The View from St. Paul

 

D. J. Tice

      D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. These articles are reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

Bush Inspires “Hate”—and More Than a Little Silliness

      Conservatives and liberals have something in common. They enjoy diagnosing their opponents as having a screw loose.

      Last summer, a group of university researchers created a stir by publishing, in the American Psychological Association’s “Psychological Bulletin,” a paper that identified “psychological factors . . . capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents.”

      Chief among the tendencies that allegedly infect a mind with conservatism: “fear and aggression”; intolerance of ambiguity”; “uncertainty avoidance”; “need for cognitive closure”; and “terror management.”

      I don’t know what that means, but I know when I’ve been insulted.

      Conservatives are busy these days returning the diagnostic favor. They’re busy, that is, exploring a question recently described by columnist David Brooks with admirable cognitive closure: “Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids?”

      What worries Brooks and others is widespread evidence of a feverish and irrational hatred among liberals for George W. Bush. Conservative pundits are declaring that not even Ronald Reagan—not even Richard Nixon—inspired the kind of red-faced, pathological loathing liberals feel for Bush.

      These charges of overheated animus have recently been met not with denials, but with justifications. In the latest edition of The New Republic, senior editor Jonathan Chait delivers “The Case for Bush Hatred.”

      Chait writes:

I hate President George W. Bush. . . . I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is . . . [h]e reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school—the kid who was given a fancy sports car . . . and believed he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks . . .

“There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters,” Chait adds. “I have friends who . . . describe his existence as a constant, oppressive force in their daily psyches . . . ”

      Commentator Ted Rall, in an online essay called “Why We Hate Bush,” describes the president as “an effeminate frat boy.” Bush’s “fake presidency is treasonous,” and Bush is “no more legitimate than Saddam Hussein.”

      Chait and Rall both give reasons for their phobia about Bush. Lasting bitterness over the disputed 2000 election is a lot of it; so is a sense that Bush misrepresented himself as a moderate. There are the tax cuts for the rich and the invasions of civil liberties. There is Bush’s privileged life and supposed stupidity.

      These are all understandable motives why a liberal would zealously oppose Bush and enthusiastically seek his defeat in 2004. But do they explain actual hatred—a daily oppression of one’s psyche?

      Minnesotans have reason to wonder whether this sort of liberal crack-up is even specifically about Bush. Last fall’s election inspired radio host Garrison Keillor’s bonkers denunciation of Senator Norm Coleman, which sounded a bit like what we’re now hearing about the way Bush walks.

      “All you had to do was look at Coleman’s face,” Keillor wrote,

. . . that weird smile, the pleading eyes, the anger in the forehead. Or see how poorly his L.A. wife played the part of Mrs. Coleman, posing for pictures with him, standing apart, stiff, angry . . .

      It’s tempting to use all this creepy silliness to identify “psychological factors” that produce liberal “ideological contents.” Vanity comes to mind. But there may also be something broader at work.

      Conservatism has been gaining political ground for decades, oppressing overconfident liberal psyches something awful. Traditionally, successful conservative politicians have been deemed by liberals to be either stupid (Eisenhower, Reagan) or evil (Nixon, Gingrich). Bush marks a new breed: a conservative so threatening that liberals consider him simultaneously evil and stupid.

      Politics has never been for sissies; it has always attracted hotheads. But the politics of rage is, well all the rage today.

      Bush hatred has its parallel in conservative loathing of Bill and Hillary Clinton, which was (and is) just as extravagant in some quarters. In its Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaughs and many more, the conservative movement has long had more than its share of rhetorical bomb throwers.

      Why is vicious tribalism so widespread today? It’s the culture war, of course—the fact that since the 1960s, fundamentally incompatible visions of life and society have been in conflict in America, powerfully amplifying all political differences.

      It may not be a bad thing that important differences about religion and morality, the nature of a good society and the meaning of America stir deep feelings.

