Blithely unaware

The other day I was driving around and, as I frequently do, I had NPR on the radio. Our local host, Lois Reitzes, was interviewing Jon Meacham, an author/journalist with a new book out, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Natures.

I did not catch the full interview but enough to once again be struck how our public intellectuals can be both so isolated and so ignorant.

This is brought to mind by a review of Meacham's book I see this morning in the New York Times, A Battle for the ‘Soul of America’? It’s as Old as America, One Historian Notes by Sean Wilentz.

Loise Reitzes and Jon Meacham are both quite bright. Well educated, articulate, in some fashion knowledgeable and certainly accomplished in their niche circles. But their blind spots are astonishing as is the narrowness of their circles. Meacham's themes are the standard ones of the academy and public intellectuals. Those whom Thomas Sowell refers to as the Anointed. Better yet, the Self-Anointed. To these cultural postmodernists, America is always at risk from its own democracy.

The dark night of fascism always looms. The citizens insist on having opinions divergent from those of the public intellectuals. According to this hothouse worldview, Americans are inherently small minded, racist, fearful of others, fearful of change, misogynistic, homophobic, violent and ignorant. They are probably unwashed and eat things like twinkies and iceberg lettuce too.

In the NPR interview, Reitzes and Meacham started out with some of the interesting nuggets Meacham turned up in his research but it quickly devolved into the intellectually threadbare and loathsome lamenting of two tired thinkers falling back on cliches and the anemic mindset of French Marxist intellectuals from the sixties.

The unsupported and often sotto voce assumption of the vileness of the opinions and behaviors of the American public took second place only to the regret of Reitzes and Meacham about the smallness of vision of the Founding Fathers and their racism, misogyny and other moral failings.

Gone unmentioned and uncommented was that the founding of the nation marked the first experiment in a people conjuring a nation out of principles (the ideas of the Enlightenment) rather than from shared history, soil, blood, or religion. The first experiment of vesting power in a diversity of people rather than in a clique (whether monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, oligopoly, or dictators); the acknowledgement of the rule of law; the according to people equal rights; the establishment of equality under the law; the structuring of a government to protect the rights of all minorities (religious, national origin, cultural, life-style, regional, etc.). All these things were unremarked while Meacham and Reitzes breathlessly observed that African-Americans in 1784 did not fully share in all these benefits and nor did women.

In focusing their criticism so narrowly, Meacham and Reitzes betray their ignorance, their bigotry, their intolerance, their racism, their misandry, and their elitism. Parroting the French postmodernist Marxists, their targets are white men and their casual banter indicates that they assume that all white men were able to vote. They seem completely ignorant of the fact that slavery was a universal global phenomenon, that nowhere else was there an institutionalization of broad suffrage, and in no place else was there a mechanism, other than violence, for individuals to defend themselves from the State.

In the first stages of the great American experiment, voting was indeed limited. But not by the postmodernist categories of race and gender. Meacham, Reitzes and their ilk, so besotted by the totalitarian moralism of the postmodernists, have closed their minds to how different the world was then. By seeking to impose the 1960s French postmodernist categories onto the world two and three centuries ago, they expose themselves as intellectual blank slates.

In our great founding experiment, voting was limited primarily to those deemed to have the greatest stake in the well-being of the commonweal - broadly tax-paying, property owning, heads of households, i.e. a small subset of men. With these restrictions, only some 20-25% of the adult population was entitled to vote. In some states Jews and Catholics were not allowed to vote. In many states, the majority of white men failed to meet the specified criteria and therefore were not entitled to vote. By choosing to ignore these facts and focusing only on their preferred postmodernist victim categories of the mid-twentieth century, these public intellectuals demonstrate the levels of ignorance, intolerance, racial animus and general bigotry which they claim to see in their fellow citizens.

It is ironic that the social isolation of our contemporary public intellectuals is profoundly more restricted than even the suffrage of America at its founding. At least the Founding Fathers granted participation to 20-25% of the public. For our postmodernist public intellectuals, their circle of people with whom they live, work, and accord respect is markedly more circumscribed. Their world is limited to those with college degrees (only 30% of the population), preferably at least an advanced degree (8%), and desirably from an Ivy League or comparable state university (1% of the population). Our public intellectuals scorn the Founding Fathers exclusiveness while reveling in their own greater exclusion.

Not only do Meacham and Reitzes ignore how radical the American experiment was in moving beyond nativist tribalism into a government informed by the ethos of the Enlightenment, they also ignore what that did actually mean. For the first time, even on the most limited scale, there were Jews who could be full citizens (in some states), some Catholics, some Blacks, etc. In no other country in the world (except possibly in Britain/London) might one find a person from the African diaspora with fully vested rights of voting citizenship. The fact that it was regrettably rare in America at the founding should not overshadow that it could occur.

While slavery was not outlawed at the federal level we should not forget that 40% of the original thirteen states, including three of the largest by population, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, had already outlawed slavery - the first in the modern world to do so.

The third thing that they ignore is that the American experiment in government according to Enlightenment ideas was only one of three such experiments in the space of five years and the only one to succeed.

The American Constitution (1788) was the first and with changes and evolution and some tragic interludes has continued till today, the longest running representative democracy not based on blood or soil. Our two main parties are the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world. The stability and duration are phenomenal.

The second effort to institute Enlightenment ideas in government occurred in the Haitian Revolution in 1791, ending in genocide and dictatorship.

The third great experiment in instituting the ideas of the Enlightenment was in France with the French Revolution (1792). An experiment which ended in mass executions, dictatorship and then global war resulting in the deaths of millions across Europe and the globe.

Our public intellectuals glory in badmouthing the failures of the Founding Fathers and the shortcomings of American citizens while celebrating their own bigotry and ignorance. The limits of their experience, knowledge and social range prevent them from understanding why they are held in such low regard by their fellow citizens. They are shielded from reality by an invincible Dunning-Kruger cloak of bias, continuing their bigotry and racism, blithely unaware.

There are three truths which our public intellectuals in the academy and in the media either ignore or do not know. 1) The Founding Fathers launched a till then unique effort to embed the ideas of the enlightenment into a form of government extending rule of law, natural rights, equality before the law and protection of the individual citizen from the mob and from the state. 2) This experiment advanced the principles of freedom and equality far ahead of any other system of government extant at the time. 3) That the institutionalization of the principles of the Enlightenment was so radical that it failed everywhere else it was attempted and only became enshrined in other countries, decades and centuries later when the evidence of its feasibility was already demonstrated by the US.