I see that the first commenter there says: "Another asshole, undoubtedly a Republican/TeaPartier."
My guess is exactly the opposite. What would possess a professor to say something like that? From my long experience with professors, I think it is the left-wing professors who: 1. Feel confident in their own goodness on racial issues, 2. Analyze events in terms of race, 3. Think up "critical theory"-type explanations that explore ideas about racial difference, 4. Imagine that it's clever to express these ideas out loud, and 5. Are capable of making the mistake of thinking that the students will know that they are good people who do racial critique that is supposed to be understood as an attack on white people.
Anyway, the professor in this incident is named Mark Wattier. The school is Murray State University. I haven't checked into what his actual political propensities are or what he really had in mind when he said whatever he said that is being reported the way you see it in the linked article. My motivation to write this post was the commenter's reflexive assumption that Wattier displayed right-wing ideology. That is absurd.
***
I noticed that story because John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are talking about it on Bloggingheads. Their discussion centers on whether the student is "lowering" herself by requesting an apology.
"But 'social justice' is frequently just a euphemism for a socialist political agenda of leftist politics, redistribution of wealth, and heavy state controls over the marketplace."
Says Paul Hsieh (via Instapundit) in the context of explaining those Wisconsin doctors writing excuses for protesters — and tweaking our anxieties about Obamacare.
The Wisconsin protests have shown how some doctors are seemingly willing to subvert their professional integrity to serve the political ends of government special interest groups. Under ObamaCare, when similarly trained doctors have to choose between practicing in their patient’s medical interests or in the political interests of their government paymasters, which side will they choose? And will you want this new breed of doctor taking care of you when you’re sick?
Interesting questions, but to be fair, the doctors handing out the notes were helping individuals, not burdening the individuals for the sake of the greater good. Hsieh links to me and says:
University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse spoke with one of these doctors who was completely unapologetic for his actions, saying that it was “not dishonest” but rather “an ok thing to do” because it was in the interest of “social activism.”
To be extra accurate: I ask the man if what he's doing is "dishonest," and he says, "It's not dishonest. It might be a little social, oh, gosh, what do you call it?" I say "Activism?" He seems about to say one thing, the stops himself and says "It's an okay thing to do" then goes on to talk about how teachers matter a lot to him. He notes that he is genuinely "seeing" the patients (on the street corner) and they do have their symptoms. It's not the most explicit embrace and promotion of social activism. Indeed, he may very well be motivated by nothing more than a desire to help the nice teachers so they won't get in trouble at their jobs.
That said, I'm concerned about the general trend of medical ethics in the form of "social justice" ideology, if that's really what is going on. Is it?
Using the phrase "intellectual diversity" is itself an act of courage in the academic arena.
I once uttered "intellectual diversity" in a debate with a leftie (I use that term endearingly, of course).
The "discussion" ended with a link to an explanation that the phrase is code for a neoconservative plot.
Later, in that comments thread, there's this:
Scott M said... If "intellectual diversity" and "personal responsibility" have been deemed as code words of right-wing oppression, just what the hell words or phrases do they use when they are trying to talk about intellectual diversity or personal responsibility?...
That's a sentence I've already quoted in the previous post, but focusing on it in isolation, I see it's a stunning example of something I've been observing more and more: Today's liberals sound like yesterday's right-wingers.
Read that sentence closely: "Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system." Doesn't Larry Tribe sound like your old man carping about welfare queens? There's no pity for people who are struggling to cover their basic expenses: Ah, don't be a bleeding heart — Larry/The Old Man scoffs — these people are choosing to sponge off the rest of us.
Tribe had to block out the possibility that people without health insurance aren't really making a choice. After paying for the things they think they need, they just don't have enough money left to cover a major expense that doesn't bring them a present good, only insurance against something that could go wrong.
Yeah, but that's why we need to force them to take responsibility, make them put insurance into their household budget along with the extra cupcakes and cars they're always blowing their money on — Larry/The Old Man snaps back at you.
