WHY Everyone Hates the Educated Left
Part two of my "Democrats...what are we doing here?" series
If you’re a Democrat, and you came away from Tuesday thinking “no self-reflection is needed!” then — as they say where I’m from — God love ya. Personally, I’m pro-self-reflection pretty much across the board, because at every point in my life, thinking about myself from five years ago causes me to be mortified to the point of paralysis. The further back I think, the more I want to jump into a volcano. This process of constant reflection and — one hopes — self-improvement is the only, remote shot I have at being something less than a total douche-rocket before I die.
Some Democrats continue to deny that anything weird is happening on the left. The line from some liberals after Tuesday’s ass-kicking was “We lost because Youngkin and conservative activists stoked racial animus.” This strikes me as denial in its purest form, a doubling-down on the “how do we get these racist fuckwits to like us?” attitude that ignores the possibility that our actions might be part of the problem. It’s belied by the fact that Youngkin did better with Black voters than Trump, who, himself, outperformed expectations. I don’t have a fine-grained analysis of what happened in Virginia; ultimately, Virginia is weather, and I want to talk about climate. And the climate is one in which many on the left refuse to admit that we’re playing footsy with a weird, elite ideology that most Americans hate.
On Tuesday, I wrote about how basically everyone hates the highly-educated, progressive left. On some level, we all know this — extreme examples of this archetype are viscerally annoying. Remember Pajama Boy? Pajama Boy gained brief internet fame in 2013 when a DNC-linked group tweeted this image in a horribly-misguided attempt to drum up support for Obamacare:
Reactions to Pajama Boy ranged from “he should be put in a one-person rocket and launched into the sun” (far right) to “he should be fired out of a cannon into a hippo’s waiting, open mouth” (center) to “he should be dunked in iodine and dragged by horses through a field of thorny shrubs” (moderate left). I’m pretty far left, so I merely wanted to bury him up to his neck, slather him with meat drippings, and let seagulls peck at his eyes. I’m still stunned that a liberal group tweeted an image that’s the equivalent of a conservative group sending out a picture of a guy with six teeth and 20 confederate tattoos holding an “XXX” jug with the caption “Don’t get vaxxed — that’s for Hebrews!”
Pajama Boy is, essentially, the personification of the type of person David Shor thinks has too much influence in Democratic politics. My point in Tuesday’s column — which I’m turning into Part 1 of a three-part series on what the fuck Democrats think we’re doing — was that Shor is right, but that their influence within formal Democratic politics is only part of the story. I think that things people do everywhere all the time — from entertainment to tweets to person-to-person interactions — affect the Democratic “brand”, and that a party’s brand affects voting outcomes far more than decisions made by campaigns.
But why do people hate elite leftism so much? That’s what I want to think about today. And I think a good place to start is by admitting that I was, at one point in my life, more-or-less Pajama Boy. In my mid-20s, I had a graduate degree, lefty politics, and thick-rimmed glasses worn mostly for style (my eyesight is not that bad). Unfortunately for me, I was also beginning my career as a standup comic, so I was bringing this deeply-loathed persona to places where it was even less-welcome than normal, like a beer festival in central Pennsylvania (real gig), a pool hall-slash shooting range in rural Virginia (real gig), and a club in Baltimore that had a $20 “all you can drink” special (unbelievably, a real gig).
I made things hard on myself by deciding “I can’t just do jokes — I need to say something!” But…did I need to say something? I was, after all, mostly doing shows where I had to ask “could you please unplug Big Buck Hunter before I go on?” I don’t mean to shit on the entire concept of “saying something” — often, change only happens when someone speaks up — but now I realize there’s a time and a place for everything. And an ice cream parlor where you have to stop your set every time the loud-as-a-jet-engine freezer kicks on (real gig) might not be the right venue for taking down George W. Bush’s views on gays in the military.
Of course, the impulse to say something comes from two places. The first is the desire to do the right thing. I try to keep sight of the fact that many of the people I view as nutty and overzealous are coming from a good place, which I honestly do believe. That’s especially true of young people, who have raging hormones and 3/4-cooked brains, and who will probably, one day, think back to their youth and wonder why someone didn’t chain them to a stake like a werewolf.
