Clipping the Eagle's Wings

Kathy G weighs in at Crooked Timber [1] with just about the definitive post on this obscene business of Washington University in St. Louis conferring an honorary degree on Phyllis Schlafly. Two more things worth saying, however.

First, I want to respond to commenter Milton Appling below. He points out what he claims should be a mitigating factor: that no one should be surprised that Wash U. is wrapped up in this nonsense, given that they host a right-wing business school named for conservative benefactor John Olin: "That should be all that you need to know about Wash U regarding giving the Eagle an honorary degree." Another friend, a St. Louis native, likewise writes in to point out the institution's historic conservative, citing the way they dissolved their sociology department in the 1980s as a way to shake loose all the suspect lefties lodged within.

In fact, the Olin business is all you need to know why it's so important to press forward with the movement to shame Wash U. on their egregious lapse of intellectual standards.

One of the first principles of politics is to choose battlefields to fight on that unite your side and divide the opponents. The fact that Wash University's administration and benefactor class is lousy with the sort of conservatives who love Milton Friedman-style business schools is all the more reason to point up the absurdity of Washington University association with Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly believes a secretive cast of bankers—the "Bildergergers"—are conspiring to impose One World Government on the United States. She believed it in the 1960s, when she said the Bilderbergers were fronting for the International Communist Conspiracy, and she believes it now (or, at least, she believed it in 1997 when I interviewed her; I have it on tape) that that International Communist Conspiracy is fifteen years gone. Schlafly believes—or claimed to believe—that if the Equal Rights Amendment passed, boys bathrooms and girls bathrooms, would be outlawed, and that little girls would be forced to see little boys' wee-wees each and every day; and thatwomen would not be able to refuse their husbands if their husbands demanded they went out to work—would be slaves of their husbands. And yes, these things are crazy. And Phyllis Schlafly believes them, because Phyllis Schlafly—for all her brilliance, organizational accumen, and ability to gain get granted respect among the councils of the respected and powerful—is crazy. [2]

If the city of St. Louis learns, if the greater Washington University community learns, if America learns, if the world learns just how crazy she is, thanks to the efforts of this movement, the respectable business conservatives of Washington University's Oilin School will want nothing to do with her. She will be, as she should be, an albatross around their respectable conservative necks.

The Age of Reagan cannot survive the successful wedging of its business constituency, which craves nothing so much as respectability, and its lunatic constituency, who appear the more unrespectable the closer they're held to the light. And so, progressives, hold Phyllis Schlafly to the light. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Here's the other point, and it's a depressing, disconcerting one: in l'affair Schlafly we have already lost. If this campaign succeeds, there will still be not inconsiderable collateral damage to the progressive movement: conservatives will once more be able to claim themselves free speech martyrs, "silenced" by political correctness. It reminds me—yes, I truly am the hammer to which everything in the world of politics is a nail [3]—of a story involving, yes, Richard Nixon.

Early in 1966 Richard Nixon was offered an honorary degree from the University of Rochester. His political friends in New York—who understood themselves to be re-grooming the disgraced two-time loser's image as a responsible statesman, with an eye toward his 1968 presidential run—were ecstatic: occasions like his robe-bedecked commencement speech in Rochester were what would kill the poisoning image of the slashing, low-brow "old Nixon" at long last.

Only problem: the previous year a (then-Marxist) history professor at Rutgers said that he would "welcome" a Communist victory in Vietnam; the Republican gubernatorial candidate made it his marquee issue for the fall; and Nixon came to the state to campaign for him, braying thus:

I do not raise the question of Professor Genovese's right to be for segregation or integration, for free love or celibacy, for Communism or anarchy--in peacetime. But the United States is at war. [ed.: Anarchistic multiracial orgies, in wartime, no less!... If anyone had welcomed a Nazi victory during World War II there would have been no question about what to do. Leadership requires that the governor step in and put the security of the nation above the security of the individual.

The Rochester faculty, enraged that an enemy of academic freedom could be honored at their free academy, got up a petition to bar him from speaking. Nixon wrote a long and legalistic letter to the New York Times arguing that he as actually arguing for the preservation of academic freedom "by defending the system of government which guarantees freedom of speech to individuals." The swells at Nixon's Wall Street law firm, Len Garment wrote in his memoirs, were annoyed that he just didn't fold his cards and admit the mistake. The boss was nonplused. He told Garment to stop listening to the "damned press." Nixon understood that in fact he held all the cards in this game. In the Gallup Poll, among presidential contenders, he was the leading Republican by 13 points. Sticking it to the liberal intellectual elites didn't hurt him. It helped.

He spoke at Rochester in June in defiance of a successful faculty petition not to offer him an honorary degree, lying that "since leaving the office of Vice President it has been my policy not to accept honorary degrees." He both got across his right-wing message ("If we are to defend academic freedom from encroachment we must also defend it from its own excesses") are cloaked himself in the martyr's mantle of moral superiority.

Phyllis will, too. Even if she doesn't speak.

We have to stop these invitations before they start. Venal conservatives lobby for them. They harass liberal institutions to get them, by baiting boards of trustees that they will be excoriated for ideological "intolerance" for not extending them. Then—win win—they watch the fun that ensues.

No reason, for all that, not to fight this fight anyway. We can get ahead of the game, and force them to play it on our battlefield for once. Tie Phyllis Schlafly to Washington University, whether she speaks there or not. Make it poisonous for "respectable" conservatives to have anything to do with lunatic, lying conspiracy mongering constituency they need in order to succeed politically. Unite progressives. Split conservatives. Wash, rinse, repeat. We shall overcome.