The Liberal Canon

Roy had an interesting post the other day commenting on several different pieces -- mainly from the right -- wondering at the absence of a liberal canon governing our political world view (as opposed to our friends on the right who all, evidently, read Ayn Rand, Friedrick Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Tim LaHaye).  The most serious of these pieces was by Beverly Gage at Slate, although it struck me as fairly ahistorical with observations like this: 

Once upon a time, the Old Left had “movement culture” par excellence: to be considered a serious activist, you had to read Marx and Lenin until your eyes bled.

I think that if one looks back over one hundred plus years of liberal/left thought in the United States, the number of people who read Marx and Lenin "until their eyes bled" would have had a difficult time filling a small coffee shop.  Marxist ideas, distilled and popularized, may have had some impact on the way the American left viewed the world, but I would say outside of a small cadre at City College in New York in the 1930s, that the number of Americans who were conversant in Marxists or Leninist theory and writings was decidedly small and generally not a crucial part of liberal/left movements.  (Yes, for a period of time there were members of the U.S. Communist Party who were active in the American labor and civil rights movements, but they were a distinct minority.)  As I've noted here before, "American exceptionalism" was originally a commentary about the failure of mass-based socialist political parties to ever make much of a dent in the American electorate.     

American liberalism has never been a particularly ideological tendency.  Its crowning achievements have been a combination of pragmatic top-down social reform -- embodied by the New Deal and the Great Society -- and successful mass movements -- the labor movement, the battle for black civil rights, women's equality, and lately, gay rights.  There are all kinds of strains of American liberalism, with origins in any number of causes -- labor, the environment, feminism, civil liberties, pacifism, civil rights, sexual freedom, and so on.  Most of us have overlap in all or many of these areas, while perhaps having a central passion that we think of as our core political identity. We contain multitudes.

I have never been a big political theory man.  I came to liberalism as a kid through a combination of watching things happening growing up in the 60s -- what the fuck kind of monster do you have to be to grow up rooting for the southern sheriffs? -- reading history -- again, who roots for the slave owners?  or the late Nineteenth Century factory owners? -- and, strangely enough, taking some of the classic Catholic Sunday school stuff seriously.  Probably the most important book that I read in terms of solidifying my political world view was The Glory and the Dream, William Manchester's history of the United States from 1932 to1972, which I read when I was 14.  Manchester begins his account by describing the hideous assault on the Bonus Army marchers led by Douglas MacArthur in the summer of 1932, just another manifestation of the inhumanity of the Hoover Administration.  From there, it's on to the heroic days of the New Deal and FDR's extraordinary leadership, the labor movements struggles to organize the steel and automobile industries, the sit down strikes, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther and Sidney Hillman -- a hundred or two hundred pages in I knew what side I was on.  For life.  (Again, who reads this stuff and sides with Hoover, MacArthur, or Henry Ford?) 

As I got into my late teens and early twenties, I did read the works of some of the leading voices for social democracy in the United States -- Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, and Barbara Ehrenreich come to mind.  But with the exception of Walzer, these thinkers tended to be less interested in the theoretical and more in tune with describing the way things were and why they needed to change not from some abstract philosophical point of view, but from a gut level sense of human justice.  Later still I would take a shot at John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, but despite agreeing with most of its premises, found it too dense to get through.  I didn't feel the need to have a grand theory for my politics -- I tended actually to agree with Pat Buchanan, who suggested that one arrives at one's politics through a visceral sense of the world and then you incorporate theory in later as a kind of post hoc means of reinforcing that which you already felt.

It seems to me that there are a whole lot of paths one could take to liberalism and texts that could lead you in that direction -- from the Other America to Silent Spring to the Death and Life of Great American Cities to the Feminine Mystique to the Autobiography of Malcolm X to Backlash to Nickel and Dimed.  Music, movies, and popular culture generally are also underrated in terms of promoting liberalism.  My guess is that something like marriage equality has been advanced far more by occurrences in the popular culture than by works like Virtually Normal.

Roy suggests that western literature is our canon, an answer I also quite like -- just from an American perspective think of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huckleberry Finn, Sister Carrie, The Jungle, Elmer Gantry, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath,  For Whom the Bell Tolls, Light in August, Catch-22, Invisible Man, Giovanni's Room, American Pastoral, A Boy's Own Story, The Things They Carried etc. as examples.     

Liberalism is, at its core, pragmatic and humanist.  It does not elevate abstractions over real live human beings and it looks to real results in terms of outcomes rather than theory.  It is a fractious political tendency, which is a strength even if it doesn't always feel that way.  It is a world view big enough to encompass voices as different as those that people the lefty blogosphere, from Amanda Marcotte to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Glenn Greenwald to Josh Marshall to Duncan Black to John Cole.  It is a community in which dialogue and diversity are celebrated, even if we sometimes get infuriated with our compatriots.

Finally, it is a quintessentially American world view in the best sense of the world -- or at least the part of the American tradition that has fought for and gradually broadened the categories of people to whom freedom and equality apply. 

