Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Everyone and their blogging dog have linked to this Walter Russell Mead essay on “The Progressive Crisis”, mainly because it’s a really good essay, at least until the last few paragraphs. (It is, in turn, partially a critique of Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg’s piece on the puzzle of just why voters don’t think liberal policies are totally awesome.) After critiquing Greenberg’s suggestion that campaign finance reform is just the tonic to cure progressive ills, we get to the real meat of Mead’s juicy argument:

Greenberg has not yet come to grips with the deepest and most difficult aspect of the crisis of liberal legitimacy. He roots the dangerous and corrupting special interests outside the state: with their money and their lobbying the corporations and the fat cats influence and pervert the state. But the state and its servants do not, in Greenberg’s story, constitute a special interest of their own.

This is not how voters see it. For large numbers of voters the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest. It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.

At this point Your Humble Blogger will now make the universal gesture of tapping his pointer finger to his nose, thus.

It gets better:

The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.

This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.

Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren’t progressive enough. But it’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They don’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology. Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.

The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role.

The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.

At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about. A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.

The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn’t a reaction against the abuses and failures of government. It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent and hard work to a greater say in the nation’s affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap colleges rather than political science in expensive ones.

There are a few things to quibble with in those paragraphs. Saying that people “fear and resent upper middle class ideology” muddles two separate issues, namely the imposition of politically correct, anti-religious, environmentalist etc. ideology on the unwilling through government coercion favored by liberal coastal urban atheist elites vs. the inspirational upper middle class values of working for a living, getting (and staying) married, raising children, owning a house etc., which cannot be imposed. Also, a large portion of the Tea Party is indeed animated by the failures and abuses of Big Government, not to mention the corruption and self-dealing of Democratic elites who funnel taxpayer money to liberal constituencies (ACORN, unions, etc.), who then turn around and give it back to those same Democratic elite in the form of campaign contributions and cushy post-electoral sinecures. But those are relatively minor points.

But the next paragraph in Mead’s essay is where the whole thing goes careening off the rails, thanks to his trotting out that most hoary and unwise cliche, comparing national politics to high school cliques. This is almost always a bad idea, and best left to the Maureen Dowds of the world. It’s a simplistic, reductio ad absurdum argument that will make it all too easy for liberals to dismiss the entire essay in toto rather than grappling with the real problems the American public has with them and their policies.

As a commenter on the blog notes, “It is unfortunate that an article that is so insightful ends in an utter train-wreck of stupidity.”