The perfection of the liberal moment?
George Will levitates into the ether in a discussion that begins with Adlai Stevenson and Barack Obama. He asks whether Senator Obama has become today’s “prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting”, as Stevenson was said to be in the 1950’s:
Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, “what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude.” They sought from Stevenson “not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.” They especially rejected “American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,” rather than — in Michelle Obama’s words — “just downright mean.”
The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension. Obama voiced such liberalism with his “bitterness” remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.
It would of course be entirely too mean spirited at this point to wonder if we should reconsider all those fainting episodes of a couple of months ago. Surely there could not have been any calculation or manipulation involved in them. Or, as any preacher’s kid would know, could there have been some manipulation in these events for the rubes that watched them at the revival meeting or on TV? You have to admit that the thought is surely plausible, given all that has happened in the intervening months.
In any event, it is, however, becoming a little clearer that, in some important ways, stylistic if not substantive, Senator Obama appears more and more to be the son, not the nephew, of his spiritual mentor.