The right wing canon is strangely foreign -- Rand, Hayek, and von Mises, all people who bear the deep scars of life lived in other parts of the world and who, I would suggest, are not very American in terms of their thinking.   It's a strange group of thinkers to idolize really.  Throw in the contradictory religious primitivism that also shapes the right and it is little wonder that right wing governance has proven such a disaster in recent times.  

Ultimately, I will take our more chaotic influences any day than be a part of an inhuman, abstract cult.   

 

Comments

[big bad wolf]

SC, i like this post. and i love, and agree with, roy's statement that literature is the liberal canon, but i'd say, let's not call it a canon. let's call it the liberal underpinning, the liberal spring, the liberal ecosystem. canon is a bit strong, a bit dogmatic, tending toward rigid. it's precisely that it is not a canon that we don't have easy answers to every question---literature reflects life and its nuances. it reminds us to be aware and to know that we don't always know or anticipate. it can let us see things through stories that we cannot let out brains accept and begin a rethinking, a real one, not an indoctrinated one, whether indoctrination lasts a lifetime, as it does for some who embrace the right's canon, or a year or two, as is more typical for some young people exposed to the more rigid ideas of the right or left. thankfully, most people can't sustain an ideological position without an authoritarian structure to police it, be it iran, north korea, fox news, or a right-wing foundation.

another reason not to call it a canon, i think, is that we already had our great canon wars, which in retrospect seem really silly. people defended the idea that there should be a relatively fixed set of books that should be read. odd. if literature teaches us anything it should be that life changes. we react. we adapt. we, sometimes, improve. we, sometimes, fail to do the better thing. we are a part, not a whole. how then could people have seriously said we have all the books we need, no more. that is an affront to the idea of literature. that said, one should always be a bit careful in declaring the undying worth of any particular novel or poem; some that strike us hard may do so because they seem so about us at that moment, but eventually seem rather time-or-event bound. but even that is not reason not to study it; study may make us think about what it is we valued, or overvalued, or undervalued in it.

now, the other great literature controversy of the 80s i am on the more conservative side of. i really don't think you can read grocery lists or comic books or found documents as literature, not in the sense that roy means---stories that try to speak to recurring, persistent happenings and traits in human experience and history and that do so in a way that remains recognizable years later to a significant number of untrained readers. you can, with appropriate degrees, practice literature on any document you want, but that is not what roy means. that is an educated professional skill, like being a lawyer or a logician---looky here what i can do to this document or this situation, i can make it mean many things because in my profession we accept these terms and techniques. this is an interesting and educational skill. it's not reading literature as stories about humans. it's not how literature became the liberal ecosystem. i have a similar unease about reading literature in primarily political ways. there is much that is useful in that, but maybe only after the books have been read for the story. i suspect it must be rather dispiriting to experience a book only through the eyes of an early 21st view of royalism/colonialism/etc-ism. such views, which can be accurate (or as accurate as the contingent values and perspectives of the given time can make them), educational, and thought-provoking, feel like class work (in at least two senses), which great stories never do---they feel like life, no matter how different the people, no matter how difficult the text.

and yes, i am obviously wholly a product of my time on this.

but i do love the idea of literature as the ecosystem of the left. in part because i suspect that ecosystems are always more subtle and varied than those who study them and try to explain them. that doesn't mean that we shouldn't study them, it means we should be wary of canons and proclamations; too many of them and the suppleness that makes a good, visceral, pragmatic society can disappear under a layer of dogma that will later be studied and found wanting. i read about it in euripides.

[big bad wolf]

and no i am not suggesting that athens was the ideal society. it was a literary flourish. vain, aesthete wannabe that i am. :)

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

I think we see this pretty much the same way.

I don't think I quite got across part of my point, which is there is no canon in the true sense (and I think Roy would agree), at least not via literature, only the sort of amazing humanist guidepoints that people of talent, sensitivity, and discernment have been able to convey via a creative, rather than dogmatic process.

One of the things that Roy is adamant about -- and with which I also wholeheartedly agree -- is that reading everything with just political means in mind, and to do so as a way of scoring points, is a cramped, inhuman way to live life.

One of the things that we have discussed here frequently is the degree to which some of our artistic heroes are incoherent or worse in matters of politics. I once heard Norman Mailer speak on behalf of Ted Kennedy's presidential run in 1980 and even to a 19 year old what he said seemed embarrassing and deeply silly -- some sort of existentialist mumbo jumbo rather than the fact that we should vote for Ted Kennedy because he wanted us to have universal health care. Gore Vidal, who people I respect claim to have had literary merit (I haven't really read him), was pretty much a political idiot in my view. John Updike, whose Rabbit books I think one of the most astonishing works in American literature, was a fairly unreflective, old school conservative.

Still, Armies of the Night is an amazing bit of American journalism -- as I am told is The Executioner's Song. There is much about life and humanity one can glean through Rabbit Angstrom even if his creator was a pretty pedestrian political thinker.

Life is bigger than politics as important as I think politics is -- great literature, it seems to me, opens us up to so much that it has a general, indirect effect of liberalizing us.

I generally agree with you on the earlier canon battles and how both sides of that battle tended toward foolish orthodoxies.

