Bobo Goes To College

David Brooks, who is quite possibly the most useless political commentator writing for a major American newspaper (yes, even more useless than Maureen Dowd), phones in yet another of his illuminations. What would be the opposite of "weighs in"?

Back in the 1950's, tens of millions of Americans were members of fellowship associations like the Elks Lodges, the Rotary Clubs and the Soroptimists. These groups had lodges or chapters across the nation, where the affluent and not so affluent, the educated and not so educated, would get together once a week or so for schmoozing and community service.

Bobo forgets about the Freemasons and the Illuminati -- or does he? Maybe that's what they'd like you to believe....

But as Prof. Theda Skocpol of Harvard has demonstrated, these fraternal associations lost members in the 1960's. Instead, groups like NOW, Naral and the Heritage Foundation emerged as the important associations in American life. But these groups were not like the old fellowship organizations.

Many of these groups were formed to champion some specific cause. Instead of relying on a vast network of local chapters, they tend to organize their work from central offices in New York or Washington, with a professional staff. They raise money through direct mail appeals or by asking for foundation grants.

These new groups are dominated by experts - people who live within the network of grant officers, activists and scholars. Being a member of one of these organizations doesn't generally involve going to a local lodge once a week and communing with your neighbors; it involves sending a check once a year and reading a newsletter.

And? Welcome to the age of specialization and refinement, Bobo. Guess what -- football players don't double on offense and defense any more, which is why Chuck Bednarik thinks they're all a bunch of pussies.

Bobo also seems to miss the obvious point that lodges were a way for men to get away from the little woman for a while, drink and play poker, drive around in some funny cars at the parade, etc. And if some of that got written off at tax time by doing a little community-oriented work, so much the better.

You can almost see Bobo's glasses fog up when he gets all wistful for the days when Ward was a little hard on the Beaver last night.

Furthermore, as Skocpol observes in her book "Diminished Democracy," these new organizations tend not to bring people together across class lines. In 1980, at a time when about 15 percent of the electorate had a college degree, roughly 80 percent of the members of the Sierra Club and Naral were college graduates.

You can find this sort of statistical skewing in many clubs past and present. Any association of people is bound to have anomalies. But don't let a simple tautology stop Bobo. He's rolling.

The decline of fraternal associations and the emergence of these professionally run groups for the educated class diminished communal life. The change also reshaped politics.

Since the 1960's there has been a breakdown in the machinery that allowed Americans to work together across class and other divisions. The educated class has come to dominate, and the issues of interest to that class overshadow issues of interest to the less educated and less well off.

The primary breakdown in this putatively well-oiled communal machinery has less to do with the rise of the technocrats, and more to do with how we've allowed business to eviscerate the earning power of the majority of people. Real wages are about where they were in the late '70s. It is not uncommon for people to work two or three jobs just to survive, never mind getting ahead. (Check this report too [.pdf file]. More on this page, and here.) Seems a slightly more likely explanation for the breakdown of community than "fewer Rotarians".

Bobo forgets conveniently that in the '60s, families generally made do pretty well with just one breadwinner. There were no "DINK"s or "OINK"s or any of that yuppie shit. Dad went to work, and he made enough money so that Mom stayed home and made a nice home for Dad and 2.3 children. This was a fine arrangement, so long as Mom didn't want a career of her own. And it generally didn't matter much if you didn't have a college degree. People even saved money in banks, rather than running up credit cards and crossing their fingers.

No more. You don't have a degree, you better learn to like paper hats and the smell of freedom fries, 'cause that's a good chunk of your options. As far as having time for community service, uh, okay. Bobo forgets pretty regularly that most people don't get paid six figures to be a fluffer for the Republican Party.

But the two major parties were affected unequally. The Republican coalition still contains some cross-class associations, like the N.R.A. and the evangelical churches, which connect corporate elites to the middle classes. The Democratic coalition has fewer organizations like that. Its elite - the urban and university-town elite - has less contact with the less educated.

Not coincidentally, Republicans have a much easier time putting together electoral majorities.

