I Do Not Think Those Words Mean What You Think They Mean

There's an article on Five Thirty Eight from a couple of months ago (recently posted by a friend) that calls Rubio a moderate, and implies, albeit with caveats, that Trump may do better among conservatives. 

Well, I took umbrage. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard and read too many things along these lines.  Maybe it’s because I respect and appreciate 538’s work with math, and therefore hate to see a friend be inaccurate.  In any case, I feel the need to get this point off my chest.

As a lot of people have already noted (including, to give them their due, Five Thirty Eight elsewhere): Donald Trump is not a much of a conservative. I’m not going to spend much time attacking Trump’s conservative cred here, since that’s been done (see links above, or go find your own).  But I will briefly make the case that Rubio is not a moderate than conservative (on which matter Rush Limbaugh agrees with me).

By the way, the fact that “Donald Trump conservative or liberal”

is one of the top searches to pop up when I put in

“Donald Trump is conservative” should tell you something. 

Also, to ye olde Catholics out there, let me propose a new way of judging

a candidate’s  “conservatism”: the Chesterton test.  What would

Chesterton think of your policies … or your candidate?

On social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty, Rubio and Cruz—the “moderate” and the “conservative”—have pretty similar positions.  Trump’s flaked all over the place on these matters; not many people trust him to hold this conservative line when it matters—for example, in nominating our next two or three Supreme Court justices.

On matters of defense, all three of the top tier candidates are more pro-foreign-intervention than, say, Rand Paul.  But while their attitudes on this issue are problematic from a libertarian perspective (and probably would earn denunciations from Chesterton), that hardly qualifies them as “moderates” in the eyes of most ordinary Americans, who tend to equate military interventionism with conservatism and caution with liberalism.  Once again, this means it’s hard to paint Rubio—who’s positioned himself as tough on Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, the Middle East, and of course Cuba; and who’s advocated a strong military—as a moderate on defense.  One can argue that his position on Syria is misguided (and possibly unChestertonian?? but then again, rebels ...), but hardly that it’s unconservative (unless, again, one takes a libertarian definition of the term).

Taxes and the economy?  Don’t make me laugh.  Yes, Rubio likes families in his tax code—so much so that Steve Forbes has kinda, sorta, maybe endorsed Trump, presumably as being more favorable to business.  But since supporting families is actually a conservative enterprise, and since Rubio’s economic positions in general are conservative, I fail to see how this particular foible (which it isn’t) makes him a moderate.  He’s against raising the minimum wage, preferring wage subsidies as a way of helping poor individuals and families; he’s said that the War on Poverty demonstrates a failure of Big Government; he’s spoken favorably of how church and community used to take care of neighbors in need; he’s spoken in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts and simplifying the tax code; he wants to make life easier for small business; he’s supported balancing the budget.  He is, in other words, for a smaller federal government, while still wanting to retain enough of a social net to protect the poor and encourage families.  This all sounds fairly conservative (Chestertonian?) to me.

Immigration?  Not even really there.  Yes, Rubio was involved with the Gang of Eight bill, despite his promises to be tough on illegal immigration.  But anyone paying attention to Trump’s actual immigration plans, as opposed to his rhetoric, should recognize that touch-back is essentially amnesty by another name.   Meanwhile, Rubio—despite his swivel, which is certainly cause for concern—is talking about favoring skilled immigrants, has expressed concern for legal immigrants waiting in line, and has promised strength on border control.  He flip-flops on this issue, but at the moment he’s flipped back to a more conservative stance.  (Hard to know what Chesterton would think here.  He likes the little guy—but he also likes preserving local culture.)

Education?  Rubio’s in favor of vocational education and likes vouchers, saying that the poor reap the most benefits from school choice.  He’s said the states should be making the choices on education, rather than the federal government.  (Once again, Chesterton the localist would approve.)

Gun control?  Rubio doesn’t think gun control will stop criminals, has a concealed carry permit, and is rated B+ by the NRA (that pretty good B+ was an A, until Rubio failed to push a guns-to-work bill a few years back).  (Chesterton???  I defer to someone who knows his biography a little better.  I will note, however, that he is reputed to have carried a swordstick.)

Health care?  Rubio thinks the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has a stifling economic effect.  And while Ted Cruz made a public statement against Obamacare, Rubio worked to insert a poison pill into the bill that would slowly eat away at it from the inside.  (Again, it’s hard to know what Chesterton would have thought here, but I have trouble seeing him endorsing the mandate, much less single payer.)

Support from the “Washington Republican Establishment”?  Well, yes, Rubio has that.  Trump is being supported by Chris Christie, who was until recently considered an establishment candidate.  Look, in politics endorsements have a lot more to do with who’s married to whose sister, who had dinner six times at whose house, who played nice as opposed to mean, and who expects what favors from whom.  That’s why Rubio has the support of Washington rather than Cruz: not because Rubio is a “moderate” but because Rubio, unlike Cruz, has not burned bridges in his quest for power.  They’re all after power, of course; and all quite unscrupulous; but some of them are more prudent in their pursuit of power than others.  Rubio has been more prudent in Washington than Cruz.  Once again, that doesn’t make him unconservative.

