I’ve been rereading Lionel Trilling lately. I’ve long been a fan of his unique ability to write a meandering essay that nonetheless feels as though it has a singular focus.
In any event, a recent editorial by Matt Franck in the Washington Post made me think of Trilling.
Franck surveys the many ways in which proponents of gay marriage and other progressive social causes ignore the arguments made by conservatives, falling back on the assertion that resistance is based on “hate.”
And not just in matters of sexual liberation. Liberals and progressives tend to approach questions of economic policy with the assumption that those who oppose them are motivated by greed or are simply reflecting “special interests.” It’s as if they can’t imagine (or refuse to imagine) any reasons for conservative economic policy based on a cogent political philosophy or a vision of the common good.
Which brings me back to Trilling. At the outset of his most famous book, The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling makes a bald statement about the liberal monopoly on critical thinking. “In the United State at this time,” he wrote, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is a plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
There was, of course, a conservative sentiment in post-War American that remained quite strong, even predominant, as the election of Eisenhower would demonstrate. This Trilling knew. “But,” he continued. “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
I’ve always liked that sentence, which is justly famous, and turns out to be very relevant today—except that it’s the liberals who, when faced with counter-arguments, resort to irritable mental gestures of the sort that Matt Franck identifies.
At this point the legacy of liberal dominance gives progressives control over many important institutions—media, foundations, universities—and they are quite willing to use this control to ruthlessly exclude conservatives. (Who, after all, would want to hire someone motivated by nothing more than “hate” and “greed”?) But in my experience liberals find it difficult to reckon with reasoned opposition. So, sixty years after Trilling published The Liberal Imagination, the tables seemed to have turned. Liberalism is certainly capable of generating lots of ideas, as a look at publishers’ catalogues indicated, but is in nonetheless the old, complacent, and established mentality, one that has gone stale.
By my reckoning, we are living in the mirror image of the 1950s. Then a conservative social outlook seemed predominant, but in retrospect we can see that it was brittle and ready to break. Today, most people conform to what seems like a permanent liberal consensus, but irritable mental gestures suggest a similar fragility.
Perhaps the next decade will be a mirror image of the 1960s. I hope so.
December 21st, 2010 | 2:26 pm
This is an insightful posting and reminds me of a book by uberliberal wannabe-policy-wonk George Lakoff. Read his most famous academic work, _Moral Politics_, and you will see clearly that conservatives have interests (94-5) while liberals have principles — or perhaps simply sentiments which parade as principles — and are unstained by self-interest (119, 173). Even black Americans’ support for affirmative action not out of self-interest but out of a deeply empathetic “moral focus” (290).
If you are a liberal devoid of the taint of self-interest, who operates only out of deep empathy for the oppressed Other (oppressed, of course, by conservatives), what other conclusion apart from “hatred” and “bigotry” can be reached regarding conservative opposition to liberal “moral focus”?
December 21st, 2010 | 3:36 pm
There is a key difference between the 1950’s and now: Liberal fascism. Recently the University of Kentucky denied a position to a man because he was “potentially evangelical.” If one believes that one’s opponents can only be motivated by greed or hate, the urge to employ illiberal methods to advance liberal goals can be almost impossible to resist.
December 21st, 2010 | 3:40 pm
To think – we have liberals to blame for camoflauge speech like Deconstruction. And they think they are the ones with imagination? Puhleeeease.
December 21st, 2010 | 4:58 pm
People forget what a towering public intellectual Trilling was at the time of his death in 1975. Maybe that’s what we should expect given the growth of conservative intellectual culture since then. There was National Review, and Commentary magazine had only recently turned right. Those were about the only serious venues for conservative thinkers. First Things and the Weekly Standard had yet to be conceived. Ditto talk radio. Charles Krauthammer has described Fox News, which was born in the 1990s, as creating an “alternative reality,” meaning that “the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone.”
So Trilling’s tough skepticism about the liberal pieties, about the smugness of the educated middle class, has lost some of its edginess. Let’s be clear, though: He only questioned liberalism, never really repudiated it. But for someone of his stature to do even that much back then took courage. And honesty. He personally disliked Whittaker Chambers, for example, but, when the feds came to question Trilling about him, Trilling, as he told his friends, was clear: He told them the truth, which was that in his estimation the truth was something that Chambers could also be trusted to tell.
December 21st, 2010 | 5:30 pm
I always liked James Lileks take on this particular bit of parallelism:
“Discontent: the sign of a Serious Person. If you’re Deep and Real and Concerned with the way things are, you’re *pissed off*. Unless you’re angry about taxes, race-based government policies and the inefficiencies of the public education system, in which case you are an Angry White Male who has to pick gravel out of your knuckles every night. Remember: the Right is full of people who are Resentful and
Angry, but the Left is Pissed and Discontented, which is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.”
