In a series of posts and an external essay Timothy Burke grapples with the US election results trying to understand why the Democrats lost and how they might recover from their decades long slide into increasing irrelevance and political powerlessness. I find his work useful but I think it suffers from false assumptions.

In his most recent post he abstracts arguments from his essay for further emphasis.

Quite a few commentators have observed that Bush is popular with some voters precisely because of his malapropisms, his anti-intellectual stance, because they see a resemblance to themselves and because that resemblance aligns them with him against educated elites. The reverse is equally true. A lot of us who voted for Kerry are astonished that the simple competence issue didn't carry the day by itself. What I have realized is that seeking competency and a respect for institutional process are cultural values that are parochially confined to educated elites. They're part of the everyday ethics of our work, part of our habitus. But this is not what some other social constituencies are looking for in a leader. We take codes and norms of professionalism as a matter of course and so forget just how class-bound and culture-bound they are as a value system. Yes, probably most everyone wants to "do a good job" at whatever it is that they do. But for some, that is simply working hard, or meeting their basic obligations, or not letting down the team. The union ethos of hard work, for example, tends to collide culturally in some really sharp ways with the ethos of professional meritocracy. Professional meritocracy prizes hierarchically-coded distinctions between particular individual professionals; the union ethos tends to suppress individuals from distinguishing themselves from the group. The upshot of all this is that a Presidential candidate who is unquestionably a better professional in the way he approaches leadership is probably never going to win a general election on that theme.

Kerry is not seen as competent and Bush is not seen as incompetent by those who supported Bush. Similarly, the educated elites are not generally seen as competent. There are competent and incompetent individuals in every trade but it is simply false to elevate one trade above another claiming that the members of one are competent and the members of another are not.

Educated elites are often derided as educated fools precisely because they are incompetent in a general sense. This isn't anti-intellectualism, this is a simple observation. An awkward child that has few social skills, physical competence, common wisdom, human and emotional insight or simple affection for others does not become competent by grinding through a graduate program and climbing an academic fitness ladder. Some may, but they are probably incompetent jerks after education as they were before learning their trade, especially since it isn't a general education it is highly specialized. They know a great deal about very little. They are merely monks, modern day versions of historical third sons, the ones that didn't inherit wealth or gain a commission in the military.

There are in fact competent monks just as there are competent individuals in every class and trade. It may be difficult for a monk to identify a competent soldier or businessman, and vice versa, for lack of knowledge about the determining factors. But understanding that this is an issue, that it is hard for those of one discipline to judge those of another, helps avoid blunders such as Timothy has committed. The true content of Timothy's judgement is that he thinks only a monk is competent to lead the nation, even a mediocre monk as he admits Kerry seems to be.

This is why Democrats are losing and will continue to lose. They don't have a grasp of reality. They aren't "reality based" as they have recently taken to trumpeting, they are blinded by illusion and faith, evangelists for a modern religion that simply doesn't appeal to the nation. They don't respect the competence of those who have followed different paths to maturity and wisdom or even grant them simple human dignity. By misreading and underestimating their opponents in the quest for power and dominance they are increasingly easy to defeat. They are almost laughably incompetent while loudly proclaiming their erudition and merit - strutting, posturing, ignorant fools unaware of just how ludicrous they look to those with more breadth and depth of understanding.

The red-staters are the people who have stayed behind while everyone else has left because they do not want to or cannot live the blue-state way, because they have an idea of moral economy that scorns getting ahead, rejects meritocratic values. They don't mind wealth achieved through pure serendipity, as Jackson Lears has noted in an interesting essay on gambling and fortune in the American imagination. But they do mind wealth achieved through individually differentiated effort, through accumulative aspiration.

What is "getting ahead", what are "meritocratic values", what is "wealth". These are relative and situationally defined measures. Red-Staters actually go to blue states, have relatives and friends that live there, hear, read and see it in media and conversation. Many have gone to school, lived a portion of their lives in blue states, "seen the world". Red staters know much more about blue staters than the reverse. They have different values not just on personal religious grounds, or social religious grounds, but on the very definitions of success, merit, wealth and competence.

In addition to the third sons sent to the monastery, the first sons who inherited wealth and the second sons sent to the military there are fourth sons who were sent away to make their fortunes in strange lands. Those who have no place in society leave. This is a metaphor, it isn't actually this way as it once was, few even have four sons today and it doesn't even talk about daughters, but the social wisdom of the metaphor can still illuminate current issues. Prodigal sons and daughters may go away to blue states and not all return when they've had their fill of the bright lights, coarse manners, anonymity and despair of concrete jungles. But it is simply dumb to think that blue state, urban lifestyles are objectively superior or subjectively appealing to all. It's not a matter of competence and its not a matter of success. What Bicoastians don't understand, can't understand due to their narrow world views, is that highly competent people are living successful lives in red states, that they in many ways have a broader and deeper understanding of the full spectrum of human conditions and options, and are in that sense even more qualified to choose national leadership and fully rational in working to use national politics to prevent the unthinking destruction of their lives by blundering incompetents who don't even know such things exist.

