progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL "… Goldwater remarked In a revealing statement "I don't fell the conservative cause has been hurt. Twenty five million votes are a lot of votes and a lot of people dedicated to the concept of conservatism." … If one accepts the point of view of political doctrinaires and amateurs, whose primary aim in politics is to make certain notions more popular, this statement has its validity; for a generation no politician has been able to preach Goldwater's brand of ultra right wing individualism and ultra nationalism to so wide an audience form so exalted a platform … liberals should be grateful to Goldwater. No other Republican could have made such a startling contribution to the first really significant and general extension of the New Deal since the 1930s. It was his campaign that broke the back of our postwar conservatism." Compare Wilentz in the Foreword to Hofstadter in the body. Hofstadter could not see the US as moving in a direction, he could never have seen Reagan and the 1980s. Yet he did not see Johnson and the financial collapse of the 1970s and the Vietnam War. Speak of ultra nationalism one needs look no further than Vietnam. Johnson did ten times over in Viet Nam what Goldwater could ever have done. Also the whole concept of individualism is distorted and misunderstood by Hofstadter. He is writing a classic journalism piece and not one of academic correctness. He is writing a polemic and as such fits the role of Public Intellectual. 6.1.5 Hofstadter Redux It is interesting to examine haw Hofstadter still has influence in today's political world. For example, George Will wrote a piece for Real Clear Politics in April 2008 regarding Obama, and in so doing brings the Hofstadter mindset into the current time 160 . He states: "The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow: First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats. 160 See Washington Post, April 2008 or http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/obamas_condescens ion.html Page 148
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree. Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America. " But if Will has discovered a nexus, a nexus of substantial value, then one must say that Hofstadter and the prejudice and near hatred of rubes and Irish Catholics may still live on. Will sees the pervasive influence of Hofstadter. Indeed there is the view that only the Intellectual on Morningside Heights sees the truth and that the rubes and Catholics below need guidance for the response from this underclass is their almost animalistic and unguided d responses. His dismissal of those with whom you disagree is in many ways a result also of the influence of Herbert Marcuse in his work The One Dimensional Man. For it was Marcuse who gave structure to what Hofstadter and Bell and others were saying in that he argued that the society had through its advertising, preaching and the like reduced people to sheep, to followers. Marcuse became the prophet for the 60s generation of protesters, especially at Columbia. In fact, Marcuse was saying in a more elegant can compelling manner what Galbraith had popularized in The Affluent Society, namely that society was manipulated to "buy" what corporate institutions wanted them to buy, that individual choice was being ripped away, and that society had only one path and that was the path laid out by the capitalists. This underclass needs direction and guidance, says Hofstadter, and whatever they may think, whatever opinion they may have is uninformed because they just have not listened, they do not understand, and in some cases they do not have the capability of even understanding. They have in the mind of many of these intellectuals become the "untouchables", they are there but they just should be forgotten. If one reads between the lines of the letter to me from Barr in 1960 that view is pervasive. I had been inculcated and Columbia was just beyond me. Somehow MIT thought differently. Also I was a Professor in 1996 at Columbia in the Business School. Frankly the students were some of the least intelligent I have ever seen in my forty plus years of teaching 161 . 161 I taught in the 1995-1996 year at Columbia Business School. I was uniquely unimpressed by the students. They were in an Executive Program and one would have expected some understanding. They were lacking in any mathematical skills, and had de minimis knowledge of common business principles. In contrast in the late 1980 and early 1990s I was a Professor at the Polytechnic University, now NYU's Engineering School in Brooklyn. The students were for the most part first or second generation Americans from everywhere. They were bright and hard working, eager to learn, street smart, open, and lacking in the arrogance of the Columbia students. My MIT doctoral students are Page 149
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The Telmarc Group and the Progressi
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