Maybe now, you're thinking The Old Man was right! I'm not saying he wasn't. I'm just saying the liberals of today sound like The Old Man who used to enrage us with his heartlessness and his cynical observations about the lives of the people we thought of as vulnerable and unfortunate. That doesn't mean today's liberals are wrong. And I'll leave it to you to tease out the corresponding observation about the conservatives of today. Are they saying things that we Boomers, in our hippie days, used to scream back at The Old Man?
Because they don't know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don't know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting "shut up"... when they aren't prissily imploring everyone to be "civil."
UPDATE: Scott Lemieux, the blogger I linked to above, has written a new post in which he might think he's responding to my challenge and providing substance rather than crude denouncement. If you can slog through his laughably poor writing — "It’s not just liberals but Althouse herself who don’t believe in the standards of free speech she criticizes 'liberals' for not practicing" — you'll see he's come up with 3 links to posts of mine which supposedly show that I don't have principled free-speech values. Follow those links and see what I actually wrote.
"... The First Amendment for many years played the role, when it triumphed in the courts, of protecting the speech of people who tended to be on the left—so it was minorities or the powerless in our society. The liberals on the Supreme Court today would still protect those people and their rights... What's changed is that conservatives found some causes which they have used to vindicate genuine First Amendment rights."
One of the commenters declares that my "assertion that 'the best test of the truth is its ability to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas' was probably the most offensive part of her argument." When questioned about whether I really said that, he comes back with:
She cited a Justice whose name I haven't retained, as in: "As Justice X says, ..." followed by the verbatim passage I quoted.
She cited a Justice whose name I haven't retained.... Oh, for the love of God, why doesn't every educated person in America know the name of the Supreme Court Justice who said that... or at the very least know that it's embarrassing not to know? As if I'd thrown out some abstruse legalistic peculiarity!
And that was part of an argument by the commenter — echoing Bob Wright — that free speech is too dangerous because it might be false and it might inspire bad people to act out in terrible ways.
Remember when lefties were all about free speech? When did that change? Why did that change? Perhaps the answer is: Free speech was only ever a means to an end. When they got their free speech, made their arguments, and failed to win over the American people, and when in fact the speech from their opponents seemed too successful, they switched to the repression of speech, because the end was never freedom.
"... and any other privileges into which I was born, like being a citizen of the richest country on earth, and did not obtain for myself," says Roy Edroso.
In fact, when I was growing up, it was customary for adults to remind children of such luck as they had inherited, like the food we had and "people starving in other countries" didn't. This was meant as a spur to gratitude and humility, and to not being such a whining little shit.
He's reacting to a program that in which government officials are prodding adult citizens to think about how privileged they are. The analogy to a parent-child relationship comes so easily to the left-wing mind.
And what kind of families — back in the olden days — encouraged their kids to think about how lucky they were to be white? Only racist parents would have said anything like that. Kindly parents back then had a simple message for their kids on the subject of race: There is only one race, the human race. It wasn't hard for them to figure out that that was the right thing to say, and it wasn't at all hard for kids to understand it.
Yes, it's also the 10-year anniversary of the big Florida recount. I wish I'd been blogging then! It would have been so much fun to write about that every step of the way. I'd have liked to show you in real time that I really wanted my guy, Al Gore, to win, and I also accepted nearly everything the Supreme Court did in the complicated litigation over the recount. But there are so many missed blogging opportunities in the past. I'd have loved to have blogged the Clinton scandals too. And the Clarence Thomas hearings. The Bork hearings.
As if things couldn't get any weirder, did you notice the name of the lawyer who made the Republicans' unsuccessful arguments before that federal judge today? That would be Ted Olson, a man Washingtonians often refer to as a 'Washington super-lawyer.' Who is Ted Olson? Well, that would be the same one knee-deep in the Arkansas Project, which in league with the American Spectator spent a ton of money digging dirt on Bill Clinton in Arkansas....