[beckya57]

I'm not much for canons or orthodoxies either. One of the most consistent labels that co-workers (in many different settings) have applied to me is "pragmatic," which I consider a compliment. I remember hearing in high school US history that FDR was considered more of a pragmatist than an ideologue, and that totally appealed to me. This way of thinking informs how I work: I don't particularly subscribe to any specific psychiatric theoretical point of view; what I want to know about any treatment is, "What's the evidence that this works?," i.e. makes peoples' lives better. I also apply treatments and then follow up to see if they're working, and make modifications if they aren't, which I think was generally FDR's approach to the New Deal as well. My view is that human beings and their institutions, including the political ones, are far too complex to understand with a single theory. The eagerness of the right to grab on to specific thinkers, and also very rigid religious views, strikes me as the age-old attempt of people to try to make a scary, confusing world comprehensible through simplification. I certainly understand the motivations, but as we've seen with every example of conservative governance lately, it doesn't work and often leads to disastrous decision-making. The fact that the contemporary right lives in an echo chamber in which no other views are allowed and there's endless cheer-leading for right-wing policies just makes this process worse. As far as I can tell there was no one in the Bush WH telling Bush to stop and ask himself whether invading Iraq in the absence of WMD evidence, or filling FEMA with incompetent political appointees, or allowing interrogation methods that have generally been considered torture was a good idea. I think leaders do best when they surround themselves with people with competing points of view, listen to the various arguments, and then make their decisions. There's no way this can happen in a right-wing government in contemporary America.

[beckya57]

Great tag on the Political Animal website, that also fits here: "The Mittness Protection Program." LOL!!

[Joe S]

If I had to venture a few additional works on the liberal "canon," I'd go with Dewey's "The Public and its Problems," WEB Dubois, "The Soul of Black Folk," some of Keynes' "Treatise on Money," the collected speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.

I think, however, the key of modern liberalism is empiricism as to both knowledge of the world and a developing understanding of what egality and solidarity means at any given point in time. How to achieve equality and to understand the world around you changes across generations and societies. As such, liberals read different books from generation to generation.

[Sir Charles]

becky,

Pragmatism -- with both a capital and a small P -- strikes me as something that has historically been a big part of both the American psyche and American politics. Old school conservatism characterized by things like frugality and isolationism seemed grounded at least in a kind of main street common sense. The world made by the Austrians and the Russian exile don't really seem to fit that mode.

Joe,

Thanks for adding those things. I had meant to put something in the post about both Lincoln and King and their rhetoric as staples of American liberal thought.

I also meant to mention Dewey and the fact that Pragmatism was America's real contribution to the philosophical world in a way that always seemed fitting. (We might also claim a kind of undeclared existentialism I think.)

Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois are also excellent additions. (Getting back to a discussion that we had some time ago -- that there is no American culture that excludes black culture.)

Keynes, although not American, also strikes me as a wonderful example of pragmaticism and empiricism, the latter which you rightly add as an essential component to liberalism and one that has ceased to matter at all in right wing circles.

[Sir Charles]

That would be "doesn't" seem to fit that mold.

I edited the sentence in a way that sounds really ignorant.

[beckya57]

The dreaded "agreement error." Your high school English teacher would be ashamed, Sir C. ;-)

[Eric Wilde]

I think, however, the key of modern liberalism is empiricism as to both knowledge of the world and a developing understanding of what egality and solidarity means at any given point in time.

This seems to sum up modern liberalism to me. I came to liberalism not through reading; but, by witnessing the excesses of conservative regressive behavior (I'm from the rural Bible Belt). The other factor that brought me to mainstream liberalism is a slow awakening to the folly of idealism in the face of unbridled tribalism and usury (in other words, I learned that both sides of American politics really are not the same.)

[Sir Charles]

Eric,

I find these stories really interesting.

It was not difficult for me to be a liberal, although the times were quite turbulent. I grew up in Massachusetts, my Dad -- who is Irish Catholic -- almost always voted Democratic (except in '72 and '76) -- (interestingly, my mother -- not Irish Catholic -- converted to Dem in 1980 just when lots of people were heading the other way), and lived in a place where there was a huge liberal constituency.

It has to be difficult to grow up in places where the culture is completely one way and to go another.

[joel hanes]

I grew up in a very Republican family, three generations of retail businessmen rooted in a small Iowa town

But it was the 60's, so the infection vectors for liberalism were all around.

Probably the most insidious was the back-of-the-Des-Moines-Register columnist for many years, Donald Kaul, who has recently retired. Don was a thoroughgoing liberal who snarked at Republicanism and who made gentle fun of the charming provincialisms of Iowan, every day for decades.

I read Griffin's Black Like Me in my earliest teens, while Jim Crow was still a way of life, and had my eyes opened to what America really is for people of color.

And I read and re-read Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, a beautiful work of distilled observation and quiet case-building for conservationsism, which later became environmentalism.