If we desire a more egalitarian world, a more humane world, one of the most urgent changes needed is to educate the poorly educated elites and reduce the structural inequities that reward them out of proportion to their skill and accomplishment. There is no justification for paying a computer programmer six figures. It is an accident of market evolution, a temporary scarcity, one that is being corrected by finding less expensive replacements in other lands. This is a process that will continue and affect most other professions and trades. Lawyers and doctors will be replaced by expert systems and AIs just as machinists were replaced by robots. Teachers will be replaced in the same way. The point is that there is no intrinsic value in any of these professions, there is merely training and a temperamental inclination to endure indoctrination and hazing to gain entrance to a closed society. They have no greater measure of the truly valuable human capabilities of creativity or insightfullness than any other trade that requires large amounts of domain knowledge. An illiterate farmer that can read the chemical composition of his soil by taste and smell, predict weather by observations of the night sky, bioengineer improved cultivars over decades of selective breeding, repair or build implements from raw materials, raise healthy children, love his family well and long, be a good friend and neighbor, fight a war and make peace is far more educated, competent and wise than most. But not necessarily more creative, of greater intrinsic value, and so of no greater worth to society than that rarest of creatures, the creative university professor; no greater and no lesser value.

Democrats, as the supposed party of progress, have failed miserably to either understand or advance the issues of those who suffer from structural inequities, and that's most of humanity. They are in fact regressives, jealously guarding the small privileges of intimate tyrannies, locked in a protracted battle to halt social evolution in order to preserve their perquisites. Their cynical attempts to assemble a coalition of out groups defined by racial, ethnic or gender distinctions - offering small treats as inducements - to fight a war against capital is misdirection in order to advance their agenda of thwarting progress.

The Republican coalition, not intrinsically superior to the Democrat coalition, does a better job of advancing the interests of humanity not least by having a better, more respectful understanding of the issues of competence and intrinsic worth than the Democrats. Those who are interested in the longer term project of birthing a better world, one that is more equitable and less haunted by ancient power structures and class divisions, have more to like about the Republicans than the Democrats. This is why they are winning and increasingly have the support of the disenfranchised. As the disenfranchised winnow the persuasive rhetoric and venal accusations of both sides they are finding more kernels of worth coming from the Republican stream. Increasingly this is valued more highly than the small treats offered by Democrats as bribes, especially as the long term deleterious effects of dependency in creating permanent underclasses are understood.

Neither side is right and either can win by doing good works that actually benefit the disenfranchised. It isn't just humor to say that voters have to pick their poison, choose the least bad alternative from a menu of bad options.

Once Democrats realize this, that they are not viewed as competent, virtuous, kind, wise or politically astute they stand a better chance of success. Their primary problem is their embrace of old fashioned power structures. They violated the separation of church and state by establishing the new religion of secular humanism as the state religion - while claiming that it isn't a religion and so shouldn't be excluded, though they evangelize it as stridently as any TV preacher. They hardened class divisions by elevating the monks of this new religion to a privileged status, granting life long tenure and immunity from competition, like royalty of old or "made men" in an organized crime gang. They are racist, sexist bigots that judge people by their genetic endowments and persecute those who aren't members of their blended tribe - while claiming that that their tribe has been persecuted in the past and that this somehow justifies their persecution of others in the present.

In short, Democrats don't live up to their rhetoric, their claimed purposes. Republicans don't either but they do a better job of advancing Democrat issues than the Democrats do, while also advancing their own sometimes inimical agenda as well. Republicans should be easy to defeat, they are on the wrong side of history, but Democrats are corrupt, incompetent and dumb.

UPDATE:

Nick expresses a related opinion:

My personal preference is to hang with people who think about things, and therefore have diverse opinions, and who actually enjoy discussing them, and even, dare I say it, arguing about them. Sometimes, mirabile dictu, they actually change their minds. Strangely enough such people are now, regardless of their opinions about anything in particular, called “conservatives”. Has it always been thus? I don’t think so.

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Back40 at Muck and Mystery has an excellent essay today on the view of Democrats that the Conservatives are somehow less ‘intelligent’. Anti-Intellectualism The heart of Timothy’s argument in the previous post, that “Bush is pop......[read more]
Tracked: November 8, 2004 10:40 AM