Fighting the last anti-war

"If you want a good example of the 'long march through the institutions' undertaken by sixties leftists after they left school, look no further than the career of Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's School of Journalism," writes Bruce Thornton at Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers:

Since the political program of the left was unlikely to prevail through democratic means -- given the innate good sense of most Americans, who can smell a totalitarian rat a mile away -- those like Schell endorsing various socialist nostrums could realize their utopian schemes only "by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation," as Roger Kimball has put it. Thus they settled in the universities and the media, "working against the established institutions while working in them," in the words of sixties leftist guru Herbert Marcuse.

But there is another dimension of the institutionalization of the left, one also illustrated by Schell -- what Tom Wolfe famously called "radical chic," the use of leftist ideology as a fashion marker to signify one's elitist superiority to the bovine middle class befuddled by a false consciousness that keeps them from seeing the horrible oppression and injustice of America.

"This combination of elitist privilege and ideology has been a pretty good deal for lucky leftists like Schell," notes Thornton:

Schell has hobnobbed as well with George Soros, fawningly interviewing the wacky billionaire who made a fortune by being a rapacious capitalist freebooter and who now, like some medieval knight buying masses for his soul, is doing penance by funding leftists and publishing screeds whose premises and prescriptions, if actually followed, would've kept him from getting rich in the first place. Like Soros, or John Kerry and John Edwards, for that matter, Schell finds a populist rhetoric of "equality" for the common man convenient camouflage for power and privilege.

A sure sign of this dislike for the common man is the obligatory sneering at religious believers, especially evangelical Christians . . . Good people like Schell are enlightenment rationalists sensitive to nuance and complexity, while Bush and those like him -- which is to say a majority of Americans -- are medieval throwbacks crippled by superstition and dogmatism.

"Liberals," he writes, approving [Eric] Alterman's similar bigoted assertion, "do not tend to see themselves as representatives for any ideological movement." Unlike those close-minded, doctrinaire conservatives, "they favor self-criticism, diversity and fairness." The arrogance of this is breathtaking, not to mention laughably false, given the ideological rigidity and complete lack of diversity that characterize, with some few exceptions, the liberal and "progressive" worldview.

The low value of fairness, objectivity, and balance in Schell's thinking is most obvious in his commentaries on the war, which follow the old Marxist script of evil capitalists pulling all the strings of government and culture alike in order to further their nefarious greedy ends.

We were blogging about this very thing earlier today in our Streep vs. South Park post. Thornton continues:

This demonizing of business . . . was stale back in the sixties when it was popularized by Herbert Marcuse and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Forty years of history, however, have rendered it as convincing as phrenology or mesmerism, except in the minds of those like Schell whose intellectual clocks stopped around 1970, leaving them ideologues incapable of "self-criticism," "fairness" and a "diversity" of ideas.

For those stuck in the amber of the radical sixties, Vietnam is their most glorious memory, a time when they rose up and confronted the military-industrial complex and forced it to retreat from its neo-colonial and imperial ambitions. That's why at every opportunity Vietnam is trotted out, surely the most overused false analogy ever.

What does have a "haunting ring" about this war, however, is the relentless assault of those domestic critics like Schell who attempt to erode our will to pursue to its proper end a conflict democratically sanctioned by Congress.

Comments

[Brian]

Good article, except for this bit:

Good people like Schell are enlightenment rationalists...

Social subjectivism? Polylogism? No-facts-only-interpretations? How exactly can one blame this on Voltaire?

I know impugning "rationalism" has always fired up the paleocons - no doubt they'll also get a pleasurable frisson from the note of hopeless pessimism that ends the piece - but it's just silly.