The second impulse is not-so-noble: Political statements can be self-righteous virtue signaling. That’s what I was doing in my 20s; I was shoe-horning political statements into places where they weren’t welcome — such as a holiday party for Jiffy Lube employees (real gig) — because “smart, political guy” was the identity I’d chosen for myself. Believe me: If any other identity had been available, I would have gone for it. If I thought I could have pulled off Hoodie-Wearing Stoner Guy or even Weird Sideburns Guy With Strong Opinions On Microbrews, I would have leapt at it. Ultimately, my political statements played basically the same role as my Buddy Holly glasses: They were part of a character I’d created for myself.
I realize now how obnoxious this all was. The first problem was that it was elitist; my persona existed to remind people that I had gone to Soft-Handed Dandy University, where I majored in Fancy Lad studies. The second problem was that it was preachy; people were looking for light comedy, and instead I was delivering a scorched-earth takedown of the War on Terror. If my theory is correct that any action anywhere by anyone on the left in some way affects the Democratic brand, then I might have single-handedly killed the public option in Obamacare.
Whoops. Sorry about that.
I think most people respond to this type of performative politics with eye-rolling annoyance. That’s how I always reacted to religious fundamentalists; in high school, I knew a lot of people who would chew my ear about how evolution is a myth and being gay is a sin, blah blah blah. It was the mirror image of the performative proselytizing that I did in my 20s, presumably done for the same reasons. I remember thinking “Look, I know that the topic of evolution came up and now you need to do your little ‘intelligent design’ song and dance or else you’ll feel like a bad person, but why don’t you just leave me out of it?” A fundamentalist’s one-man holy roller show never came close to convincing me of anything, and it never made me want to join their tribe. In fact, it’s probably one of the main reasons I ended up on the left.
The nuttier the belief, the more annoying the political play-acting surrounding that belief. One of the reasons the Democratic brand is turning toxic is that parts of the left are getting into some pretty fucked-up shit — if Michael Moore was weed, then Ibram X. Kendi is heroin. I think John McWhorter spoke for a lot of people when he called Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility “the second-worst book ever written” (the worst, I assume, being Mein Kampf 2: Heil Hawaii!, which had all the racism of Mein Kampf plus a lame plot obviously thrown together so they could rush out a sequel). Of course, Kendi and DiAngelo are merely the king and queen of a vast empire of lefty-academic horseshit that’s convincing absolutely no-one who doesn’t already practice their religion.
It seems to me that parts of the left are caught in an ideological hothouse whose temperature is rising by the minute. But I’ll be honest: I’m still sympathetic to the “it’s just a few crazies” argument. I mean…it seems like a lot of craziness to me. But how does one measure political craziness? There will always be some crackpot State Senator with a bill to give mosquitos the right to vote, and some crank teacher telling his class that vowels are imperialist (or: “mmprrrlssst”). Maybe Twitter makes it easier to find these people (it does), and maybe right-wing media has made publicizing the Crazy Lefty Self-Own Of the Day its raison d’etre (it has). So, it might just be the case that normal levels of crazy are getting amplified. I find this argument difficult to refute.
But I would happily settle for this understanding: No matter how prevalent craziness might be, let’s just denounce it wherever it exists. We can’t stop someone from saying something dumb, but when they say something dumb, let’s make it clear to all listeners that we don’t share their views. Just as Democrats try to tie Republicans to the biggest idiots on their side, Republicans will try to tie Democrats to the biggest idiots on our side, so when they pull that move, let’s say — loudly and clearly for everyone to hear — “that crackpot doesn’t speak for us.”
We’re not doing this. How do I know? Because anyone who does do it gets labeled “heterodox”. Elite academia weirdness is playing the same role on the left that Trump plays on the right: It’s broadly unpopular but cultishly revered by the base — it’s a wedge issue. Because so much lefty weirdness is related to race and gender, liberals are afraid to denounce it, because we don’t want to get called racist or sexist. Politicians also try to say as little about it as possible, and when they do summon the nerve to denounce it, it doesn’t always work, because it’s hard to distance themselves from what’s been established as the Democratic brand.
Consider what just happened in Virginia. Youngkin had great success convincing voters that Democrats would promote radicalism in public schools. Without a doubt, the threat was overhyped; the panic over “critical race theory” is a concerted political effort for which conservative activists have been loudly taking credit. The Democratic response — voiced by McAuliffe billions of times — was that critical race theory was not being taught in Virginia schools.
