"You don't deserve us!"

Here's another nice little political parable for our times (courtesy Jessica Van Sack at The Boston Herald via Ed Morrissey): "Closed market’s valediction ironically explains its failure". Once upon a time, it seems, some people decided to start a business, as happens every day. They had a plan or business model, as usual, but the model didn't really work, and both the plan and the business failed, as also happens all the time. What's different about this time, and what makes it such a delightful parable, is the attitude of the failed owners (it was an upscale food market):

“Don Otto’s Market wants to say we had few customers that understood customer loyalty and its importance to our business,” a message on its Web site reads, later adding: “If you came in only for baguettes, the occasional piece of cheese, the occasional dinner . . . you can not tell yourself you were a supporter of our market.”

Heh. Apparently, the business plan amounted to: "have customers that understand customer loyalty and its importance to the business". Somehow I doubt that's going to revolutionize the business schools. But, you know, given what I'm sure was their target demographic -- the bien pensant liberal elite and their wannabe's -- perhaps the surprise that it didn't work is understandable; certainly that churlish bit of moral bullying on the way out is in keeping.

Now, the point of a parable is that it has a point. In the example of the unnecessary traffic lights a while back, the point was that a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom can open new, unexpected paths to freedom. Here, the point is that a foolish acceptance of fashionable beliefs is no sign of elitist superiority and no  ticket of entitlement. Sound familiar? Think of large portions of the Democratic Party in particular the last few years, and of the liberal-left in general. As Morrissey says, speaking of the writer of the bitter words above, they're really exhibiting a peculiar sort of contempt:

Her contempt for her customers is not dissimilar to the contempt shown by those in political office who pass laws barring restaurants from using saturated fats in their cooking, who ban Happy Meals, and who overhaul entire economic sectors because they believe people can’t make their own choices.

And then, when their policies lose them support on historic scales, the response is never to question policies or the plan itself -- instead, it's the customers' fault! You people are too angry, they say, too bitter, too clinging, too racist, too stupid, and you just don't listen! You don't deserve us!

And you know what? We don't. So maybe the lib-left should just close their doors, like any other business too good for their customers, and try to live off their sense of their own rectitude.

More Midterm reaction

And a nice contrast to the deranged screed a couple of posts ago -- here's what the BBC's Paul Adams describes as "one minute and nine seconds of pure advertising genius":



See, what I like -- nay, what I love -- about Sarah Palin is just the effect she has on the so-called "elite", on both left and right. She grates, she baffles, and she just generally messes with their heads -- look what she's done to poor, excitable Andy Sullivan, for example. Now, like David Gergen, I doubt that she'll actually run for President -- though the temptation to be the first female candidate for the office might be enough to do it -- but I think she's having a great time making a lot of people nervous just by threatening to run.

Why take such schadenfreudean delight in the discomfort of the putative elites, you might ask? Oh, just because they tend to treat political ideas and values as they treat fashion -- something merely to be donned and displayed as status symbols rather than thought about seriously. Which is true more on the liberal, bien pensant side, of course, as distinct from the conservative, snobby side. But on both sides the fun is mainly just in seeing an obstreperous opposition get in the face of complacent orthodoxies, and stay there.

So you go, girl.

UPDATE: While we're doing videos that spook the liberal elite, I might as well add this one, called "Fire from the Heartland":


Fire From The Heartland from Citizens United on Vimeo.

Taking the Rally to Restore Smart People seriously!

Funny at any time, but in the context of people who describe themselves as "smart", funnier:

Thanks to Doug Powers at  Michelle Malkin
and of course  Reason TV

Taking Jon Stewart seriously

See Taranto, Best of the Web, "Rally to Restore Authority":

The "sanity" for which Stewart claims to long is the authority of the old mainstream media--their ability to set the boundaries of newsworthiness and respectable debate, claiming to be above politics while actually skewing leftward--though not so far or so intensely leftward as, say, MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann.

Stewart mimics this authority by insisting that he is nonpartisan and nonideological. In truth, he is no more above politics than were Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather. But he's clever enough to know that a Ratheresque assertion of authority would make him look ridiculous. So instead he makes an appeal to antiauthority, escaping scrutiny by insisting he's just a comedian. "If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to," he smirked at Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire," back in 2004.