There is some truth to this. But the real problem is that the Democrats conceded the Midwest so easily that many Midwesterners just took it as proof of their assumptions. In the "red" states where Kerry and Edwards actually tried -- especially Missouri and Arkansas -- they had those states in play, coming within just a few points in each state. In contrast, Bush campaigned even in the reddest of states. He made his pitch even in Utah and Oklahoma, where there was no doubt. (He stayed out of California, strangely, since the GOP is actually somewhat ascendant here, but whatever. Maybe he knew that even California Republicans were unlikely to have anything to do with those pre-screened bullshit audiences. That is just so pathetic.)

At any rate, I submit that the Democrats' concession was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a truly smart strategy of conceding what was not theirs. If we understand that most states are neither "red" nor "blue" but "purple" then we realize that pretty much all states are in play. The Midwest gets neglected because of their sparse populations, and hence low numbers of electoral votes, but they tend to be like dominoes, seeing how their neighbors are voting.

What Bobo misses is that the Republicans -- think tanks, policy-makers, and all the rest -- are run by educated corporate elites just as surely as the Democrats are. He's right that they've done a better job communicating with the less educated, but doesn't mention that it's a cynical bamboozlement of moral values boilerplate and flag-waving, while disguising their actual policy so well that many polled Bush voters had no idea whatsoever as to their candidate's actual positions on many key issues. That's not communicating, that's scamming.

Over the past two years, what we might loosely call the university-town elite has come to dominate the Democratic Party not just intellectually, but financially as well.

Howard Dean, in his fervent antiwar phase, mobilized new networks of small donors, and these donors have quickly become the money base of the party. Whereas Al Gore raised only about $50 million from individuals in 2000, John Kerry raised $225 million, including $87 million over the Internet alone. Many of these new donors are highly educated. The biggest groups of donors to the Dean and Kerry campaigns were employees of the University of California, Harvard, Stanford, Time Warner, Microsoft and so on.

Bobo somberly intones this news as if it's a bad thing. You can practically hear him stage-whispering something snide about pipe-smoking, elbow-patched liberal English professors who take time out from showing their etchings to cheerleaders to donate to Satan's party. Gee, after weighing the faults of each side, whom do I think has the most interest in general well-being and common sense -- Harvard or Walmart?

See, Bobo's main problem in his "noble savage" adulation of the supposedly stolid values of the "red states" is that he's got the wrong end of the stick. He fails to put this tableau of traditionalism and publicly-espoused morality in context with where the rest of the world is going. The globalization advocates won. This means everyone else starts catching up with us, from demographically-advantaged countries like China and India to even second-rate powers like Russia and Brazil. This means we have to stop jerking ourselves off with paying tribute to religious hucksters who have infested our policy-making apparatus, and truly start running this railroad like a business. This means we have to stress science and engineering and logic and reason, and tell the creationism grifters once and for all to get the fuck out of our science classes with their mumbo-jumbo. This means that we had better start getting serious about making sure all of our kids know at least as much about world history, geography, math, science, effective writing and speaking, and all the rest, as they do about American Idol.

China is powering up their manufacturing base big time. India is serious about engineers. We buy shit from China, have people in India tell us how to fix it, and listen to morons like Bobo tell us how much better Stuckey's is than Spago. We let the values pimps hijack the debate over meaningless issues like Janet Jackson's nipple, while their corporate masters rob us blind and plot to leave us destitute when we're old and feeble. We snicker at them fretting about cartoon characters, when it's really an instance of them reassuring each other in code that the agenda is still on track.

We are besotted with our peculiar vision of American exceptionalism, which has been true in the past, and still has much truth to it, but is on the wane. We kid ourselves with this American Gothic notion of white picket fences and unlocked doors, when small-town America is rapidly becoming a zone infested by crank cooks and ignorant codgers, a place where the manufacturing base has been outsourced so thoroughly, all the kids have gone to where the money is, so the towns decay into strip-mall service jobs and low-rent subdivisions.