Well, now, isn't that weird? I just blogged this morning about that Think Progress blogger who confronted Justice Alito and he was going on about the Arkansas Project:
Last night, the American Spectator — a right-wing magazine known for its role in the “Arkansas Project,” a well-funded effort to invent stories with the goal of eventually impeaching President Clinton — held its annual gala fundraising event....
That first TPM post wove Justice Scalia into its conspiracy-ish riff:
Of course, Olson... is also the Olson from Morrison v. Olson, the supreme court case which upheld the constitutinality of the Independent Counsel statute. Olson was against it. Come to think of it, we Dems now think he and Scalia were right. So maybe chalk one up in his favor.
So that's how TPM first talked about law. Yikes. Spelled "constitutionality" wrong too.
I'm going to start reading the lefty blogs more and writing about them, I think. I'm interested in the way they string ideas together, and I think they need some more push back.
The credit for galvanizing ordinary people and placing individual freedom and limited government back on the national agenda principally belongs to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Their heedless pursuit of progressive transformation reinvigorated a moribund conservative spirit, just as in 1993 and 1994 the Clintons' overreaching on health care sparked a popular uprising resulting in a Republican takeover of Congress.
So it wasn't that conservative principles caught hold of America. It was that the progressives scared the hell out of us.
"... that preclude opportunities for self-definition and coerce men into stifling identities. The Equal Protection Clause should not... presumptively tolerate such burdens on a man’s right of self-definition."
Lawprof John M. Kang argues that the law of gender discrimination should not protect men merely as "collateral beneficiaries of the protection afforded women, but in their own right." The article is called "The Burdens of Manliness."
Kang denies that he's a throwback to the "the sensitive troglodyte yearnings of the 1980s Men’s Movement," and I hear echoes of criticisms he must have received on drafts of this article. I was already a law professor back then, and my school (Wisconsin) was a hotbed of feminism theory. My own orientation at that the time — and now — was to see gender roles as limiting freedom for everyone. I remember suggesting to one of the most prominent feminist lawprofs that I thought feminism would be better if it expanded more generally into concern about the burdens of gender roles, which men felt too, in interestingly different ways. Individual freedom for all could be the overarching goal.
The response was not, as I'd naively anticipated at the time, that I had a great idea or that it was at least an intriguing proposal that we could casually converse about for a minute or 2. No, not at all. I mean, I'm still alive. But there was pushback. Swift, sharp snapback. Men get nothing from feminism. They must give ground. Much ground. For all that they have taken from us, for all the crushing and raping. Never give them the hint of a glimmer of hope that there is anything more that they can get. This is for us.
But —I tried to defend my humble, untenured self — wouldn't more freedom for everyone be better? No! My elder laid down what was, she assured me, the lesson of long political experience: If men think there's anything in it for them, they will use their superior power to take more and more, and the subordination of women will worsen. We must all follow the same strategy: to demand that men give up power and wealth for the benefit of women.
As for the Men's Movement... remember "Iron John: A Book About Men"? Remember thinking it was important to hate Robert Bly?
And what are the burdens of manliness? Ironically — ironjohnically — men are made to feel unmanly for developing their set of grievances and whining and moaning about the unfairness of it. But please don't let that stop you from expressing yourself in the comments.
ADDED: By the way, during the same period, you'd get similar sharp pushback from lefties if you said you thought gay people had the right to marry each other. That was viewed as a conservative position that would undermine the feminist critique of marriage as patriarchy. I also got an instant, angry response from a lefty feminist law professor when I said that the cause of gay rights might be advanced by scientific findings that homosexuality may have a biological cause. Back then, you see, homosexuality was supposed to be a choice, and scientists were condemned even for researching the matter. Today, of course, lefty lawprofs will get mad at you if you don't endorse gay marriage and the biological origin of homosexuality. Oh, how I wish I'd had a blog circa 1990! And I hope this post gives you a glimpse of why there is so much emotional energy behind my blogging.
