Random Notes on Antiliberal Liberalism

Another Amy Sullivan pundit’s fallacy, another firestorm. A few comments:

• If you want to know why Sullivan generates so many hostile responses, although she seems to be a progressive arguing in good faith, this remarkable part of her response to Matt is the key: “Most parents don’t care that statistics of child wellbeing are improving overall; they worry about whether their kid is going to use drugs or start having sex early or become a victim of violence. Some twenty-something blogger telling them not to worry about it isn’t going to make them feel better.” This is the rhetorical strategy that Sullivan always uses: rather than making a case for cultural conservatism on the merits, she just projects her preferences onto some poorly defined demographic. The purpose of this is not to start a discussion, but to end it, to pre-empt any discussion of Sullivan’s–I mean, American parents’–a priori values. You’re not allowed to bring evidence of the actual effects of cultural products into the discussion; people believe what they believe, and one has to pander to that. Even if that’s true for politicians, it certainly isn’t true for “twenty-something bloggers.” Surely not everybody has to accept these claims on blind faith.

• The other element of this strategy (also familiar from her arguments about abortion) is to be maddeningly vague about what you’re actually advocating. If Sullivan was willing to make concrete arguments about what should be done, we could have a useful argument (although I would almost certainly disagree, for the reason Yglesias explains well), but she won’t. I’m willing to accept that there’s a middle ground between the cultural liberatrianism I prefer and James Dobson, but people advocating a middle ground need to specify what they’re talking about. If she’s just saying that Democratic politicians need to respond to cultural anxieties, fine, except that 1)they already do, and 2)nobody disagrees with that; we culturally liberal elitists are perfectly well aware that national Democratic candidates shouldn’t sound like us, so there’s not much of an argument there. As with abortion, Sullivan’s punchline seems to that there’s a crucial demographic for whom cultural issues are important enough that people who would otherwise vote Democratic wouldn’t, and yet can be persuaded without offering substantive policies but with minor shifts in rhetorical tone. My problem with this argument remains that these voters, for all intents and purposes, don’t exist.

• There’s an additional problem evident in the way Sullivan frames the debate. One might ask why so many people are obsessed with culture, when the evidence for the influences attributed to it are so weak. Could it be that politicians and pundits like Sullivan continually tell parents that they should be obsessed with culture? This isn’t just harmless misdirection, either. The national political agenda can only be focused on a fraction of the policy solutions being advocated. The more people are convinced that TV is causing certain social pathologies, the less likely they are to agitate for solutions that might actually be relevant to the problem (which, of course, is why the cultural conservative agenda is so effective for Republicans.) I would like liberals to point out that other liberal democracies have lower rates of violence and teen pregnancy despite their children being exposed to similar cultural influences, which suggests that other factors may be more relevant that pop culture. But according to Sullivan, you’re not even allowed to point this out, because if parents believe what politicians tell them you’re not allowed to say anything different.

• Those who believe that moralizing rhetoric is the key to Democratic success have an obvious problem to explain: the 2000 campaign. That year, the Democratic candidate was someone who rose to national prominence based on a campaign against rock music. And, just to be very safe, they picked as their Veep the most moralistic windbag they could find. We know what happened, and it should be noted that Gore was utterly savaged by the same pundits who say that Democrats need to pander to people’s cultural anxieties more. It’s true, of course, that Kerry (who was extremely timorous on cultural issues anyway) got less of the popular vote. But in context, the results of Kerry’s campiagn were much more impressive. Kerry came closer than anyone else has come to unseating a wartime incumbent in a decent economy. Gore did very poorly for an incumbent in a time of peace and prosperity. I’m not saying that Gore lost because of his identification with cultural moralism, but I am saying that it’s a trivial factor.

• Please, God, let the “liberal/communitarian” dichotomy remain dead and buried.