–James Lileks, on Michael Moore
December 21st, 2010 | 7:18 pm
Thought experiment: I wonder what would happen if a liberal were about to have his head cut off by an Islamic terrorist. Would he entertain thoughts of becoming a conservative, or would he just resign himself to certain cultural differences? Discuss among yourselves.
December 21st, 2010 | 11:36 pm
Its hard to imagine a more incompetent rule than the one that kills 50 million children in and partially out of the womb. Surely raising up a wretched abortion ideologue as US President and suffering the consequences is as far as a nation can go. God I hope Prof. Reno is right.
December 22nd, 2010 | 1:11 am
[...] Liberalism and Irritable Mental Gestures – R.R. Reno, First Thoughts [...]
December 22nd, 2010 | 1:51 am
While both Reno and Mr. Franck raise problems that certainly exist in some parts, the evidence they provide doesn’t live up to their sweeping claims; their incidents are just that: incidents. The events mentioned by Mr. Franck barely rise above the level of anecdotes and Reno provides no examples at all. Information I found myself doesn’t seem to point strongly towards their views, either.
Finding evidence of consistently poor logic on the left proved difficult and neither author provided much in their articles. Therefore, I am inclined to say that, barring further evidence, their claims are implausible and unsupported by available evidence.
I wrote a bit more on this and the Washington Post article here:
http://glaufiles.blogspot.com/2010/12/hate-card.html
December 22nd, 2010 | 11:40 am
Glau, I am curious. There are thousands and perhaps millions of sites which purport to give examples of Reno’s and Franck’s premise. It is my impression, in fact, that I have read acres of the stuff over the last thirty years, each with different examples. Are you asking that writers who make such claims provide detailed supporting evidence each and every time they write on the subject, else you will treat them dismissively?
I could, in fact, send you several hundred links from my own site – I wouldn’t ask you to wade through all 2700 posts for the 10% on the topic – and I imagine others could as well. Many others. Actually, there are new books each year on the topic, which I am guessing are not repeating a few incidents endlessly. All in all, I think you are setting up a game where the rules are different for each side, then declaring one side victor with smirking triumph.
December 22nd, 2010 | 1:01 pm
@Glau: I took a look at your blog and then followed that to the website you found. Did you notice the third and fourth arguments for SSM were “Sexism” and “Racism”? And that’s not counting the entire casting of the issue in terms of “equality”, which is taken as an assumption. The “Counter Arguments” are all cast in pro-SSM terms rather than allowing others to make their own case, i.e. they are strawmen. Maybe you should read what you recommend? I think this site is a good example of what Reno and Franck are talking about.
December 22nd, 2010 | 1:19 pm
Glau
Your rambling simply proves that someone who sets out to find nothing will find exactly that.
December 22nd, 2010 | 6:00 pm
Assistant Village Idiot: I see what you’re saying about having to provide detailed supporting evidence every time. However, the problem was that showing me a handful of individual incidents isn’t really evidence for an ongoing trend.
I don’t see how I’m setting up a double standard here. If a liberal columnist argued that conservatives use “irritable mental gestures” to cover for the inadequacy of their arguments, I would challenge that claim too–unless it was well-supported by evidence.
Mike: Yes, those two sections don’t belong under “arguments,” since they presuppose agreement. However, the site seemed to me to deal with the most common criticisms of SSM fairly in the “counter-arguments” section, which is why I gave it as an example. If you feel it uses straw-men, please give an example.
Buzz: I aim to write concisely, while covering everything thoroughly. Obviously, I am not always going to strike a good balance. Does anything stand out as being unnecessary?
December 26th, 2010 | 7:54 pm
Glau: What a refreshing response—- to actually address the questions your original comment raised. Doesn’t happen often enough, in my experience.
December 29th, 2010 | 5:20 pm
Strauss and Howe had a similar idea in their books “Generations” and “The Fourth Turning”, only that they expected this year (2010) to be more like the mirror image of, say, 1966 than the 1950s. Consider the parallels:
1966: young women fed up with machismo about to begin a movement for women’s rights; steady economic improvement, still relatively high educational levels, a cohesive society yearning for diversity
2010: young men fed up with hembrismo about to begin a movement for men’s rights; economic stagnation, poor educational levels, a diverse society yearning for cohesion
Strauss and Howe thought this 40-50 year span was not casual, as it related to roughly half a lifetime (or, more or less, a couple of generations) and the dynamics of different generations’ upbringing. Time will tell how accurate this prediction will result.
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