Daily Blague

Thinking further along the lines of yesterday's post, "Conventions of Disrespect" (see below), I thought that I'd say a few things about the regrettable side-effects of our bottom-up, decentralized school governance system, which gives local civilians with (very possibly) no academic or intellectual qualifications a leading role in determining how and what kids are taught. For many reasons, decentralization has never struck me as a good idea. Never mind what the reasons are; it's enough to confess that I'm an arrogant liberal. That's to say that I prefer the European model, which concentrates power in the hands of the manifestly, demonstrably intelligent, and which coordinates curricula throughout the land. Keeping experts at bay has been so deeply built into the American way of doing things that it would take a crisis of religious hysteria to put this country on the European course.

My arrogance betrayed itself in my Google search. "Lowest common denominator," "school district," "textbook" - I was fishing for a particular kind of page, one that would argue my already-held ideas and, with luck, join an authoritative chorus of support. What I got was rather different. I stumbled on a few well-written sites that I want to spend a little more time on before summarizing them here. Had I found what I was looking for, what you're reading now would have written itself. Instead, I'm groping. (Does it show?) I've been tossed back on one of two lessons that I've learned during these years of conservative hegemony: liberals are eating the bitter fruit of decades of swaggering presumption. (The other lesson concerns "moral values" and resistance to the shift away from what I call the Augustinian Settlement - you'll find that among the Categories, below right.) The sooner we learn why we've been served this bitter fruit, the sooner we'll begin to move on.

The casual reader, eyeing the phrase "arrogant liberal," might make the snap judgment that this is a conservative blog, and there would be some truth to that, although not the kind of truth that's popular in Washington these days. In fact, though, I do identify myself as an arrogant liberal for the simple reason that I've never been allowed to forget that I am one. For most of my life, I've stirred up a running low boil of resentment. I'm big, I'm smart, and, at least when I'm holding forth, I'm not the best listener. I can control a conversation the way a good cowboy herds cattle, and it shows. And I certainly like to hold forth. I have learned that I can whip up a load of resentment in no time. It's the sort of resentment to which a younger me used to respond with scorn, dismissing it as a failing that only proved the resenter's unworthiness. Middle age has made me rather more reflective.

Now I see that it's the sort of resentment that put George W Bush in the White House.

After World War II, liberals became passionate about civil rights. From a standpoint of pure self-interest, they learned from the McCarthy travesty that bright, inquiring minds could be marginalized in the same way that Afro-Americans were. But completing the work begun in 1861 and so malignantly forestalled was obviously a fight for the good. As blacks were enfranchised, the public began to pay a new attention to the circumstances of black society in America, and a very liberal connection between education and prosperity led to a vast increase in the funding of social and educational programs that, inevitably, sported plenty of instances of waste and folly. (Liberals believe that improved school systems will produce an improved society. Conservatives see the importance of education, too, but they believe that a bright person will make the most of whatever educational opportunities are available. That is conservative arrogance.) But liberals were so convinced that what they were doing was right, so very - although they would have choked on the term - self-righteous and optimistic about social engineering that they deflected criticism. Only nasty old bigots ("John Birchers") could be opposed to the liberal project.

So you can see who taught whom this bad habit, so loudly decried by today's liberals, of refusing to hear what you don't want to hear.

That the liberal project did have right on its side remains, for me, a core belief. But I have been taught this bitter lesson: for the project to advance, I and every other liberal will have to work on my conversational manners.