Most influential: the Dangerous Visions SF anthologies, edited by Harlan Ellison. Right up front, Fred Pohl deftly limned the racism of Americans in "The Day After The Martians Came". Here I found my first real exposure to feminism (in Joanna Russ's superb "When It Changed"). Other wonders were Ursula LeGuin's most political work, the openly-anti-VietNam short novel "The Word For World Is Forest", and Chad Oliver's bitter and prescient environmental fable "King Of The Hill".

Finally, Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee showed me a side of the American historical narrative that no one wanted to talk about, and that certainly didn't appear in any of my U.S. History texts.

But, you know -- Viet Nam in the papers, Viet Nam on TV: I remain baffled by the way so many of my generation lived through that awfulness, and then went on to become Reagan Republicans, trying with might and main to turn the lessons of that decade on their head.

[nancy]

SirC, Definitely not 'really ignorant.' Slightly multi-tasking I'd say. Wonderful post. Thanks.

In the interest of an ongoing liberal canon, I'd suggest dropping the capC 'Canon' to the small c one. We need always leave room. Canon needs flexibility. bbw, loud sustained bravo.

Updike may have seemed an unreflective old-school conservative but his poetry sang quiet small songs where Rabbit was nowhere to be seen. Essays on Art -- he had much to say and left the political entirely aside. "The Executioner's Song" is on my must-be-re-read list, although Mailer, the man, I found ferociously nasty and sexist. Art is art. That's kinda that. Gary Gilmore, proto-American, left-behind, American West sad detritus and poignant loser-killer. Mailer told that story brilliantly I think, and it's one we keep revisiting ad nauseam.

Young reader American canon to my mind, aged 14 or so, both genders, all persuasions -- "The Scarlet Letter". I'm still bothered that kids can leave secondary school without grappling with Hawthorne, Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingsworth and Pearl -- our American tale that lives on in the war on women, religious intolerance, 'Christian' cruelty, and self-satisfied piety. No abstractions anywhere there. None were allowed.

"Calvin and Hobbes" I must add, lightheartedly, to the usual elementary school canon, such as it is. ;) Philosopher Hobbes, oh yes. Wise indeed. Counterpoint to Calvin, the tempted and wannabe anarchist.

Very much like your point about the pseudo-conservatives reaching elsewhere for their short reading list, all the while blathering about their understanding of 'American exceptionalism.'

[Sir Charles]

Joel,

Thanks for your insights. I was not familiar with A Sand County Almanac but I gather it was a seminal work for the nascent environmental movement.

I am struck by the fact that fiction seems to have played a role in your political development too.

I forgot about Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee -- that was definitely one of those books that prompted a lot of kids my age to see the world differently.

Everyone,

I would encourage all who feel like it to share the things that made you liberals. I am particularly interested to hear from those of you who grew up in conservative households or communities.

[oddjob]

The Scarlet Letter most definitely belongs. Hawthorne was the descendant of one of the judges (John Hathorne) during the Salem witch trials. There are those who assert that Nathaniel changed the spelling of his surname to hide this.

To Kill a Mockingbird also belongs to the list, as does the science fiction short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula LeGuin.

[joel hanes]

I was not familiar with A Sand County Almanac

*gobsmacked*

If you've lived all your life in cities, if you can't tell a chickadee from a sparrow, it may not resonate; but please give it a try. Leopold poured everything he had into crafting the prose in that little volume, and though the style now feels a bit antique, at its best it's crystalline.

[beckya57]

Sorry, Sir C, my parents were academics and very liberal, as was my hometown (Champaign-Urbana, IL, home of the U of Illinois) in general (though we did somehow produce George Will--ugh). My sister who moved to Texas, converted to Catholicism and became a Republican was the one who rebelled, not me. ;-)

I was influenced by a number of books in high school and college. To Kill a Mockingbird was one of them, also the Scarlet Letter and Miller's play The Crucible; one by Upton Sinclair about a really repressive small town (can't remember the title, help me out here guys), the Red Badge of Courage (the folly of war, read while Vietnam was raging), Dibs in Search of Self (about a disturbed boy, got me interested in going into child mental health) in high school. Aristotle, the Federalist Papers and John Stuart Mill and Locke in college. I was also very influenced by my high school US history teacher, who got me involved in a program that allowed me to travel to Washington DC, meet various senators/congressman/cabinet members etc, and also to be a congressional intern. Growing up during Vietnam and Watergate had a lot to do with my world view too, of course.

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

Updike, when on, was just an exceptionally great observer and a beautiful stylists. I think he tended to avoid overt political statements as an author.

I had thought about listing both The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick in my list. (And I omitted mention of both Emerson and Thoreau, which is a pretty big oversight.)

I was born in Salem and spent a lot of time drinking there in my late teens and early twenties (back in the time of the 18 year old drinking age). One bar overlooked the Custom's House where Hawthorne was employed, another was just around the corner from the House of the Seven Gables.

oddjob,

To Kill a Mockingbird definitely makes the list.

It seems like Ursala LeGuin makes several people's lists.

[Sir Charles]

Joel,

I am very much a city guy, although nature keeps on intruding on me here. We have more deer here these days than you can shake a stick at -- had to go out this morning with my wife to buy four or five new plants to replace what's been eaten in the last week or two. (We have beautiful birds around here too -- saw a goldfinch this morning.)

becky,

Champaign must be a little oasis of liberalism in a pretty conservative part of the world.

