David Brooks says liberals need to get philosophy in his op-ed today. I’m sure folks will be weighing in on the matter, both critiquing and agreeing with his point. In any case, The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky already wrote Brooks’ column over a month ago:
I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are (my excellent young staff excepted, naturally; I’m mostly wondering if young Democratic Hill aides have read, for example, The Vital Center or any John Dewey or Walter Lippmann or any number of things like that).
I’m all for Tomasky’s recommendation. But since I know a thing or two about post-structuralism, let me take up the issue of academic thought that Brooks raises:
Liberals are less conscious of public philosophy because modern liberalism was formed in government, not away from it. In addition, liberal theorists are more influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys.
As a result, liberals are good at talking about rights, but not as good at talking about a universal order.
This is meant as caricature, and even so Brooks is begging the question. A public philosophy need not concern itself with a universal order to make sense or be useful. What it needs is public-ness, an engagement with actually existing public sphere. Instead, the academy to the left of history have been cut off in their own counterpublic. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it uses "politics" in inverse proportion to its engagement with actual political organization, power or decisionmaking. The reasons are complex and mutual. On the one hand, the humanities have lost the role and prestige they once had (combined, not coincidentally, with overproduction of degrees), and their powerlessness has only fueled a discourse more concerned with France in 1968 than the U.S. in 2005. On the other hand, current-day humanists think they’re discussing contemporary politics by repeating abstruse mantras (which may have a kernel of truth, mind you) yet don’t realize how shallow you have to scratch before you find the latent humanist. I can’t count how many papers I’ve read or heard that cited Foucault something or other to make the point that sexual or racial minorities need to form political coalitions with one another! If they were freed from the need for intellectual window dressing, they could more productively be discussing C. Wright Mills’ Power, Politics and People. As regular readers will know, I’ll defend the intellectual use of certain abstruse poststructuralist thought, but just as often its function is to put a radical, obscuratinist verneer to a liberal, conventional position. I can’t help but think of Bourdieu’s complaint that the dominated fraction of the bourgeoisie (bobos in David Brooks terminology) care more about the aesthetics of politics than its substance.
But my gripes with academic language aside, there’s a bigger problem than what Brooks diagnoses. Those "post-modernists" aren’t liberal theorists, they’re part of the left, which has no shortage of ideas and philosophies to toss around. (Where are Marx and Weber in his list?) And when you add in the nonacademic, popularizing thinkers, like Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky, you have a lot of people who do like to read and debate ideas. I’ll pit Cambridge’s bookstore culture against any red state city’s. Only, those ideas are ones that discourage them from joining a center-left political party. I know lots of people who vote Democratic reliably, but few who would call themselves Democrats. This, more than a lack of Dewey in our lives, may speak to the base problem.
[Maybe I wrote too soon. Additional thoughts in the comments.]
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