None of this, by the way, is intended as a derogation of Cruz, much less (obviously) of Rubio, either of whom I would be delighted to see as president.  (And for the record, Cruz’s debate performance this most recent time was superior.)  But voters could use a reminder that, the issue of immigration excepted, Rubio and Cruz are BOTH conservative.  Trump … it’s a little less obvious.  Actually, given his chameleonic nature, it’s a lot less obvious.  And the fact that Trump has been doing well in states with open primaries, and losing to Cruz in states with primaries limited to Republicans, should make it extremely non-obvious (not to say dubious) that Trump is a conservative.

Now, if you want to define the word “conservative” to mean “angry people” or “people who watch a lot of reality TV” or “people who don’t like foreigners on principle,” then yeah, I guess a lot of Donald’s support is conservative.  But then, if you choose to do that, I have a new word for what you are: sophists.

Am I being  too strong?  Perhaps.  But as far as I can tell, the usual reasoning behind applying “conservative” to Trump and “moderate” to Rubio is as follows.

Some conservatives are angry, uneducated, cultural chauvinists.

Some of Trump’s supporters are angry, uneducated, cultural chauvinists.

Therefore, Trump's supporters are conservatives!
(And Trump is the conservative candidate in the race!)

Fallacy #1: undistributed middle; Fallacy #2: non sequitur.

Rubio’s style of talking about immigration is more moderate than Trump's.
Therefore, Rubio is a moderate candidate.
Fallacy #1: equivocation; Fallacy #2: failure to consider the array.

Maybe I am missing something; but as far as I can tell, when people comparing Trump and Rubio put Trump on the more conservative end of the scale and Rubio on the more moderate one, they are simply not using words in the same way that I use them.

The Anger of the Academic

 Perhaps it is the election cycle, perhaps the increased intensity of my own research—whatever the cause, I’ve become far more aware over the past few months of the amount of anger in academia.

I’m not referring to the anger of students, to the dangerous absurdities that most often make the news, but to the anger of the academics themselves.  It is, fortunately, not nearly so universal a trait as (to choose a quality at random) the habit of carrying one’s own dry-erase markers; but it is common enough to be noticeable—remarkable, in the etymological sense of the word—especially in the humanities.

All professors in the humanities are inclined, by profession as it were, to make professions—indeed, to commit what are referred to coyly in the Catholic world as “professions of faith.”  As with all good faiths, these professions involve negative and positive elements.  A Catholic rejects sin and Satan, and embraces Jesus Christ; a biologist rejects cancer, and embraces health.  The Catholic may study sin (indeed, a great many of us are walking human experiments in the subject, making it well-nigh irresistible for the eager student), but that hardly suggests that the Catholic is in favor of sinning.  Likewise, the biologist may study cancer, but only with the purpose of contributing to its eventual eradication.  His focus, like the peccatologist’s, may be on the evil he sees all around him; but the evil is evil precisely because it is destroying some good.  His anger may be severe, but it is an anger ultimately based on love of something beautiful.

The oddity in the humanities is that this does not always appear to be the case.  Within literature in particular, there are certain scholars who seem to take delight in studying things which make them angry, things which on some level they regard as evil—but with no apparent consciousness of the good or the beautiful in the background.  They are professors whose profession appears to be fundamentally negative.

Chinua Achebe’s famous essay on Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness is a classic instance of the phenomenon.  Achebe’s argument, in brief, is that Conrad’s portrayal of Africans makes them the real dark centers of the story.  For decades readers focused on Kurtz’s corruption and the irony that of corruption, given the purportedly “civilizing” influence of Europeans in Africa; and finding in the story, if anything, a lesson against supposing that one’s race or culture is a guarantor of one’s virtue.  But Achebe argues that, despite the superficial appearance of cultural humility, Conrad’s work is essentially culturally imperialistic, inasmuch as it highlights the superiority of European culture to African again and again.

A counter reading of the novella might emphasize the role of the narrator, his prejudices and his disenchantment, more than Achebe does.  But be that as it may, Achebe is correct to observe that the portrayal of Africans in the story displays prejudice.  And given the correctness of his observation, there is nothing surprising about his anger.  Nor is it surprising that he should write an entire lecture fueled by that anger.

It is not even surprising that his is not the only scholastic effort bent on tearing to shreds a previously well-accepted piece of literature.  If artists can be prejudiced like anyone else, they are capable of writing things that are offensive; and naturally, if everyone goes around lauding such works to the skies for their artistic merit without noticing that there is offense in them, the situation ought to be rectified.   I, personally, have always found Ulysses offensive, and (if I ever get around to actually reading it) may someday write a scathingly brilliant essay against it myself.

But I doubt I will ever actually write the essay.  For one thing, Ulysses is a very long book, and I have plenty of other things left to read.  There are so many good books that it seems a waste of time to gorge on one which (based on the excerpts I’ve encountered and the descriptions I have read) would be profoundly antithetical not only to my aesthetic taste but also to my moral principles.  A work of genius I have no doubt it is.  But again, there are even so many works of genius in existence that it is probably more worth my time to read Moby Dick (for example) than Joyce’s equally oversized saga.