      But some of these tantrums remind me of kids I knew in high school. I had hoped we’d all grown up.

Commissioner Yecke, Tear Down This Wall (of Ignorance)!

      A decade ago, not long after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, I visited Berlin and purchased a gift for a teenager of my acquaintance. The present was a little chunk of the fallen Berlin Wall which had been turned into a million chintzy souvenirs in an ultimate triumph for capitalism, and for freedom.

      The trinket’s recipient, then just graduated from a Twin Cities high school smiled quizzically and asked: “How’d that wall get there in the first place, anyhow?”

      I could share a dozen personal anecdotes about encountering similarly surprising gaps in historical knowledge, often among people with more than a high school education. Studies routinely demonstrate the comically awful state of historical awareness in America (twice as many Americans can identify George Hamilton as Alexander Hamilton—that sort of thing).

      Historian David McCullough has, as usual summed up the situation best:

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are . . . historically illiterate. It’s not their fault. . . . But it’s not just something we should be sad about. . . . We should be angry. . . . They are being cheated and they are being handicapped, and our way of life could very well be in jeopardy.

      Now, I wonder how this wall of historical ignorance got there in the first place—this wall that can isolate a person as completely as a convict in solitary from the rich totality of human experience? It seems possible that educators had something to do with it.

      And so it has been modestly maddening, in McCullough’s sense, to see university professors and various teachers’ groups rise up proudly to condemn the new social studies standards under development by the Minnesota Education Department. The main complaints: The new standards are too demanding, too positive about America, and they don’t give teachers enough flexibility to teach what they choose.

      Various accounts confirm that the committees working to draft the new standards for Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke have recently made progress in responding to the critics and finding room for compromise. One trusts this is a good thing. But too much compromise could leave Minnesota students imprisoned in the narrow cell of the present.

      I say: Commissioner Yecke, tear down this wall! (And, while you’re at it, teach our kids who first said that.)

      Having gotten that off my chest, I hasten to add that the debate over Minnesota’s new history standards is in itself a welcome sign that we are on the right track. Minnesota is actually having a substantive public debate about history, what’s important in it, and how it should be taught. Critics assert that the new standards contain too much detail about historical events and persons and too much emphasis on America’s founding documents and ideals.  

      Well maybe. But “too much paperwork” was the main complaint we heard about Minnesota’s previous standards, the Profile of Learning. There was little protest about the content of those standards because there was little content to protest. Anyone who bothers to read them will agree that the new standards are, if anything, too rigorous and ambitious and definite. If this is error, it is the kind of error we should be as quick to forgive as to correct.

      Clearly the most volatile complaint about the standards is that they reflect a conservative bias and soft-pedal the dark side of American history. A group of University of Minnesota history professors writes that the standards are guilty of “the-refusal to acknowledge (much less confront) the tragedies and injustices of our own past . . . ”

      The standards probably could do with more emphasis on the historical sufferings of African slaves and American Indians and the laboring classes and others. But here, too, the debate over the standards teaches something that is often ignored or denied.

      Education is unavoidably a process of, for lack of a clearer term, “indoctrination”—it is conveying a body of beliefs, the shaping of minds and attitudes. Minds have a way of changing in a free society rich with information and opinions (and professors). But the ideas children are taught matter.

      Minnesotans must decide whether they want to teach schoolchildren that American history is just another sorry sequence of “tragedies and injustices” (like every other: nation and culture on earth) or a special experiment in human liberty whose ideals and institutions, however imperfect and imperfectly realized, have produced as decent and successful and improvable a society as humankind has known

      There are, in the end, two basic attitudes toward the past: gratitude or self-congratulations.

      If we mostly pat ourselves on the back for being so much more enlightened than previous generations, we will probably be content to be ignorant of history’s details.

      But if we feel thankful toward the forebears who, despite having harder lives than we, created the society and political system we inherited, we will naturally want to know more about them, even about their flaws.     Ω

“Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every things else! . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.” —Patrick Henry