When did you intern on the Hill?

[Bill H]

Sir C, I think you point out the danger of using labels like "left" and "right." If extreme left is Marx and Lenin, then extreme right would not be Tea Baggerism but more something along the lines of Mussolini.

My liberalism, such as it is, came from being raised by a father who was a medical doctor and a career Army/Army Air Corps/Air Force Officer and pilot who, after experiencing WW2 in the European Theater studied for orders at home and became an Episcopal priest. He practiced all three professions the whole time I was growing up. His military career began as enlisted in the mounted cavalry. The Army sent him to medical school, he did flight school on his own, and he retired a colonel after 43 years active service.

He was registered as a Republican his entire life, but he was certainly never a social conservative. He was, for instance, a huge admirer of MLK and he took pride that the Air Force was leading the other services in fully integrating women into all functions of service.

[joel hanes]

Ursula LeGuin

If you have not yet read her two masterpieces, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness, then I envy you, because reading either for the first time is something I wish I could do again. IMHO the second is a work of genius, to which I have returned again and again; a meditation on what religion can be, a parable about the difference between ethics and law, an arctic adventure in a glaciated world, a love story: a wonder. The beginning is disorienting; give it a hundred pages to take hold. Pay attention.

(LeGuin's father was the prominent American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, she grew up in Berkeley before Mario Savio, and the characteristic calm broad-mindedness of anthropology and scientific academe inform all of her works.)

[beckya57]

Sir C,

You are correct about Champaign-Urbana. The university has a huge effect of course (it's a huge university!). I remember seeing a breakdown in voting patterns of the district when I was in Washington. They didn't do the blue-red thing back then, but in contemporary terms the pattern was CU as a blue spot in an otherwise red sea. The congressman I worked for was our district's representative, a Republican, and fairly conservative by that era's standards, which would make him a flaming liberal today. The main project I worked on for them was a proposal of his to renew a bunch of abandoned railroad lines so that they could then be used for shipping again, thus freeing up space on highways and lowering pollution. No Republican these days would be caught dead anywhere near a "big government" project like that these days of course. Liberal that I am, I thought it was a really good idea and spent a lot of time on research supporting it. Don't know what happened though.

In answer to your other question, I was there in the summer of 1974, right after I graduated from high school. That was a very interesting time to be there, of course, as Nixon resigned later that summer (while I was on a trip in Europe as it happens). The tension and anxiety in the office was palpable, even to a mostly clueless teenager, as I was at the time.

[nancy]

Life is bigger than politics as important as I think politics is -- great literature, it seems to me, opens us up to so much that it has a general, indirect effect of liberalizing us.

A similar point vis a vis the sciences is made here: "This Just In" .

:)

[Joe S]

Sir C, I think you're kind of wrong about Americans not being conversant with Marx. I know that most philosophy majors at the U of I (a fairly conservative school) had to read quite a bit of Marx. He was part of the philosophical canon (right after Hegel and right before Heidegger and Husserl). It also seems like most economics majors got some Marx at some point.

There were also a large collection of revisionist historians influenced by a Marxist/Frankfurt School view of history (Walter LeFeber, William Appleman Williams, and of course, Howard Zinn).

Many Americans also get alot of the Frankfurt School which was partially, an intellectual heir to Marx. And of course, there's Noam Chomsky. I've had/known a few Marxist professors along the way. I've also had lots of Frankfurt School types as professors in my educational experience.

[Sir Charles]

becky,

I was there six years and a whole different political universe later -- just as the deluge arrived. I was there for the disastrous election of 1980.

I also hate the attempt to make scientific things that are not. Some things cannot be known empirically -- we just have to intuit and understand them the best we can.

I am a pretty big skeptic of quantitative political science for instance.

Joe,

It's not that there are not Americans who are conversant in Marx, it's that I don't think that he has much influence on contemporary liberal thought as applied to the politics of the last 30-40 years. I don't think many liberals have devoted much of their time to reading Kapital. I was a Politics major at a pretty high level school and I think the only Marx I read was "The Communist Manifesto."

I similarly think that Chomsky and Zinn have had an impact largely on the margins of American political thought.

I certainly agree that the Frankfurt School types have had their moments of influence in the academy, but I think it's been a long time since "One Dimensional Man" had much of an impact on American politics.

I think that Rand is someone who is read on a really wide scale and I can't think of anyone on the liberal side who is so widely read and subscribed to as a thinker.

I am skeptical about how many wingers actually read Hayek, but they do seem to pay homage at least.

[joel hanes]

As I thought about it, I realized that the really subversive books were the ones I read earliest, or had read to me:

Yertle The Turtle on egalitarianism and populism,

The Sneetches on race and class,

The Lorax on conservation and activism,

What Was I Afraid Of on diversity.

Thank you, Dr. Seuss, for inculcating these values into generations of impressionable young Americans.

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

I omitted you name there about the science article -- a very good link.

joel,

Yeah, Dr. Seuss always had a certain subversive quality, which I think even as a kid you noticed. It was one of the things that made him so enjoyable.