(I know, I know—it’s scandalous that an English PhD student

hasn’t read Moby Dick.  I didn’t get around to Crime and Punishment

or Anna Karenina until a couple years ago.  And I still haven’t read

Timon of Athens.  Consider this my Lenten abasement for the week.)

The world is so full of a number of things (observed Stevenson), I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.  There’s no reason to spend time on books that one doesn’t enjoy.  And there’s certainly no reason to make them the focus of one’s academic career.  And yet, people do.  People do dedicate their academic careers—not simply to works by men who are flawed (all of us are); nor even to works that themselves show the dark side of the era in which they were written (few, I suspect, do not); but to works that they consider the embodiment of everything that they don’t like about literature.

Now there is a way in which this approach is similar to that of the biologist with cancer.  The biologist wants healthy people, and therefore he focuses on eradicating a disease that kills billions of them.  In the same way, perhaps, the feminist literary scholar who despises pre-modern portrayals of women is certainly a proponent of women, and of their accurate portrayals.  But literature does not work like medicine, or even like philosophy.  In medicine, if enough people study a bug for a long enough time, the bug generally gets licked.  Even in philosophy, the theory is (or was) that if enough people argue about a bad philosopher for a long enough time, his errors will become apparent and his influence, therefore, will be destroyed.  In literature, however, the more people study a work—even a morally questionable work—the more of a life the work seems to have.  One does not kill prejudice by angry academic writing; one perpetuates it by extending its voice.

The real solution, if a work is sufficiently morally iniquitous to make one angry, is to ignore it and to study or write something else, something more morally worthy of attention.  Scholars here could stand to learn a practical lesson from politics: giving air time to an opponent is usually a strategic mistake.  But scholars, like politicians and people in general, sometimes let their anger get the better of them, and spend endless reservoirs of time and effort and influence trying to dismantle a canon they perceive as problematic and, in the process, reminding the rest of us of its existence.  Wiser would be the man (however wrong) to argue that Samson Agonistes is a work of terrorist literature, and leave it at that.

But the real oddity of the angry literary scholar is not even his impracticality—scholars are, after all, stereotypically bad at realizing how their ideas will affect those around them.

(For example.)

No, the real oddity of the angry literary scholar is that in a field which is purportedly devoted to delight, they have determined on a course of study and work which will keep them perpetually miserable.  The entire point of an aesthetic representation is, after all, to give pleasure to its readers.  Whether or not it is also to contain some elements of truth is disputed.  I myself would argue that a great deal of the pleasure is in seeing the truth—in seeing that the way this character acts in this moment is eminently true to life, in the sense that that sort of man would indeed act in just that way in that sort of moment.  But whether the pleasure comes from the truth of a depiction or from something else or some combination of things, pleasure is at the heart of reading, and at the heart of creating an object to be read.

It is odd, then, that those who are professionally dedicated to the study of things designed to give delight are so adamantly determined not to enjoy themselves.  It is odd that they should choose to attach themselves to works which are so morally iniquitous as to anger them.

But then again, there are a great many desiderata that other people enjoy which I, in my saner moments, regard as odd: power, heels from Prada, and hang-gliding, to name but a few.  But there are darker moments when the appeal of being angry, really, righteously angry at something, and being known to be angry at it, and respected for it, does appeal to me.  There are also moments when the idea of standing on four-inch calf enhancers sounds exciting, not to say daring.  I gave my heels to Goodwill a long time ago; I have yet to eradicate the remains of empty righteous indignation from my life.  Probably the job of doing so will go on until my life is over.

But in the meantime, someone somewhere is writing an essay about how T.S. Eliot or Dickens or Milton or Shakespeare is evil, and they are angry.  I can only hope that, on some level, they’re enjoying it.

“It is consequently my degrading duty to serve this upstart as

First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief,

Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Back Stairs,

Archbishop of Titipu, and Lord Mayor, both acting and elect, all rolled into one. 

And at a salary!  A Pooh-Bah paid for his services! 

I a salaried minion!  But I do it!  It revolts me, but I do it!”

Death

I’ve been engaged in other kinds of writing, alas; but I couldn’t pass up this guest post (if you will).  In betwixt all the headlines about Scalia’s death, I was reading Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, and stumbled on this poem which somehow I missed when reading Herbert’s complete works last spring.  It’s a timely Lenten reminder, like Scalia’s own death, of the Ars Moriendi—and a lovely illustration of how Herbert’s flavor of metaphysical conceit suited his religious impulses.

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,

                           Nothing but bones,

      The sad effect of sadder groans:

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

For we considered thee as at some six

                           Or ten years hence,

      After the loss of life and sense,

Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.

We looked on this side of thee, shooting short;

                         Where we did find

      The shells of fledge souls left behind,

Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood

                           Into thy face,

      Thou art grown fair and full of grace,

Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,

                           As at Doomsday;

      When souls shall wear their new array,

And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust

                           Half that we have

      Unto an honest faithful grave;

Making our pillows either down, or dust.

—George Herbert.

No, that’s not George Herbert—I couldn’t

find a death mask for him.  But kudos if you

can recognize his near-contemporary.