Matt Bai's George Wallace Values?

By DHinMI

I think it's time for me to start an ongoing series, similar to Brad DeLong's "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?," devoted exclusively to wrongheaded articles about Democrats and "values."  (And the wrongheadedness isn't limited to the press, as some bloggers have shown.)  I've yet to come up with a pithy name for the series, so consider this a prototype for the eventual series, sort of like the Simpsons shorts on the Tracey Ullman that preceded The Simpsons.  For today's installment, we focus on NYT Magazine writer Matt Bai.

I've already expressed some problems with Bai's work, but today's article really set me off.  One of Bai's problems is that he's infatuated with ridiculous binary comparisons, such as "old hidebound industrial unions" and "new, progressive service unions."  In today's piece, "Democratic Moral Values?", he sets up the origins of Democratic social policies:

While the Democratic Party traces its ideological lineage on economic issues to the New Deal, its DNA on social issues was created by the union of the two principal movements of the 1960's: civil rights and the antiwar counterculture. The two are generally discussed as part of the same transformative social force of the era, but in fact, in the political arena, they reinforced very different instincts. The civil rights movement legitimized the idea of legislating and codifying morality. Where activist lawmakers or judges could find a constitutional rationale for overruling states and communities on a discriminatory social policy, Democrats came to believe that they had not just the right but also the responsibility to intervene. The counterculture, however, was all about radical individualism -- the attitude Republicans now snidely describe as ''if it feels good, do it.'' In the context of the time, these contradictory ideas weren't hard to reconcile; to Democrats, and to most Americans, government's integrating swimming pools seemed clearly to be right, while government's banning books seemed clearly to be wrong. But as often happens in law and politics, the specific circumstances that created each impulse were outlived by the conflicting precedents they established.

Geeze, this is so banal I hardly know where to start.

First, Bai's infatuation with opposing binaries seems to have blinded him to considering the "movement" that's arguably had a much more profound influence on society, the economy, culture and politics: the feminist movement.  Maybe the difficulty of slotting the feminist movement into a neat category that shows how the Democrats are completely screwed led him to forget it, or maybe he just ignored it because it complicated the simplicity of his (simplistic) anti-dialectics (with two equal theses, jammed into the equation and not able to create a synthesis).  Whatever the case, the feminist movement can't be succinctly be summarized as having either "codified morality" or created "radical individualism."  Bai's omission of the feminist movement in favor of the counterculture and the anti-war movement as the dividing forces of American politics renders all his subsequent conclusions suspect, as feminism has far more to do with creating the cleavage between the radical religious right and the rest of the country.

Along with omitting feminism from his thumbnail socio-political history of the 1960's, Bai also completely botches the intellectual and moral underpinnings of the civil rights movement.  Yes, many of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement were clergy well-versed in the biblical and liturgical tropes of the black church, and those tropes and themes resonated with much of White America.  However, it was a moral and religious appeal to America to fulfill its promise of full citizenship for all men, regardless of race.  The means may have been moral, but the goal was civic.  After all, it's not called the "moral values movement," it's called the "civil rights movement." 

There's also his completely ahistorical positing of "radical individualism" as originating with the "antiwar counterculture."  First, the "counterculture" and the "anti-war movement" were hardly synonymous; if Bai thinks Haight-Ashbury in 1966 was politicized with anti-war protests or that SDS was founded by a bunch of bead-wearing hippies, I suggest he spend a little time learning about the history of the 1960's before he resumes pronouncing on it.  And once he's brushed up a little on 1960's history, he might want to go in search of the history of "radical individualism," which will take him back to the Puritans and the Calvinist Reformation.

All of that idiocy is just prelude that Bai had to create in order to justify the truly offensive conclusion I suspect he was determined to reach, regardless of fact; a conclusion that you could hear every weekday afternoon from Rush Limbaugh:

This kind of hypocrisy isn't limited to Democrats -- Republicans, those lovers of states' rights, made that clear enough when they tried to bully Florida's courts and Legislature in the Schiavo case -- and it probably says as much about human nature as it does about any one political ideology. All of us are inclined to see our own values as sacrosanct, while the choices of others are subject to review: if I put a statue of Zeus in front of my house, that's my decision as an owner; but if my neighbor sets a rusty car atop a pile of cinder blocks, it's suddenly an issue of our collective property values. When it comes to morality, our first instincts always tend toward tyranny. Moral issues bring out the worst in our two political parties because the parties seek to capitalize on those instincts, motivating voters by turning them against one another and pushing them toward extremes. What Republicans have managed to do is to dress up their particular brand of moral tyranny as a defense of life and piety in all its forms. The Democratic alternative, relying as it does on the moral judgments of Ph.D.'s and Oscar winners, subscribes to no such pretension. It simply smacks of boundless elitism.

