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 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. 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. There is no need to discuss their positions because they don’t have any positions, or at least any positions that count as rational and respectable. Ms. DeVos has a long record of education policy making, and she’s devoted time and money to the effort, but in this case the background disqualifies her. She has the wrong kind of educational experience. Actually, it’s worse than that. The experience she has acquired proves her iniquitous character. We needn’t debate the merits of

1Emmarie Huetteman, Yamiche Alcindor, “Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary; Pence Breaks Tie,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 2017. 2Peter Greene, “How Unqualified Is Betsy DeVos?” Huffington Post, Dec 20, 2016. 326 M. Bauerlein vouchers or parental choice. Her moral and intellectual incapacities are the only points one is obliged to consider. It is crucial that conservatives understand the transformation that has taken place here. Partisan polemics didn’tusedtoworkthisway.The debates of the Culture Wars during the late-80s and early 90s, for instance, followed a quite different course. The Secretary of Education for much of that time was William Bennett, who had a reputation among academics as an out-of-touch conservative. While serving as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett had overseen a study of the state of the humanities that had infuriated the professoriate. To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education bore a title bound to irritate the many theorists and critics of that era who were fired with a conception of themselves as radical and revolutionary. The very words were out of fashion. Reclaim sounded reactionary, legacy uncritical and chauvinistic. A notorious paragraph in the report confirmed its backwardness in the eyes of the professors:

The study group was alarmed by the tendency of some humanities professors to present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner. Sometimes the humanities are used as if they were the handmaiden of ideology, subordinated to particular prejudices and valued or rejected on the basis of their relation to a certain social stance.3

I was in graduate school at the time, absorbed in books and happily unaware of culture wars and national controversies. But I recall several conversations over Bennett and Reagan administration policies, people at lunch complaining about DC conservatives who knew nothing about our cutting edge work. Bennett was “a failed philosophy professor from Texas,” someone once said. The general impression cast him as a not-so-learned traditionalist who’d found a home on the Right, that’s all. I didn’t like Reagan or any other Republican back then and agreed with the assessments, though I didn’t know much about the debates. At least, however, it was Bennett’s ideas and values that bothered us. I don’t remember anyone getting snide. Smug, yes, but about his opposition to multiculturalism and his ignorance of works by Derrida, Foucault, etc. in which we were so immersed. One couldn’t imagine parodying him as a buffoon or dictator in

3William J. Bennett, “Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C. (Nov. 1984), 33, https://files.eric.ed. gov/fulltext/ED247880.pdf Argument by Epithet 327 a Saturday Night Live skit. People foregrounded his politics, not his person. They acknowledged him as a representative of an obsolete educational philosophy. In today’s climate, DeVos doesn’t represent anything philosophical or intellectual. She gets no credit for having ideas. She isn’t an intellectual like Bennett, to be sure, but she does have policy positions that could undergo sincere analysis and critique. But no. They go after DeVos on the basis of her stupidity, incompetence, and money. The policies she does promote, especially charter schools, impress her critics not as practices in which she earnestly believes. Instead, they are practices that serve her political and financial allies and backers. Our first impulse is to call this ad hominem tripe, and it is. But this is more than a logical fallacy that invalidates an argument by demeaning the subject. The personal slur is not the primary event. It actually follows another, impersonal maneuver: the downgrading of what the person believes. The insult of a conservative, that is, is enabled by the conversion of conservative opinion and practice into immorality. The Left can insult a conservative personally because his political opinions don’t qualify as genuine political opinions. Put it this way: In 1987, what William Bennett stood for was traditionalist learning. It was judged wrong-headed by the Left, a form of Eurocentrism and Dead-White-Male complacency, but it was still a position one could hold in the marketplace. Today, Bennett’s Western Civ orientation is something else: white supremacy. When Donald Trump delivers a speech in favor of Western Civilization and the editors of the mainstream, center-left magazine Atlantic Monthly term it a specimen of “racial and religious paranoia,” we know that ordinary educational has been removed from the halls of respectable opinion. The ideas are no longer up for discussion, only the wackiness of the disreputable person who espouses them. In Ms. DeVos’s case, on the personal side we have the person; a wealthy, middle-aged woman from Michigan. On the political side we have her commitment to charters schools and vouchers. While vouchers have had limited impact on public schooling in the United States, charter schools are one of the biggest stories in the history of American education. In his speech on the Senate floor (quoted in the Times article, FN1), Tennessee’sLamar Alexander called it “the most effective public school reform movement over the last few years,” and he praised Ms. DeVos as a leader of it. Charters and vouchers have been central to conservative reform of primary and secondary education for a long time. Social conservatives like vouchers because they open religious schools to the resources that secular schools enjoy. Libertarians 328 M. Bauerlein like vouchers and charters because it allows individuals more discretion and breaks up the monopoly of “government schools.” There is a large body of research literature on the reforms. But the coverage of Betsy DeVos doesn’t pursue the nature and impact of the reforms. The NYU professor in the Times story tells us what Ms. Devos’s charter/voucher policies really are: “diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich.” That’s not politics. It’s just greed, callous and inhumane. To treat Ms. DeVos’s reform agenda as a respectable position is—to use a word of great currency on the Left—to normalize it. Even if you judge it misconceived and damaging, by presenting it for political analysis you acknowledge that charters/vouchers belong in the marketplace of ideas. An editorial in the Detroit Free Press, reprinted in ,noted that DeVos was a leader of charter school projects in the state of Michigan, but said this did nothing to qualify her for Secretary of Education. “DeVos isn’tan educator, or an education leader,” it said. “She’s not an expert in pedagogy or curriculum or school governance. In fact, she has no relevant credentials or experience for a job setting standards or guiding dollars for the nation’s public schools . . . She is, in essence, a lobbyist.4 What follows this characterization is a summary of how the poor performance of charter schools in Michigan has not altered Ms. DeVos’ zeal for them. She is “willfully impervious to the relevant data.” Allofthisleadstothe conclusion—which, in fact, comes near the beginning of the editorial—that President Trump’s nomination of her isn’t just the triumph of free market education policy or the steady privatization or corporatization of public schooling. Her appointment goes beyond bad policy: it is “contrary to reason.” Again, one must pay close attention to the rhetorical shift from politics to psychology. The op-ed writer, Stephen Henderson, is no enemy of charter school efforts. He praises them, but only so long as they have accountability. He regrets, though, that Republicans in the state, backed by the money of the DeVos family, have relaxed the monitoring of performance and lowered the bar of achievement. Why? Because Betsy DeVos despises the public schools so much that she’ll allow terrible charters to keep operating. She has “a conviction that any nontraditional public school is better than a traditional one, simply because it’snot operated by the government.” She is a zealot.