There is a lot to be said for living in a small town -- you know everybody, the cost of living is relatively low, and crime is relatively scarce. It's a safer environment to raise kids. That's all great. But this continual pitting of an "educated elite" against a stoic, noble less-educated class is just nonsense. You simply cannot continue for long in an era of scientific and technological progress, and geopolitical stability, patterning yourself after a way of life which, in many ways, deliberately eschews those things. Small-town people are not looking to get ahead so much as to get by, which is simply not going to be an option for the United States henceforth.

Many Republicans are mystified as to why the Democrats, having lost another election, are about to name Howard Dean as party chairman and have allowed Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy to emerge unchallenged as the loudest foreign policy voices.

The answer, as Mickey Kaus observes in Slate, is that the party is following the money. The energy and the dough are in the MoveOn.org wing, which is not even a wing of the party, but the head and the wallet. Only the most passionate and liberal voices can stir up this network of online donors from the educated class.

Howard Dean may not be as liberal as he appeared in the primaries, but in 1,001 ways - from his secularism to his stridency - he embodies the newly dominant educated class, which is large, self-contained and assertive.

Thanks to this newly dominant group, the Democrats are sure to carry Berkeley for decades to come.

You know, the more I hear this smug, self-satisfied bullshit from Bobo's party, the more I think the Democrats are very much on the right track with Dean. For one, Dean is not nearly as "liberal" as they try to paint him, and they know it. There's a huge whiff of "briar patch" politics at work here.

Dean is socially liberal, of course, but sensibly so. So is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is just a Hollywood liberal who likes to keep his money, when you get right down to the nut of it. And gay marriage is an issue which has started to even out already. Sure, the state initiatives have all gone resoundingly against it. But the GM opponents have painted themselves into a long-term corner with their rhetoric. By saying they oppose gay marriage but not "civil unions", they have officially endorsed a difference without a distinction. I do not think gays would care any less if it were called a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich; they simply want the rights granted to the rest of us, which civil unions allow.

Dean is also fiscally conservative, something these current lackwits could learn something about. Fiscally conservative means more than just "not spending money", it also means being judicious about what things to cut when cuts are needed. So when, say, you're running a record deficit several years running, and you've pissed away a record surplus in the process, and fiscal stability must be attempted, do you start by cutting veterans' medical benefits, or by rescinding tax cuts from the top? The doomsayers always insist that if you do the latter, the ultra-rich will simply take their toys and retreat to Galt's Gulch or something. I say let them. Go back to your gated communities and Swiss chalets and private islands and all that. The other 99% of us will figure out something. We'll muddle on without you, o masters of the universe. I simply refuse to continue subsidizing the ability of the one-percenters to run everyone else's lives with their goddamned "donations".

Howard Dean will provide the Democratic Party with several things it desperately needs -- passion, energy, real grass-roots efforts, and a cohesive message. Already Dean has begun well, chastising the Republicans "borrow and spend" ways, while simultaneously putting to bed the old "tax and spend liberal" meme.

The next thing to do, which should be easy enough, is to begin repositioning the Democrats as the party of reform. The current Republican leadership has completely betrayed whatever true reform idealism the Gingrich brigade of 1994 espoused. DeLay and his ilk are nothing but K Street whores, and the only challenge in dragging this message out into the light is in being consistent and repetitive about it. Set it to music if you have to, boys, because this is the song that will take you to the top of the charts.

Finally, in long-term strategy, Dean is an excellent candidate to resurrect the once-noble intentions of the word "liberal". The word first started losing currency with the self-serving practices and cheap identity politics practiced by the '80s Democratic leadership, both of which are now part and parcel of the current Republican agenda. Similar to how gays have reclaimed "queer", or African-Americans have reclaimed "black" or the n-word, liberals would take a lot of piss out of a stupidly pejorative term by just embracing the term and informing it with real passion.

I think Howard Dean was the correct choice to perform these tasks, quickly and efficiently, and bring the Democrats' turn in the wilderness to a thankful ending. This country needs a true opposition party, and as such, the maintenance and stability of the US requires a quick rehabilitation of said party, so it can return to its rightful role in checking the abuses of power in which the current administration is at once so brazen and yet secretive.