The stories of the postradical generation are not only of intellectual interest but also affect the future of American government. Obama has been criticized by many for not nominating enough theoretically ambitious and bold liberals to the federal courts. Part of the reason for that dynamic, however, has less to do with politics than with the supply of such theoretically ambitious liberals—particularly law professors.
Many of the more-radical jurisprudential movements from the earlier generations have succeeded in opening eyes to the flaws in the legal system, but beyond that have largely disappeared. The Old Left efforts to push courts to be more aggressively liberal floundered after years of courts dominated by Republican appointees. The New Left efforts by the critical-legal-studies movement and others floundered, in part because, like with the Old Left, their ideas were met with sustained resistance from the elite institutions of the legal system.
Spare me! There are plenty of strongly liberal and lefty lawprofs and if you want theoretical ambition you can find it. The reason these folks don't get nominated to the Supreme Court is crushingly obviously because they'd be soundly rejected by the American people and borked in the Senate.
The country has moved to the right, so there are fewer law professors who are truly liberals.
Yeah, there's a little balance now. I can imagine what "truly liberal" means to Fontana. I think they're nearly all liberal from the standard that prevails among American voters, but that's not truly liberal.
Many of those on the left today are simply trying to maintain older decisions... Others on the left, who once might have aggressively pursued liberal legal ideas, are now increasingly writing about law from a more theoretical or quantitative, and therefore less practical, perspective—making their writing less related to the issues judges decide and making them less obviously candidates for future judgeships.
And some on the left who write more directly about cases and courts, like Tushnet or Dean Larry Kramer of Stanford Law School, and Dean Robert C. Post of Yale Law School, are now increasingly members of the "popular constitutionalism" movement, who believe that courts should be stripped of all or most of their decisional powers—hardly the prejudicial profile that one wants.
"Prejudicial"? I know what he meant to say but... what a hilarious word!
Anyway, yes, many brilliant liberal/lefty lawprofs have applied their minds to generating arguments for why courts shouldn't enforce rights, but I think the reason they have gone in that direction is that they have perceived that it is the most effective way to push back against the conservative and liberal-but-not-truly-liberal jurists who get appointed to the Supreme Court. The "popular constitutionalism" movement is further evidence that the American people have a pretty conservative view of what judges should do and how the Constitution should be interpreted. And that's why the nominees aren't "theoretically ambitious and bold liberals."
Her entire career has been about never taking a stand on anything of any substance - free coffee for students! - while networking in a way to neutralize any conceivable opposition. And she is walking back from her earlier demands for more clarity and transparency in Senate confirmation hearings. Josh notes that liberals are worried about an Obama Souter.
Souter was the old level of utter blankness.
I just don't believe that Obama is that prone to risk.
That should mean that Obama secretly knows what she's about and is hiding it from us. But that wouldn't make Kagan an "Obama Souter." Souter was appointed by a President — George H.W. Bush — who thought he was getting something quite different. Here's a New York Times article from the time of the Souter nomination (before his ascension to the Supreme Court):
John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, said today that he had assured President Bush that David H. Souter would uphold conservative values on the Supreme Court....
''I was looking for someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes, and that's what I got,'' the chief of staff said in an interview. ''I was able to tell the President that I was sure he would do the same thing when he encountered Federal questions....
The chief of staff's comments were designed to advance the overall White House strategy of seeking to convince conservatives that Judge Souter was their kind of man, who could be trusted to vote ''right'' on the big issues, without getting him involved in fierce debates about abortion or flag burning or other contentious specifics.
In being unusually candid about the details in the selection process, Mr. Sununu was carrying out his role as Mr. Bush's primary liaison to the right wing of the Republican Party and to the ideological groups that support Mr. Bush but are nervous about the commitment to their issues.
Back to Sullivan:
I predict that if confirmed, [Elena Kagan is] much more likely to surprise on the left than on the right...
