On Wickedness (Part V)

But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does no know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see is own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity he would be doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

I've been blogging over the last week on the permanence conservative wickedness: on the wickedness you see when you turn on your TV, and see the progressive standard-bearer in this current presidential election painted via insinuating smears as a crypto-fascist; on the wickedness you see when you're in the library stacks and you stumble across Republican National Committee pamphlets dated 1940, and see the progressive standard-bearer painted via insinuating smears as a war-mongering Communist. I've been promising my reflections upon how best to confront this apparently permanent state of affairs, but I've been delaying that post, just like I'd been delaying writing about the permanence of conservative wickedness in the first place. Why? It's hard to write about. It's elemental it gets at the guts.

How do I know this one will get at the guts? When I have something really difficult and deep to write, I develop certain strange psychosomatic illnesses that keep me in bed. Ask my wife and she'll tell you: that's when I usually have the most interesting things to say.

I spent several mornings last week, and this morning, in bed. Easy to describe the situation. Very difficult to express my very complicated, clouded, and perhaps unpleasant ideas about what the consequences should be.

Read the Dostoevsky quote above. Then read one of the comments I received after describing the latest bout of conservative wickedness—the kind of comments I always receive during bouts of conservative wickedness:

I have a really hard time understanding how the U.S. could possibly be so poor at listening.... Then I remember that I learned how to research at home from my Mum, a librarian. My Dad has a Ph.d., and tells me that she taught him how to research as well... So it sounds like a lot of our problems can be traced back to our fundamental education. So why is it o unimportant to the majority of the people in the country?

How to summarize a sentiment like that? Like this: "I'm smart. If only everyone were as smart as I was, they would see the world as I do, and my political adversaries could never prevail."

This is not, to put it mildly, a notably effective political appeal—as Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and '56, famously quipped when one of his supporters, overflowing with exuberance after one of his speeches, cried, "Governor Stevenson, you'll have the vote of every thinking American!" Stevenson replied: "But I need a majority."

Techically, a true thing to say. But politically, so very, very wrong. In wryly congratuling himself and his audience for comprising some sort of superior intellectual elect, he was calling everyone who didn't like Adlai Stevenson an idiot. And no one likes to hear that they are an idiot. Especially if they are, in fact, an idiot.

Every likes to hear that they are smart, however—even if the person they are hearing it from is him or herself.

Here's another response I read to the latest bout of conservative wickedness. This one is related to the "if only the rest of the country was as smart as we are" conceit, but comes at the problem from a slightly different angle: it is that if we could only explain to the masses exactly why they are dupes, slowly enough, cleverly enough, carefully enough, firmly enough (perhaps with vigorous application of CAPITAL LETTERS), and the scales will fall from their eyes. "Address the surface meaning of the ads and claims, and attack the press for promoting them too," this commenter suggests:

Address the surface meaning of the ads and claims, and attack the press for promoting them too. Like with 'presumptuous.' Ask why all the press people are now using that exact word, and what exactly do you mean saying that Obama is presumptuous? Follow up the question and keep pressing it.... what do Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have to do with Obama? Why would John McCain embarrass a friend and campaign contributor in order to attack Obama?... When they defend it by telling a lie, like how they're teh three biggest celebrities, you go, "no they're not," you say something like they're all better known and more popular than John McCain, but how is it Obama's fault that he's more popular than McCain? Why isn't it McCain's fault? And what do Paris Hilton and Britney Spears have to do with anything? Just keep asking over and over and over, what does ANY of this have to do with Obama? The key to understanding all this that NONE OF IT SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT OBAMA, IT ONLY TELLS US HOW THE SPEAKER FEELS ABOUT OBAMA.... Calling it "presumptuous" says something about the SPEAKER, namely, that for whatever reason, the speaker believes that Obama is claiming somethign that is somehow above his station.

Note the appearance and reappearance of the word "just": if we just do this; if we just do that, if we just keep doing it over and over and over, wickedness will lose its force. Explain it just right, and our ideological adversaries will confess the error of their ways. How comforting if it were so. Remarkably comforting. Pleasurable, in fact. So pleasurable that people pay to watch it happen.

There is a genre of movie that reached a peak in mid-century America, around the time Adlai Stevenson was acknowledging his political difficulties in a nation where not every American was "thinking," that I like to call "liberal narcissist." The gold standard is Twelve Angry Men. A jury is about to convict a Hispanic kid of murder because their every instinct, and a relatively thorough consideration of the evidence as presented, clearly suggests his guilt. A single juror, played by Henry Fonda, insists on slowing down the train, re-examining the evidence piece by piece. Slowly, he's able to persuade more and more of his fellows that reasonable doubt does, in fact, exist. All, that is, except for one juror: a brutish conservative who ends up admitting that the reason he's sure the kid is guilty is that that was just the way "those people" are. Then something extraordinary is depicted, as the picture ends: the conservative, realizing he has just revealed himself as an irrationalist and a bigot, slinks into the corner in shame. The film proposes, just like Dostoevsky's accused pure, innocent child, that thus "enlightened," "man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble." Wickedness shrinks away, humiliated. "Thinking Americans" triumph, as they ever must.

Movies like this, TV shows, books, feel really, really good for liberals watch; that is why liberals keep on making and watching so many of them—the entire run of West Wing; the Joan Allen film The Contender from a couple of years ago, which has been running frequently on HBO these days.

Fairy tales feel good, too. And for the same reason: because they stage scenarios that aren't true—that are better than brute truth.

But no one hustles onto comment threads of blogs and says, "If only we can make things work like fairy tales work, by gum, progressives can win every election!" We recognize this is childish. But liberals don't, to their detriment, tend to recognize that wishing everyone were purely rational is just as childish. I reacquainted myself with that Dostoevsky quote by stumbling upon the blog of "a low-level academic who likes to vent his spleen a little to much." [1] He or she does a pretty good job of it, I'd say. The post in question is called "The Problem With Liberalism," and, using Carl Schorske's account of defeat of liberalism in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, and my own account of the defeat of liberalism in Nixonland, notes that, "In both Austria and America, liberals held to core principles that betrayed them. Liberalism has its roots in the Enlightenment, and like good Enlightenment thinkers, liberals in both cases thought that being on the side of reason would win them a political victory." He concludes, in thunder:

This conceit might be liberalism's biggest blind spot, that humans will stop doing wrong when they know better. While we humans can think, knowing that something is wrong has never stopped us from doing it, in fact it makes the pleasure of doing bad all the more sweet.

Conservatives wickedly play to unreason because being unreasonable is part of what human beings are. Indeed, it is part of the pleasure of being human. The recognition of this is part of what makes conservatism conservative. And it's not going away.

I'm reading what I wrote above, and still haven't got to the bottom of what I want to convey. So expect more soon. Trust that I am not offering a counsel of despair. Here, in fact, is a fine piece of writing [2] that gets at why, to tide you over until I figure out a better way to explain that the human reality of unreason does not ever have to be an alibi for progressive defeat, and has, indeed, underwritten many of progressivism's most famous victories.