The kind of "sanity" for which Stewart claims to be nostalgic is a thing of the past. Its last redoubt is National Public Radio, which by firing Juan Williams has made itself look more like the Radio Moscow of a half century ago than the CBS.

Not that anyone should take Stewart seriously, but others do. Also, he did a good number on Olbermann once.

The spooking of the elite

A specter has been haunting the elites for a while now, of course, largely in the form of Sarah Palin -- she who will not go quietly into obscurity as they expected. It wasn't just that -- it was the frightening fact that every nail they tried to put into her coffin only seemed to give her extra strength, as though she were some unearthly, vampiric Barbie. And now, with the advent of the Palin look-alike Christine O'Donnell, not only is she growing in power, she's multiplying! Elite reps in the media have had to take their eyes off of Palin for the moment and execute a swift pivot to O'Donnell, but still without any other weapon at their disposal than repeated exercises in pointing out just how terribly, ridiculously, unfashionably non-elite she is. We can get a sense of their rising panic from noting the strain of their reach in a couple of recent examples.

First up is William Saletan in Slate, on "Christine O'Donnell, masturbation socialist". Saletan notes that O'Donnell is against socialism and then notes that 14 years ago, when O'Donnell was 27, she also expressed an opinion contrary to masturbation. Which last might be a bit silly, but, as Saletan is at least honest enough to note, was also merely echoing the teaching of a major faith. What is truly silly, on the other hand, is Saletan's vein-popping stretch to link anti-masturbation with socialism -- how does he do that, you ask? Watch:

In other words [paraphrasing O'Donnell], masturbation is wrong because you do it alone, outside the "moral order" of social relations in which you're supposed to perform your proper function. It's something you do for yourself instead of "giving" yourself to the larger purpose of human procreation. You're just a cog in the wheel. You exist to serve the community.

Oooookayy. I get it. So because you oppose the state treating you like "a cog in the wheel",  you should logically be opposed to any moral claim of the community, right? Ross Douthat, who provided me with the link in "Why We Have a Culture War", takes this down at far greater length than the simple guffaw it deserves.

The other one is also from Slate, a quick little potshot that, while it can't match Saletan for silliness (which would make a nice slogan of some sort), outdoes him in catty pettiness. It's about that other O'Donnell find:

... the thing I can't get past about Christine O'Donnell's assertion that she tried witchcraft is the way in which she describes her experimentation with it. What she said--twice--was that she "dabbled into witchcraft." Can we just point out for the record that you don't dabble "into" witchcraft, you dabble in it?

It's funny enough that she takes this seriously, as though no one else garbles the language, even twice, in the midst of an interview, but what really shows the tension is her sudden thought that, ... what, ... what if she planned this?! "I guess O'Donnell could have deliberately inserted a casual malaprop to enhance her populist appeal and distinguish herself from the nitpicking media elite, but she said this long enough ago that it doesn't seem purposeful." It's a nerve-wracking thought though, right? As Ann Althouse says (for whose link I must give thanks), "Hey! What if these rubes are just pretending to be rubes?"

Ah well. This is what gives an atheist like me such delight in Sarah and Christine and their ilk -- not just for the nature of their enemies, but for the confounding fear they inspire in the fashionably orthodox.

Beck, Palin, the rally, the Tea Party -- oh, my!

I should say up front that the Glenn Beck shtick itself doesn't really work for me. But sometimes you have to pick a side, and right now Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and all are preferable in my mind to the smug political, academic, media, and cultural elites that have dominated the scene too long. Now those elites, with their venerable left-liberal orthodoxies and assorted cultural neuroses, are old, tired, and angry, with ideas that were worn out generations ago, an inchoate attachment to the state as a kind of parent-protector, and a baffled, reactionary rage that people -- the People, ironically, that entity they've long reified and fetishized as an abstraction but never really cared much for as actual individuals -- now seem to be finding ways of working around their various forms of social control.