After all, Stevens holds the seat that was previously occupied by William O. Douglas and Louis Brandeis, two of the leading anti-corporate crusaders of the twentieth century....
Anti-corporate crusaders? Sure, pick an anti-corporate crusader, Obama, and let's see how the back-and-forth in the Senate Judiciary Committee plays out. I mean, the nominee will still be confirmed, but in the rest of the political arena, leading up to the November elections? That would be brutal for the Democrats.
Yet none of the leading candidates for the Court appears to be an economic populist....
Why the absence of liberal economic populists from the shortlist?...
Since the 1960s, grassroots progressives have focused on non-economic issues: reproductive choice, for example, or civil liberties in an age of terrorism. That means that the current Supreme Court candidates had their legal sensibilities shaped in a political environment that was less preoccupied with questions of economic justice....
The Supreme Court itself stopped its own progressive forward glide when the opportunities for expanding constitutional rights arose in the context of redistribution of wealth (which is what Rosen and his ilk spin as "economic justice").
That’s a shame, because the most important issues the Roberts Court will confront over the next decade involve the constitutionality of environmental measures and economic regulations passed in the wake of the crash of 2008.... [I]t will not be enough for liberals simply to champion judicial deference for its own sake. The next justice will, like Brandeis and Douglas, need to make a substantive case for why these regulations are indispensable to protecting American democracy from the narrow interests of a corporate oligarchy....
If "environmental measures and economic regulations" are going to be passed, then why is anything more than deference to legislatures needed? Why should a Supreme Court Justice think he could bolster arguments for deference to democracy by expressing enthusiasm for the substance of the choices that legislatures have made?
The judicial role is strengthened by the appearance of neutrality and fidelity to law. Conversely, judges undercut their own power when they make it sound as though they are reaching their decisions because of their support for legislation that is challenged as a violation of constitutional rights. When arguments for constitutional rights fail, it should be (or at least appear to be) because the claimed rights don't exist, not because the rights claimants' interests are "narrow" and run counter to what the majority wants. Rights are supposed to work against the preference of the majority, so we should be wary of someone who says courts must "protect[] American democracy from... narrow interests." He is saying rights are not rights.
Although the next justice may not be an economic populist, the confirmation hearings ahead are an opportunity to cast the spotlight on the intersection between economic populism and the law. Leahy and other Senate Democrats should use the hearings to ask the nominee to discuss these questions in depth.
Here's the article, in which — among other things — Craver quotes my blog post from last January, where I talked about why I didn't want to do the interview. I don't know if he realizes it or not, but Craver's article is better because he needed to do what I told him to do and he did it: read the blog and try to get it instead of asking me to explain myself.
I'm not saying he got everything. He most assuredly didn't. For example, after (correctly) noting my peeve about men in shorts, he tells the story of Meade asking me out like this:
In fact, Meade's first date proposal came after Althouse posted a response to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, from which she drew this piece of advice for men: "A young man should perceive when a girl likes him and he needs to ask her out to dinner and a movie before somebody else does."
Meade saw his opportunity and seized it. "OK. Want to have dinner with me and see it again? I'll wear my pants [a reference to Althouse's distaste for shorts]," wrote the loyal commenter, eyes averted.
That wasn't about shorts at all. It was a reference to my delight — "LOL! The green pants..." — when Meade changed his comments avatar to a close-up of a male model in green trousers immediately after — I can't find exactly where — I'd professed love for said model.
Mistakes aside, picking around through my various posts, looking for clues and quotes, resulted in a better material than Craver is likely to have produced if I'd talked to him for an hour. But he does make me look a little pissy in the email I sent him declining the interview:
Basically, the answers to all these questions are already on the blog. If that sounds enigmatic, I mean to be enigmatic. I'm bored by whether something is right wing or not and how can anyone be right wing and so forth. The point of the blog is not to be bored.