[nancy]

Sir C -- Not to worry. Typepad random avatar assigner thinks Becky and I are twins -- :*) . Confusing in our world of visual screen ID. Becky and I should do a virtual coin toss. ;-)

I did discover, with that comment, that all this time the accent grave, vis à vis, was right under my nose on the keyboard. Head, desk.

Joel, the very first book I checked out over and over and over...with my new library card at age 4 was Dr. Seuss's "McGelligot's Pool". Five books at a time, then return, five more, for years. Treasure the neighborhood public library.

[RCH]

Sir C -- You asked.

My parents were far right Republicans. Our 50’s dinner conversations often got around to how it was that Roosevelt sold the nation down the river at Yalta. And how Earl Warren was likely a Communist. Dad and Mom were even OK with McCarthy. My Dad, a Naval Academy graduate and career officer, was also a cradle Midwest Irish Catholic . I place emphasis on “midwest.” A few years later we were stationed in Newport RI and Dad ran into the closest we had then in America to European Catholicism; it offended his Midwest sensibilities and he “lapsed” (Catholics don’t leave the Church, they lapse). My mother was a barely involved Christian Scientist. A weird mix to be sure.

So how did I migrate from this background to the liberal side of the aisle. Two things: Mormonism and JFK. Impossible you say? Here’s the shorthand story.

Growing up Navy we moved so much. I had to make my way through seven schools my last seven years. From middle class professional Arlington, to ethnic Newport, to rough and tumble shipyard town Vallejo, and then back to Arlington. You might say that I was a tad socially dislocated. Mormonism came along during this time through my girl friend and later first wife. Presto, I joined and enjoyed instant community.

I applied to BYU, was admitted and began my undergraduate work in the fall of 1957. My freshman year I took an American history course from one R. Kent Fielding-----whom I thought was brilliant. Fielding, a real borderline Mormon even then, would be forced out of BYU by the then president, Ernest L. Wilkinson, who was very friendly with the John Birch Society. Fielding would finish his career at the University of Utah, one of America’s most underrated schools, in my experience.

My sophomore year I took my first political theory class from one Gaylon Caldwell, another suspected heathen. Caldwell taught me how read and how to think. Not long after, fed up with the right wing extremism of the campus, he bailed to a California school. Those two professors forced me to reconsider everything my knee jerk parents had been saying at the dinner table all those years.

And then there were also the students at BYU. I have to say, some of the brightest people I have ever associated with were classmates. I hasten to say that most were Republicans. Rex Lee would go on to set grade point records at the University of Chicago and later serve as Solicitor General during the first Reagan Administration. A very principled man, Lee would resign before he would take cases to the Court just because the likes of Ed Meese wanted to make a political point. Terry Crapo would graduate fourth in his class at Harvard. Tragically, both these men died early deaths----Terry at age 43, Rex at age 61. But they had an impact on my life. (Notably, Mike Crapo the very conservative Idaho Senator, is Terry’s younger brother, Mike Lee, a TeaParty favorite, is Rex Lee’s son. Compare Mitt Romney to his father. It seems to be in the cultural water.)

About JFK. I was one of the thousands of young people who really believed his “Ask Not” line. I came to Washington in hopes of making a difference, as did so many other young people. And, the thing was, it worked.

So, from Mormonism (a religion I would later leave on my way back to Catholicism) I took, oddly enough, a clearer understanding of how important it was to think critically (BYU gave bright professors tons of material. Fielding and Caldwell took every opportunity). From JFK I learned the importance of being a citizen. I cast my first vote ever for Kennedy, and for me, given my back ground, it was a very big deal. I suppose that graduate work at GW closed the deal.

By the way, were I to add one book to Nancy's "small c" canon, it would be the late Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert. You can't understand the west without understanding the politics of water, and you can't understand the politics of water without reading Reisner.

[big bad wolf]

i think the empiricism question is a fascinating one. we have to deal with actual facts and doing so, i believe, makes programs more effective. the right has made it very easy for us to be on the correct side of this question, by abandoning many things that are actually and easily measurable and determinable. that said, like SC and nancy, i think that many important things are not measurable, and i am perturbed that attempts to measure in poli sci and psychology, among other fields, may miss as much as they find. or, more accurately, i am perturbed that the people conducting the measurements are so sure that they are being empirical and that their "empirical" measurements disprove people's lived lives. i find the poli sci stuff interesting and useful as part of the mix, but i find disconcerting the assurance with which some of our poli sci blogging friends proclaim facts about people and policy. there are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their polisci.

nancy, you are so right about calvin and hobbes. that strip was brilliant, as well as screamingly funny. doonesbury is a far more sustained undertaking, one bent on trying to explain a lifetime, but the years in which calvin and hobbes shone so brightly eclipsed even doonesbury's best years.

the new jimmy cliff album "rebirth" quite delightfully good. the harder they come is part of the western Canon, isn't it?.

[Crissa]

I haven't come through the comments...

...But I think something that's big and different is that Liberals, Progressives, are about using what works, learning from many books, and tossing what doesn't. So the reading list from a liberal is going to be long and varied, including even Ayn Rand, but that doesn't mean they're going to follow it.

