coming up. One is that the party that is out of power has more to gripe about. Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the Left gravitated to a form of anger that exacerbated its unpopularity. Nor, why the Right, in similar circumstances kept its New Anger aficionados on the margins.
The notion that "the Left's anger exacerbated its unpopularity" is a cherished chestnut of the New Stupid (my term for the rhetorical strategies popularized by National Review Online authors), but I've never seen a scrap of empirical evidence to support it. Wood offers none. Anyway, even your more intellectually challenged concern trolls mostly gave up on this schtick by about November of last year, so it is kind of nostalgic to see Wood still merrily flogging it in ought-seven. Another brilliant manuscript idea left broken on the rocks of an unexpected election result. Still, the show must go on, I suppose.
As for the idea that the Right in similar circumstances (locked out of the White House, I believe is the implication) behaved much better... well, history has shown that Vince Foster did indeed commit suicide by shooting himself in the head with a lesbian, so Wood's got us there.
The article is just amazing. I mean, just watch this. Watch it! This is from a man who is soon going to call himself an "anthropologist":
The other explanation that comes up, almost always from people on the Left, is that the extreme anger has an extreme cause. It is President Bush’s fault, because he has provoked beyond measure everyone outside his own Right-wing extremist base. According to this view, those on the Left who have resorted to flamboyant expressions of anger have done so because they are dealing with a historically unprecedented destruction by President Bush of the governing norms of American political discourse.
Got that? Here is the entirety of his rebuttal:
I think this explanation is even more dubious, requiring as it does a broad caricature of how President Bush has governed.
Period. No, that is it for anyone arguing that the Bush presidency has been a disaster.
This is not "academic discourse." It is not even polite discourse. It is nakedly offensive bullshit. To buy into it, you would have to believe that, say, the Iraq war was a good idea put forward to the American people in a transparent and soberly realistic fashion. And to believe that, at this late date, is crazy. And far outside the realms of what most Americans would call rational.
I'm terribly afraid that if people like Peter Wood are serious about "civility," they need to stop advancing silly arguments. Because the sad fact is, they are confining themselves to a very strange little world of their own device, a skull and bones shop of the heart, as it were. Also, they're very annoying.