That was true. But it ignored the fact that much of the left spent the past year and a half promising a “racial reckoning”, defending actual CRT, and loudly praising cranks including but not limited to DiAngelo and Kendi. During that time, crazy things did pop up in public schools, like the training for New York Public School administrators that claimed that elements of “white-supremacy culture” include perfectionism, objectivity, and “worship of the written word”. The 1619 project developed curriculum teaching that racism was not just a large part of American history, but its defining feature. Four Robin DiAngelo books are on the DC Public Schools recommended reading list. Four! Presumably: White Fragility; White Fragility 2: 2 Fast 2 Fragile; Madea’s White Fragility Thanksgiving; and National Lampoon’s White Fragility 4: Return to Boner University.
Virginia parents may have been even more worried about losing AP classes and gifted and talented programs due to equity concerns. In New York, Bill DeBlasio made a highly-publicized (and probably about to be reversed) decision to phase out the gifted and talented program in public schools because it was too Asian and too white. This, of course, is right out of the Kendi playbook: If results are inequitable, then the program is racist and must be changed. Two veteran reporters think this fear loomed large in voters minds:
Too many voters didn’t trust Democrats to handle these issues. Activists painted themselves into a rhetorical corner, spending 18 months promising a righteous reckoning that would reshape society root-and-branch, and then doing a heel-turn and reassuring people that they actually just wanted modest changes GOD why is everyone freaking out?!?!? The pedantic point that critical race theory wasn’t making its way into schools elided the fact that occasional bits of radical bullshit were. To many people, the left’s CRT argument sounded like: “We are not teaching post-funk industrial nü-metal in schools! We’re teaching funk-infused post-punk neo-metal so will everybody please calm down?!?!?”
That dynamic may not have decided the Virginia race, but it certainly didn’t help. As the journalist Nate Cohn pointed out, critical race theory (the actual thing, not the conservative bogeyman) is a critique of liberalism from the left, so to the extent that Republicans can tie Democrats to it, it makes Democrats the party of the race-based worldview. This allows Republicans to claim to be striving for a post-racial world, which is a vision that remains extremely popular. All they need to do to seize that mantle is to get people to forget Trump, and lucky for them, Twitter silenced him. They really caught a break there.
So: Why do people hate the educated left? Some of it’s because we can be smug, smirking little Pajama Boys, and we should always try to work on that. But I think it’s mostly because we’re seen as practitioners of — or at least sympathetic to — a weird religion that’s a borderline cult. The religion is eschatological, because it sees the world as inherently wicked and in need of a cleansing fire, and evangelical, because it demands constant proselytizing and public demonstrations of faith. We spend a lot of time engaged in self-righteous posturing and virtue signaling, and a lot of time telling non-believers that they’re bad bad bad bad bad bad BAD! Of course, the religion is ultimately empty — usually just an expression of guilt about one’s privilege — and requires no real sacrifice from its highly-educated, typically-wealthy practitioners.
How many people actually fit this description? I don’t know. But whatever the numbers, Democrats won’t do well if we’re seen as being captured by a cult. Wherever craziness exists, we should denounce it without reservation. We haven’t been doing that, and if we don’t start, I think there’s more electoral pain ahead.
It pains me thoroughly as an economic leftie, but I believe that right wing paranoia about CRT is more than 50% justified.
CRT is a moving target in terms of definition, motte-and-bailey style, which is inherently not trustworthy. If something is undefinable yet repulsive on contact then an honest bigotry against it is justified, like medieval peasants without a germ theory but who figure out the hanging around sick people gets you sick and therefore brick plague victims inside their homes.
But even on its simplest and least academic form, CRT is a racially essentialist worldview. It transfers some kind of Marxist style analysis from economic relations, where Marxism at least kinda makes sense, to race relations, where it is utter nonsense. Instead positing a hostile exploitation of the proles by the owning class, it instead posits a hostile exploitation of blacks by whites. The fact that the initial relationship between whites and blacks in American history was literally a hostile economic exploitation by rural proles by the plantation owners makes that assertion particularly galling by reversing cause and effect, like saying hay fever causes you to inhale pollens.
Racialism used to critique American horrors (both historical, current, and in the near future) still has a assumption baked into its bedrock that race is an objective division of humanity; that class interest, national identity, or shared religion will dissolve onto contact with stark reality.
Thanks for making me squirm yet again. I too am aiming to achieve “not a complete asshat” status before I die.
And yet my family and I watch Maddow religiously. About a year ago I read “White Fragility” as the gospel truth.
*sigh*
I suspect that as long as I keep following you, Heaton & JuRY I think I’m on the right path. I’m also expanding my horizons by reading George Will and Jonah Goldberg columns.
Maybe there’s hope.