4Valerie Strauss, “A sobering look at what Betsy DeVos did to education in Michigan — and what she might do as secretary of education,” Washington Post, Dec. 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/08/a-sobering-look-at-what-betsy-devos-did-to-education-in- michigan-and-what-she-might-do-as-secretary-of-education/?utm_term=.5710355854bc Argument by Epithet 329

It’s not hard to explode this attribution. If we asked Ms. DeVos if the low performing charters in urban areas were “better” than the highest performing traditional public schools in East Grand Rapids, she would of course say no. If we implied that she wanted low performing charters to continue low performing, she would give us a funny look. And the story of weak charters in a catastrophic habitat such as Detroit (the focus of Mr. Henderson’s criticism) has got to be more complicated than that of a rich family throwing good money over and over at incompetent cronies. This is, nonetheless, the prevailing style of denunciation. Conservative politics are discredited, turned into something else, not bad politics but exploitation, greed, idiocy, irrationality. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in the phrase after the “deplorables” remark, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” In other words, conservative beliefs and policies become the traits of bad people. These depoliticizing labels are never far from liberal descriptions of the Right. You used to find them mostly in The Nation, Mother Jones and other hard left periodicals, and infrequently in mainstream liberal organs. On October 3, 2010 Paul Krugman said to the Tea PartyinaNew York Times column, “You probably imagine that you’re starring in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ but you’re actually just extras in a remake of ‘Citizen Kane.’” I read that line at the time with astonishment. Krugman despised the Right and berated them constantly, but this nasty little sally went much further. Remember, the figures in D. W. Griffith’s silent film were founders of the Ku Klux Klan. I’d written an historical study of a white supremacist mob episode in Atlanta and had devoted the final pages to Birth of a Nation (which, like Gone with the Wind, shows the burning of Atlanta). To equate the Tea Party with 1860s Klansmen was bizarre. I thought it could only be an aberration in mainstream liberal opinion journalism. In the last two years, though, how many times have writers in the Times, Atlantic Monthly,thePost, The New Republic, and other long-running liberal publications equated conservatism with white supremacy? In ramping up political debate to this level of demonization, liberal combatants have changed the game. We can’t even call it political correctness. Back in the 1980s, conservatives rightly pointed out how political correctness had infiltrated academic life and changed the way people thought and spoke. But from what I saw, political correctness was a form of soft coercion, one that pressured people through shame, not demonization. Some conservatives such as the founders of the NAS understood that the coercion, soft or hard, would eventually lead to demonization, but that struck liberals as an overdone concern. It appeared to us more about enforcing manners than getting people fired. 330 M. Bauerlein

The new defamations are more personal and nasty. They don’taimtomake dissidents shape up and fly right. The goal is to remove them from the room, to make them disappear. It’s not enough for people who don’t like Heather MacDonald’s writings to protest outside a building while she delivers a campus speech inside. They must invade the hall and shout her down and try to assault her. Forget refuting her statistics and evidence. Just get her. Why debate ideas that are stupid, outdated, and unjust? How do you prove you are not unbalanced or malignant to people who insist on saying otherwise? Donald Trump demonstrated one way of fighting back. But only a combative ego with enough experience in a competitive arena such as big real estate and popular television can be desensitized to intimidation enough to carry it off. Betsy DeVos has the self-confidence to push ahead as she has, for instance, on issues of sexual assault on campus. She has also managed to avoid adopting the language of diversity and progressive ed-speak. Many conservative leaders and politicians, though, aren’t ready for the calumny. But they better get used to it and find a means of overcoming it. The animosity that they express won’t go away any time soon.