He doesn't include the questions he's proposed. In trying to decide if I wanted to overcome my instinctive disinclination to do an interview with a UW student writing for the Isthmus, I asked, "Could you give me an idea of what kinds of things you are looking at and how much of the blog you have read?" He offered these questions:
Why is your blog so successful?...
What is the goal behind your blog?...
What is the blog's politics?...
How have your experiences shaped the world view/political view expressed on the blog?
I didn't think I'd be very interesting blabbing in person about such things, and I didn't want to see what quotes would be cherry-picked out of my babblings for the readers of the local "alternative" paper. Isthmus, as you'd expect in Madison, has a lefty slant, and I had every reason to expect a hit piece. (Including past experience.) And since the writer was a UW student, if I'd spoken with him, I would have treated him in that friendly, accommodating, supportive way that suits my professorial role. Consequently, I would have found it hard to protect myself from a hit piece and to respond to it after the fact. I'm not going to get into any kind of a public fight with a UW student.
I wasn't going to read the article because I didn't want to get annoyed, but then reader Larry K emailed me the link to it and — even though he alerted me that it was "scurrilous" — I couldn't resist. Then I was surprised that it wasn't as bad as Larry K seemed to think:
[Criticize Democratic politicians and policies long enough] and you'll get a scrawny University student trawling through your personal life and making repeated references to your UW salary (which is healthy, but a fraction of what I'm sure she could earn in private practice)....
If this dude thinks her blog is right-wing, he ought to move out of the basement - and work on his critical thinking skills. The apparently big insight of this article - "People who call Ann Althouse a right-wing political blogger miss the point. She's a right-wing pop-culture blogger" - is simply asserted, and then goes nowhere. Having "attitude" is right-wing? Did this guy miss the 20th century?
Ah, but wait! Maybe having attitude is right wing! In the Isthmus article, Craver wonders about my (oft-derided) line "to be a great artist is inherently right wing." I stand by that, for the reasons I gave at the time. Now, I realize I could expand that into: Having attitude is right wing. That might ring true, and, in any case, it will rile the lefties, which is how I have my fun a motivating force behind my blogging, which you know I consider to be art work (and therefore... right wing!).
"Why was this done and does The Cap Times consider this practice to be an example of good journalism?"
So wrote Meade in the comments over here, at a Bill Novak blog post, and his comment is now being addressed at a Cap Times blog post, written by Chris Murphy. Murphy's headline is "What do you think, is writing 'tea baggers' off-limits?"
It's not clear to me if Mr. Meade was taking issue with the lack of explanation, using the word in the first place or changing it. I've e-mailed him to ask (and also to find out if he's the same Laurence Meade who won Ann Althouse's heart through his comments on her blog), but no response yet.
The objection is — I think it's obvious — to using it in the first place and then to changing it without owning up to the fact that you'd done it and that a correction was required.
If it's the lack of explanation that was the issue, well, now you have it...
Put the correction at the site of the original article, not in some other blog post somewhere. You had one thing, and then you replaced it with something else when there was criticism. It's not the explanation that's wanted. It's the transparency. We know the explanation. You got criticized.
... but what if he objected to changing it? Are there a lot of you out there who think we, especially at the liberal-from-the-day-we-were-born Capital Times shouldn't think twice about using a word that raises conservative hackles? I certainly do see it regularly in the comments from tea party opponents.
Yes, we live in Madison, Wisconsin, where cluelessness skews left.
... I don't think it's that bad, but I can't say I'm comfortable seeing it in a news story, either. The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the arbiter on many such questions, has not yet weighed in, though its most recent edition does say that "tea party" should be lowercase. Lots of help there. So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?
Oh, good lord.
ADDED: Meade writes:
"So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?"
Dear Mr. Murphy,
I think your policy should be based on sound journalistic principles - not what your readers think.
Gateway Pundit thinks it is and so does American Power, but they are righties. You have to look at this from a lefty perspective, and that's something that I — with a long life experience among the lefties — can do. (I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad in 1969 and had SDS people arguing on the other side of my dorm room wall, I lived in the West Village in the 1970s, I went to NYU School of Law circa 1980, and I have been with the law professors at the University of Wisconsin — in what is affectionately known as the People's Republic of Madison — since 1984. I have had lovers quarrels with Communists.)
