Postmodernisms Take On Flake Journalism - Road to the Middle Class

IN ITS FEATURE piece on presidential candidate and Tea Party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), The Weekly Standard makes the obvious point: there is something about Bachmann and Sarah Palin that sends liberals crazy.

What unites Bachmann and Palin, above all, is the contempt with which they are treated by liberals. “I’m just mocked and marginalized, Sarah Palin is mocked and marginalized,” Bachmann told me. “If you are unashamed and vocal about your position as a conservative, that’s what happens. That’s what happened to Reagan, that’s what happened to Newt Gingrich, that’s what happens to anyone who’s not afraid to be a conservative. It’s part of the job.”

So that’s why Chris Wallace of FoxNews thinks it’s OK to ask Bachmann if she’s a flake.

It’s strange that our liberal friends should be set on mocking and marginalizing conservative women politicians. After all, every liberal has been taught to a fare-thee-well about the ethical outrage of marginalization. It’s at the center of the post-modern turn. The whole point of the liberal value system these days is to celebrate diversity. To stigmatize and to marginalize another group or another culture, to call someone a flake is wrong, because “other” reduces the span of “us”. There are no objective standards to determine right and wrong, therefore we should respect and celebrate other cultures and value systems.

So why don’t liberals obey their own rules and take immense care in their statements when it comes to pro-life conservative woman politicians who are so easily experienced as “other” by liberals?

American philosopher Saul Alinsky wrote: “The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth of the individual, and faith in the kind of worth where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.” Except when that individual is a pro-life conservative woman, say today’s liberals.

Or take Time’s Richard Stengel who asks, in a 5,000 word article about the US Constitution: “What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress’s authority under the commerce clause?” Here’s what, Mr. Stengel. The whole point of the Constitution is to limit the the power of government officials. If the Constitution doesn’t limit the government then the Constitution doesn’t have a point.

Anyway, what’s with this liberal grand narrative about the Living Constitution? I thought we had all agreed, with the post-modernist Lyotard, that Grand Narratives were a thing of the past. In the post-modern era we have “micro-narratives” as each sub-culture conducts its own Wittgensteinian “language game.” In this new world the conservative micro-narrative of constitutional originalism is just as valid as the liberal micro-narrative of the living constitutionalism, and all good diversity counselors should work to celebrate both diversities.

Back in the 18th century, the First Postmodernist celebrated micro-narrative and sub-cultures. He wrote: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” And Edmund Burke also celebrated the diversity of Catholic Emancipation, and anticipated with his Impeachment of Warren Hastings the problem of dictatorial domination that agitated Adorno and Horkheimer of the lefty Frankfurt School.

Of course it is not enough to belong to the little platoon; you must participate. American freedom-lover Saul Alinsky: “The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people... Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.” But in the big government welfare state only liberals are credentialed to pursue the common good. Everyone else just gets benefits.

America’s own contribution to post-modernism is the philosopher Richard Rorty. He held with Hume that “corrected sympathy... is the fundamental moral capacity.” Get people to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin if you want them to identify with the sufferings of slaves. So here goes.

Let the word go forth from the mainstream media to the Democratic National Committee, from the groves of Academe to the citadels of philanthropic foundations, that lily-white Netroots and mainstream media alike should get out to Iowa and get their sympathy corrected by watching the Palin biopic The Undefeated. Because we wouldn’t want liberals to compound the ethical outrage of their “mock and marginalize” hate speech towards the pro-life, conservative, female “other” for too much longer. Liberals, “when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of [their] nature,” believe in civil discourse and national conversations. At least that’s what they keep telling us.

Special thanks to American humorist Saul Alinsky for assistance on this article: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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