You can see the fault lines underlying these sides in much of the reaction to Beck's rally a few days back. Two members of the old elite, from both the overtly liberal and the monority country-club conservative constituencies, voiced their distinct but similar condescension in the NY Times (natch) "conversation" that I posted about previously. Here's another take that I think illustrates the baffled rage quite well -- it's Ed Kilgore in The New Republic (thanks to commenter itzik basman for the link):

Beck’s Saturday speech was then a rehashing of the age-old Christian Right tactic of claiming every conventional virtue, from piety to patriotism, for conservatives, with the implication that their cultural and political enemies share none of them.

Of course, the fact that their cultural and political enemies routinely bash such "conventional", not to say "bourgeois", virtues may have a little to do with this implication, but that's just what Kilgore altogether misses. As Brooks said so poignantly of the people at the rally, unaware of how his words reflected on his own crowd:

They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.

But, on the other hand, here's what I see as a little more nuanced (!) take that suggests the cultural fault lines may not yet be completely unbridgeable, at least with segments on either side -- this is Nick Gillespie, in Reason:

The organizers and the attendees are not part of the Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they are proto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money and they seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange (nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bank bailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effective in securing the borders, worry about an undocumented fall in morals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be a feature of the public square. Which is to say, like most American voters, they may well want from government precisely the things that it really can't deliver.

Writing in Reason, Gillespie obviously doesn't want to be seen as particularly pro-religion in any way, and that may at least partially explain his own condescension at the end. "Securing the borders", after all, is one of the minimal things a government is supposed to be able to deliver. And the curious bit about an "undocumented fall in morals" (did the crowd want government to worry about it? or were they just worried about it?) is almost comical, as though implying that it takes social scientists, of all people, to tell us if our morals have fallen. But still, like Brooks as well, and in contrast to Collins and Kilgore, say, Gillespie's reflections at least convey enough basic respect to retain some hope that the sides of the fault line can continue to talk.

But, one way or another, I think the times they are a-changin', in a way they haven't since the sixties.

P.S.: See this earlier post for more on the fault line and the choice of sides: "Labels: conservatives, libertarians, and liberals"

Beck and the unease of the elites

Jennifer Rubin, Commentary:

Brooks Cheers Beck — Honest!

And he does, however tepidly. It's not cats and dogs living together, yet, but coming from one of the "two mighty Davids" in the T.Coddington van Vorhees VII ratpack, it's something. Unfortunately, if you click through to the NY Times article itself, you'll see that he's in a dialog with Gail Collins, who can manage to make even Maureen Dowd read like an intellectual. "Do you think this feel-good moment is a permanent change of course?" she asks Brooks, with a flutter. "Most days the Tea Party folk still seem pretty ferocious."

Brooks, as Rubin shows, managed to hold his nerve a little better, and find some nice, if condescending, things to say:

I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights.

And that last sentence is appreciated. But Brooks' nervousness, though more complex than Collins', is apparent throughout -- first in his repeated need to signal his good standing in the elite by dissing Beck himself, as we see even as he's praising the gathering in the quote above; and second in his need to project his own genteel but largely ineffectual conservatism on the crowd:

... at the rally I don’t think the word “elite” was mentioned. There was a sense that the moral failings are in every home and town, and that what is needed is a moral awakening everywhere. After all, the stupid mortgages happened everywhere. The excessive consumption happened everywhere. This was an affirmation of bourgeois values, but against a rot from within, not an assault from on high. Again, at least at the rally.

So, perhaps, he hopes. He's right, though, that the phenomenon is really an affirmation of basic -- yes, "bourgeois" -- values, but one of the motivations underlying the movement that drew people to the rally is that such values are indeed being assaulted from "on high". At the end, Brooks reverts to his more obnoxious mode, still whistling as he walks past the manifestation of something he can't quite get his mind around:

People like those at last weekend’s rally want the Judeo-Christian ethic back, which sweetened and softened life on the frontier (physical or technological). And so they march. They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.

Again, note the projection of fears that are clearly evident in the elite itself. Something is happening here, but you don't know what is ... do you ... Mr. Brooks.