Really, Matt Bai, screw you and any pretensions you may have of unbiased impartiality.  If you take "Oscar winners" out of those last two sentences, you would have a hard time arguing that it's not something cribbed from the collected speeches of George Wallace. 

Matt Bai's problems are common with too many journalists--smug cynicism and intellectual laziness.  For hacks like Bai, everything has to be set up as equal binaries; sure, the Republicans are bad, but so are the Democrats.  The Republicans are hypocrites, but so are the Democrats.  Yada yada yada. 

While they're setting up their ridiculous "he said/she said" caricatures the two major political parties, they're missing the real stories of American politics.  Take his assessment of the Democrats' performance in the Schiavo affair:  "Far from having made a compelling case for euthanasia or against morality by fiat, Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, pretty much became bystanders to the whole unseemly affair."  What Bai and all the people who thought the Dems were screwing up by stepping back and letting the Republicans monopolize the airwaves with their Terry Schiavo sermonizing is that  most Americans didn't want the Republican or the Democrats to exploit that family's tragedy for political points, and that  most Americans don't want anybody shoving morality down their throats.  Democrats tend to realize this, which is why we don't advocate PhD's, Oscar winners or a former exterminator who is now Republican House Majority Leader making decisions for our families.  In fact, by staying out of the Schaivo affair, Democrats showed that, contrary to Bai's entire argument, they didn't rely on the moral judgments of PhD's or Oscar winners, they stepped back to allow a family, living within a nation of laws, to work out for themselves within the boundaries of existing law their own moral judgments and actions.  It was good politics by the Democrats, and it's the right way for politicians to confront most issues of personal morality.  The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't fit neatly into Matt Bai's preconceived notions that on moral issues both Democrats and Republicans are equally hypocritical, craven and blind.

Comments

[TenThousandThings]

Paul Wellstone was a PhD. I worked hard to get mine [Okay, well, actually, that dissertation isn't quite finished ... but it's coming soon!] and it put me deeply in debt. $500 a month for the next ten years! And what's wrong with wanting to be a teacher?

I remember reading Bai's piece on Kerry during the campaign (October 10, NYT Magazine cover story, "Kerry's Undeclared War"), desperately trying to find some point in it that I could hold up and say, "Gosh, I'm glad I read that. I really learned something." But no. I remember there was some point to it buried toward the end, the kind of thing that if it were an undergraduate paper, I'd underline and write, "THIS SHOULD BE IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH!"

Re: Your series, I've been thinking it would be good to name names in some systematic way--creating something like what Josh Marshall has done with his "Conscience Caucus" and "Fainthearted Faction" but applying it to journalists. Lists of MSM people who are doing good work, people who are not, people who are on the fence leaning one way or another. I'm not sure how to frame it, but I think there is a lot of ammunition out there, from the Daily Howler to CJR Daily, to other bloggers I don't know about (that pesky dissertation). Probably particular issues could serve as benchmarks. Social Security comes to mind, and any number of postmortems on press coverage of the 2000 and 2004 elections. But I suppose it is best to stay forward-looking, on current issues. Anyhow, just some thoughts.

[DHinMI]

Well, I can't very well listen to you now that I know you have a PhD, can I?

Seriously, thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of Josh Marshall-like categories.

[kathy]

What a jerk!

I agree that neutral responses if that's what comments like, "the democrats aren't any better" are a bunch of bs. I'm going to start calling people out on them.

There should be a category called ON THE BRIGHT SIDE for radio and television news stories/reporters who have to put happy endings on everything. In Los Angeles, I heard a local NPR affiliate reporter conclude his story on low voter turnout with something like --on one hand, low turn out is bad for democracy; on the other hand, it's good for the process. I can’t be sure of what he meant but sadly guess he meant the ballot counting process. I also recently heard a BBC radio story about global warming tests on a volcano in Hawaii. Apparently, it’s happening and it could be bad. When the reporter signed off, the anchorperson commented back that the wind and sounds of nature were lovely.

[janinsanfran]

Great stuff. Minimally, this guy Bai (who I have the advantage of never having heard of ) could have spoken with some of us who lived the 60s.

[coturnix]

Mike calls this the Compulsive Centrist Disorder - perhaps you can make a riff on that for the title of your series.