A fever in the body politic

On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H. L. Mencken

Last week, I re-watched the movie “I am Not Your Negro” based on William Baldwin’s recollections of the civil rights movement and the actions of his friend Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. Released in 2016 this movie has gained new relevance in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. And indeed, watching the movie shows you how little has changed between the 1960s and today in the United States.

But what impressed me most about the movie was the eloquence and quality of arguments of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Watch the movie (or this clip) and compare the TV interviews of these three civil rights heroes with the speech that made rapper Killer Mike a hero to this year’s Black Lives Matter movement. There are worlds in the quality of thought and argument between these two instances. But it wasn’t just civil rights leaders. Lest I am accused of political bias, let me state that I am also a big admirer of William F. Buckley Jr. the conservative thinker and founder of National Review. Watch William Buckley debate William Baldwin in 1965 and you witness two intellectual giants of the 20th century in action.

Today, a debate like the one between Buckley and Baldwin is unthinkable for several reasons. First, there are hardly any public intellectuals around that have the prominence and persuasion that these two had sixty years ago. Second, there would be no audience for such a debate. 

Sixty years ago, even forty years ago, intellectual thought leaders would have been able to set influence the political agenda and with it the economic policies of the day with their ideas and arguments. And because they were part of an intellectual elite that was well-educated and trained in rigorous logic paired with experience, their ideas weren’t as half-baked or plain idiotic as the ideas pushed by today’s leaders. Granted, the policies derived from these ideas failed sometimes as well, but at least it wasn’t obvious from the get-go that they would fail.

All of this is not to say that people back then were smarter or better educated than people today. Watch any interview of teenagers going to Woodstock in 1969 or people attending a state fair in the 1970s and you will find that the average man and woman on the street today is neither better nor worse educated than fifty years ago. 

But watch our political elites back then and today and you see a marked difference. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, anti-intellectualism started to rise in the United States and in Europe. In the name of representing the common man, politicians have changed their language and their way of arguing as well as the politics they argue for and against. Today, all that matters for a politician is the soundbite on cable news and the cheap rhetorical win. A good zinger or a good quip counts infinitely more than a good policy or even plain logic.

The end result is that we now have people in charge of countries that fifty or sixty years ago would not have been allowed on TV for fear of embarrassing the station or the host of the show they were on.

And as I have said yesterday, this kind of leadership by anti-intellectuals can be deadly. As Richard Hofstetter wrote in 1964 in “Anti-intellectualism in American Life”:

If anti-intellectualism rules it is a sign of a fever in the body politic.

Our current body politic has a severe fever and in some cases, it threatens to kill the patient.

It is said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried. But democracy does, in my view, not mean that we have to agree to the lowest common denominator. It does not mean that the morons rule the country. Democracy can be a dangerous thing if it isn’t guided by well-meaning elites that help society prevent the worst mistakes. Democracy means that everybody has the right to vote, but it does not mean that everybody can or should be elected. Because if we continue down this path of electing know-nothing politicians under the presumption that they represent the “common man” against the “elites” we may soon end up in a situation where elections don’t matter anymore. Because democracy will be dead.

PS: I apologise for the dark rant today, but I felt it was important to get this off my chest. Normal upbeat service will be resumed next week.