Here's the photographic juxtaposition that American Power calls "a genuinely sick comparison":
It was the front-page teaser for this "Week in Review" piece by Benedict Carey. Carey is a medicine and science writer for the newspaper, and his topic is the public display of anger in American politics. He's looking at the long history of demonstrations, and it's a great concept to put up a 60s "Days of Rage" photograph with a man yelling and gesturing along with a present-day Tea Party photograph with a man yelling and gesturing in just about the same way. That the man in the 60s photo is Bill Ayers is a fabulous bit of irony. It's a perfect illustration for Carey's topic, Carey's topic is a good one, and the newspaper succeeds in attracting readers.
Now, I understand the right-wing anger — hmmm — at the juxtaposition. The 60s protesters are Weathermen, and the Weathermen advocated and practiced violence. They murdered people. The Tea Partiers, by contrast, are engaging in the highest form of freedom of expression: assembling in groups and criticizing the government.
But people on the left admire and respect the 1960s protests. They wish there was more expressive fervor on their side today. To have the passion and vitality of the 60s is a good thing. And the air of potential violence, especially in the absence of any actual violence? I think lefties love that. They may not admit they do. But there's a frisson. Remember, the NYT readers are aging liberals. They — we — remember the 60s as glory days. Yes, there was anger, and yes, it spilled over into violence sometimes, but the government deserved it, and these young people were idealistic and ready to give all for their ideals. They are remembered — even as (if?) their excesses are regretted — in a golden light.
***
Now, let's look at what Carey says:
Each party charged the other with fanning the flames of public outrage for political gain.
Sounds pretty balanced!
But ... [w]hat is the nature of public anger anyway, and can it be manipulated as easily as that?...
At a basic level, people subconsciously mimic the expressions of a conversation partner and in the process “feel” a trace of the other’s emotion, recent studies suggest....
And in groups organized around a cause, it’s the most extreme members who rise quickest, researchers have found....
See? He's a science writer. He's mining the sociology of anger. Carey first notes that "lone-wolf" actions are more likely to occur. But what of the notably non-loner types who go to demonstrations?
Protest groups that turn from loud to aggressive tend to draw on at least two other elements, researchers say. The first is what sociologists call a “moral shock” — a specific, blatant moral betrayal that, when most potent, evokes personal insults suffered by individual members...
The second element is a specific target clearly associated with the outrage. A law to change. A politician to remove. A company to shut down....
Given the shifting political terrain, the diversity of views in the antigovernment groups, and their potential political impact, experts say they expect that very few are ready to take the more radical step.
“Once you take that step to act violently, it’s very difficult to turn back,” [Kathleen Blee, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh] said. “It puts the group, and the person, on a very different path.”
So there. Carey concludes with a calming message about the link between vocal protest and real violence. Now, there is a bit of a warning:
If a group with enduring gripes is shut out of the political process, and begins to shed active members, it can leave behind a radical core. This is precisely what happened in the 1960s, when the domestic terrorist group known as the Weather Underground emerged from the larger, more moderate anti-war Students for a Democratic Society, Dr. McCauley said. “The SDS had 100,000 members and, frustrated politically at every step, people started to give up,” he said. “The result was that you had this condensation of a small, more radical base of activists who decided to escalate the violence.”
That appears near the end of the article. But you can easily see the message: Democracy. As long as the political process seems to work, people won't cross the line into violence. And the size of the Tea Party movement is a safeguard. In Carey's scenario, it's only if the masses of people — the ordinary, pretty conventional people — cool off and go home that we ought to worry about violence. You have the "radical core" left. That's what you don't want. So this NYT piece, after teasing us with the similarity between Tea Partiers and Weatherman, draws a decisive line separating them.
