Argument by Epithet

Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:322–330 DOI 10.1007/s12129-018-9720-6 ARTICLES Argument by Epithet Mark Bauerlein Published online: 10 July 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 It is now obvious that one of the longstanding criticisms conservatives have lodged against progressives is incorrect. Leftists politicize everything, conservatives have charged, and for a long time the allegation has held true. After all, the assertion that everything is always already political followed logically as soon as Karl Marx defined history as class struggle. If every social condition is the result of groups competing to control limited resources, then even seemingly simple and natural human relations have a political genesis. All areas of human affairs from the pure regions of high art to the private sanctuary of the household are fraught with political structures and values. The personal is political, and so are beauty and truth, professors on the Left have said (while their liberal colleagues stayed silent). I have heard them voice that dogma in one way or another hundreds of times over the years. It’s why the National Association of Scholars was founded. The first members wanted to halt the politicization of the humanities during the 70s and 80s that aimed to reach all the way down into academic norms of objectivity, evidence, and reason. In recent times, however, a change in the manner in which leftists and, increasingly, liberals have treated conservatives has unfolded. In the past, a conservative might appeal to tradition, God, empirical science, or aesthetic judgment as a ground that stands apart from politics. Leftists would then accuse conservatives of concealing or repressing the politics that enabled those Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia; [email protected]. Between 2003 and 2005, Bauerlein worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as the Director of the Office of Research and Analysis. While there, Bauerlein contributed to an NEA study, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997), The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (1997). He is also the author of the 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’tTrust Anyone Under 30). Argument by Epithet 323 (putative) grounds to appear apolitical. Nothing is transcendent, they would insist, nothing is universal. Human self-interestedness touches everything. People who deny that fact aren’t always merely deluded or naive, either, leftists continued. They are engaged in upholding a political scheme that maintains patriarchy, Eurocentrism, etc. That’s how leftist politicization worked. It treated conservatives as representatives of a certain politics. They might be cast as free market types, or as social conservatives who want to restrict abortion, or cultural conservatives who uphold Western civilization in media and education. Conservatives were understood to be flat wrong, of course, victims of false consciousness or compromised by vested interests and privileged identities, but they were nonetheless tied to specific policies. They stood for a political position that had to be answered. The personal didn’t prevail over the political. But things work differently today, often enough to call it a trend. Something else happens, the opposite of politicization; leftists and liberals de-politicize the other side and replace their opponents’ political beliefs with something else. In the new encounters, a conservative’s political position slides into the background, and liberals and progressives treat him as a character, a personality, an ethos—an ignominious one. They get personal before going political, assailing a conservative’s psychic profile or moral make-up before addressing his politics. Donald Trump is the obvious example. Sixty-plus million Americans voted him into the highest political office in the land, but the Left chooses not to regard him as a politician. Review the words the press, Hollywood celebrities, academics, left-wing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, NeverTrumpers, and advocates for historically disadvantaged groups have applied to him and you find they apply to his person much more than they do his policies. He beat 16 Republicans in the primaries and overcame the Clinton Machine and its army of media cheerleaders, but his critics have nonetheless declared him unfit for office on temperamental grounds. Democrats in Congress have gone so far as to consult with Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee to discuss chances of removing the President from office on the basis of mental health. Watching them approach Mr. Trump as would a pack of fifth-graders who unite to overcome the schoolyard bully, one wonders what happened to their Marxist feel for the economic base. To interpret Mr. Trump so personally and individually is to overlook the very class structures that brought him to power in the first place. Or, one could turn to the intellectual/academic Left’s other idol, 324 M. Bauerlein Michel Foucault, who would have been wholly enamored of Mr. Trump, though he would reject the president’s patriotism. Trump has just the kind of anarchic behavior and libidinal energies that fascinated the French historian. To approach the president with righteous indignation, Foucault would say, is to misunderstand him and, worse, to verge on puritanism. In other words, the new tactic has little in common with the old leftist critique of Marx and with the New Left libertinism of Foucault. When liberals obsess over the President’s soft drinks and hair, or when they think that the discovery of a decade-old infidelity spells the end of his power, they have substituted a gossipy individualism for class consciousness or for genuine transgression. (Clearly, Trump is much more “transgressive” than any of the eminences of Queer Theory who have reigned in the humanities for three decades.) What we have, in fact, is the personal without the political. A more illuminating case of this depoliticization may be that of Betsy DeVos, the person in President Trump’s cabinet who has endured the most personal attacks since he started assembling his team. One expects people to relate to the President of the United States on a personal level. He’s a figurehead as well as Chief Executive. But Cabinet officials are all about policy and administration. They have a job to do, not an image to uphold. They aren’texpectedtoheada political party, much less the nation at large. If liberal media and commentators interpret her in characterological terms more than political terms, if they insist on scrutinizing her ethos more than her positions, we sense that a new method has taken root on the Left. That method became clear at the very start of her tenure. Here is how the New York Times described Ms. DeVos after the final confirmation vote which had to be decided in her favor by Vice President Mike Pence: Betsy DeVos, a wealthy Republican donor with almost no experience in public education . a billionaire who has devoted much of her life to promoting charter schools and vouchers . .“Her extensive conflicts of interest and record of diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich made DeVos completely unfit for the position she was just confirmed to,” [NYU education professor David E. Kirkland] said . known for her big-spending lobbying efforts to expand charter schools in Michigan . her background as a prolific fund-raiser who has donated about $200 million over the years to Republican causes and candidates... In a bizarre moment that made her the butt of late-night TV Argument by Epithet 325 jokes, Ms. DeVosalso suggested that states should decide whether to allow guns in school, citing in part concerns about protection from grizzly bears in Wyoming.1 This is not reportage on the conclusion of the nomination-to-confirmation process. It’s a statement of why Ms. DeVos never should have been considered at all. The theme is clear: the woman’s an idiot, and a tool for the money class, too. The closest the article gets to an actual education philosophy or practice on the part of Ms. DeVos is to note her “support for charter schools and vouchers.” How charter schools and vouchers relate to the public school system remains unspoken. Indeed, instead of explaining the details of Ms. DeVos’s support, the reporters frame it immediately as “a deep disconnect from public schools.” When it comes to her ideas, there is nothing to be said. Three days later, The Tonight Show ran a skit that got straight to the point. Host Jimmy Fallon interviews an actress playing Ms. DeVos, who speaks like a toddler, reads words from note cards, mispronounces the words excited and education as well as her own surname, displays a pamphlet on foreign language instruction—penned by Mr. Trump, she says—that reads, “JUST SPEAK ENGLISH,” and proceeds to chew on the paper. The presentation of her as a happy moron shows how piqued, sarcastic, and cloistered the mood in liberal habitats has become. We can’t even call it political satire. The skit is juvenile and tasteless, but that’s the point. It’s not supposed to be witty. Ms. DeVos is so personally and morally defective, so empty of intellect, that she deserves no better. A few weeks before, the Huffington Post printed a column stating bluntly why such nastiness is warranted. The article states “The nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education is such a bad choice that we don’t even have to talk about actual policy ideas to understand how unsuited she is for the position.”2 Some people, you see, are so inappropriate, so deficient, that whatever intellectual content they carry in their heads may be ignored.

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