I think what was important to me was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Why? Because that's the one which one of my teachers used to show the realities of people's inhumanities. And it actually worked on other students, whether they read it or not. I didn't need to be convinced - I was a constant target for bullying. I knew about people's inhumanity.

[joel hanes]

Second the praise for Reisner's Cadillac Desert

[joel hanes]

I think that Rand is someone who is read on a really wide scale and I can't think of anyone on the liberal side who is so widely read and subscribed to as a thinker.

At one time it might have been Paul Ehrlich. I still think we're living in the world described by The Population Bomb, but Erlich got the timescale wrong by about 4X.

Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut comes as close as anyone on the widely-read front; but I've never met anyone who I could describe as a Vonnegut acolyte -- by contrast, there seems to be an entire cult of people who not only take Rand's ugly ideas seriously, but take them to be definitive and ultimate.

I think that liberals in general are a lot less likely to fall into cult-think, and are less prone to end up as cultists of any kind.

[Joe S]

I don't know Sir C. It seems people like Isaiah Berlin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Todd Gittlin, and Noam Chomsky used to get read and quoted an awful lot.

On the other hand, Rand is considered a joke in most academic philosophy departments. If you talk to a philosophy professor, philosophy Ph.D., Literature professor, political scientist, or historian, and you mention Rand, you get snickers (even from the conservatives). There are a few economists who are "objectivists" but not many. To call Rand influential is like calling Tolkien great literature. They both wrote popular stories and have followings, but not among those who are at the forefront of the intellectual frontier.

In comparing liberal intellectuals to Ayn Rand, you're essentially comparing somebody like David Foster Wallace to J.R.R. Tolkien or Stephen King. It's just a totally different type of art.

[low-tech cyclist]

Since this was in my email, I couldn't resist sharing it here, for the sheer giggle value:

Learn from experts at the Washington Post how they use data visualization to tell stories.

This morning, the Data Visualization IOE is pleased to present a panel discussion with distinguished graphic journalists from the Washington Post Information Graphics Department-- Wilson Andrews, Emily Chow, Dan Keating, Pam Toby, and Sisi Wei. Their “stories” will help us learn new ways to visualize data using images and graphics.

These panelists will discuss the process they go through in preparing data visualizations for stories. From hearing about a story and choosing a visualization, to collecting and preparing the needed data, to the tools used for implementation and publication.

They will also touch on where they find their inspiration, how to test out ideas before publishing, the kind of feedback they get from readers, and the paths they have taken into this field.

Yeah, it must be hard to keep finding new graphic visualizations for "both sides do it," "we need to get serious about cutting entitlements," and "if only Obama would invite the Republican Congressional leaders over for a beer, everything would be fine."

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

I cringed at my careless reading of who said what. Sometimes when we read for speed we don't see things quite right.

RCH,

That is really a great story about ideological migration. That's one of the things that I think we have to keep in mind before we write off groups and parts of the country in terms of pitching our arguments. There are always persuadable people around, looking for good arguments that fit within their value systems and their experience with the world.

I have always been struck by the differences between east coast and midwest Catholicism. The interesting thing is that, as in your youth, the east coast church was one that existed in the very epicenter of New Deal liberalism and was linked inextricably to urban Democratic -- often machine -- politics. (My father tells of threatening to go to Cardinal Cushing in Boston in the late 1950s to prevent an unfair transfer when he was on the state police in Massachusetts.)

Midwestern Catholicism of that era seems to have been much more conservative and steeped in a kind of militant anti-communism exemplified by McCarthy.

Interestingly, I think over the last couple of decades the Catholicism on the east coast has been dominated by ultra conservative clerics, while a softer brand of Catholicism has existed out in the heartland. This is the largely impressionistic view of a lapsed Catholic, but I think it is pretty accurate.

bbw (and nancy),

Calvin and Hobbes was insanely funny. I don't know that I have ever really thought of it in political terms.

Like you I am all for empiricism, but understand that there are things that simply cannot be quantified effectively.

Crissa,

I think the Jungle would be one of those texts that was a tremendous motivator for large numbers of liberals back in the day. I am uncertain to what degree it resonates with people anymore. I don't know how widely it is taught these days. I know it was still taught in my high school back in the 70s, but really not sure about today.

joel,

I was a big Vonnegut reader back in junior high school, but generally think of him in a way as I would think of Rand -- a writer for adolescents. That might be unfair to him, but he struck me as a writer that I left behind by the time I was even in my late teens.

Joe,

It's funny -- I don't think of Berlin as someone who has historically been linked to the left, but that may be my own ignorance. I am generally inclined to agree with much of what Berlin says, but I've always seen him as kind of a small c conservative from back in the day when leftist ideologies made extravagant claims to have the answers.

As for Galbraith, again I don't know how much influence his writings have had on post-Regan liberalism. I am an admirer of Gitlin -- his book on the Sixties is superb. I don't know how broad his influence is. Chomsky it seems to me appeals to a certain small group on the left. Although I think he occasionally has flashes of insight that are worthwhile, I am not a big fan. To be honest, I don't think he knows much about politics and has a terrible feel for this country and its people.

With regard to Rand, please understand I am in no way suggesting that she be taken seriously as either a thinker or an artist. It is amazing to me that any movement could view her as such. I am simply saying that she has a vast readership in right wing circles and to them she is an important "thinker."

I think David Foster Wallace is probably the greatest American writer of our generation. (I note with amusement that he supposedly voted for Reagan -- you can take the boy out of downstate . . . . ) Again, my sense of DFW is that he was an incredibly brilliant guy, but that I didn't necessarily want to take my political cues from him.

[Joe S]

Sir C, I wasn't actually saying DFW was a liberal. I was saying he was a respected writer and artist-- and comparing Rand to serious philosophers was like comparing J.R.R. Tolkien or Stephen King to DFW. It's the same dichotomy. Lots of people find King or Tolkien compelling, but they really don't provide the same insights into life that somebody like DFW does.

Same with Rand and philosophy. She's just not in the same league as a true philosopher.

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

I understood your point about DFW. I was just amused to see that as is often the case, great artistry and sound political judgment are not always synonymous.

I agree as well about King and Tolkien. Unlike Rand, I don't know that either would ever claim to be anything but what they were.

[oddjob]

Erlich got the timescale wrong by about 4X

Not that he would ever agree with you. A brilliant entomologist Paul Ehrlich is; humble or even particularly self-reflective he is not. I think he shares some significant character traits with Richard Dawkins.

I find the characterization of liberals as pragmatic intriguing because the impression I drew from having come of political age as a teenager in the mid-1970's was that the last descriptor for liberals, most definitely including Paul Ehrlich, was pragmatic.

[oddjob]

If I understand the history of the last fourty years of health care debate I think that also shows liberals haven't always been particularly pragmatic.

Didn't Nixon propose something not that different from Obamacare, only to have it rejected by Congressional liberal Democrats (including Ted Kennedy) because they didn't think it was enough? If that's a correct assessment of what happened then they missed a huge opportunity out of a failure to be pragmatic.

[RCH]

Sir C, about midwest Catholicism, suggested reading: Can’t do better than Michael Rogin’s book “McCarthy and the Intellectuals: The Radical Specter” (his 1962,U of Chicago dissertation, mentored by Grant McConnell). Rogin would later say of his book, a “Gothic horror story disguised as social science.” I no doubt oversimplify this book, so heavy on quantitative voting data and analysis, but here’s what I take to be the sum and substance: McCarthyism had nothing to do with populism as is so often asserted (as a way of letting Tail Gunner Joe off the hook). Rather, it actually reflected traditional right wing mid-west Republican political attitudes supported as they so often are by NY conservative business elites. McCarthy’s most virulent right wing support came from Wisconsin German Catholics. Note: Not Irish Catholics, not Polish Catholics but German Catholics. And not all Germans. Not German Lutherans for example.

[Sir Charles]

oddjob,

I think that liberals of the early Seventies were not as willing to compromise -- which is slightly different than pragmatism in a way -- as they should have been.
They clearly had no insight as to the depths of the backlash and the economic crisis that was going to come down on their heads like a ton of bricks.

I think based on the previous 40 years, and particularly the recent political triumphs during the Great Society, liberals had a feeling that their ideas were naturally in ascendancy. Obviously they were badly wrong and I think most if they had the chance for a do-over ten years later would have jumped at the Nixon proposal.

But liberals were typically interested in having programs that worked. They were not just doing things because it fit the ideological playbook.

Is Dawkins a liberal? He seems like a pedantic atheist, but I don't think that is the same as being a liberal.

Is Ehrlich? I don't really know enough about his overall world view. He strikes me as an alarmist of a certain variety, one who, not to sound all George Will like, seemed to discount the ability of human ingenuity to cope with some of the things he argued in the Population Bomb.

Scientists, like artists, are often really bad outside of their areas of expertise. They bring tremendous arrogance to areas that they they do not know a hell of a lot about with predictably embarrassing results.

RCH,

The young Garry Wills, who graduated from a Catholic high school in Priaire du Chien, Wisconsin is a classic exemplar of the tendency of which you speak. He got his BA at St. Louis U. and his MA at Xaverian and became a protege of William F. Buckley's. He ultimately moved leftward as he watched Vietnam and the Civil Right movement unfold, but as a very young man he was part of this midwestern anti-communist Catholic intelligentsia.

[oddjob]

Scientists, like artists, are often really bad outside of their areas of expertise.

Yes, and Ehrlich's first area of expertise was the systematics of butterflies and moths (i.e., figuring out how the various species evolved). Back in the 1950's and early 60's he was busy upsetting the apple carts in that discipline by bringing in analytical tools based upon statistics that hadn't been used before.

[oddjob]

One of the features of some television shows that sometimes drives me batty is when they bring in a prominent physicist to talk about some aspect of science outside of their expertise and its implications for society at large. I have no problem listening to someone like Stephen Hawking talking about physics, but I'm less tolerant when he's asked to offer an opinion about the effects of pollution upon species diversity.