The National Review’s Kevin Williamson Really, Really Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About
By Jesse Singal - Oct 16th, 2008 at 4:46 pmA contingent from Campus Progress was at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, last night, hosting an event that took place after the final presidential debate. Campus Progress invited The National Review to attend, so the conservative mag dispatched Kevin Williamson, a deputy managing editor.
This morning, National Review Online posted a piece by Williamson running down his experience in Hempstead that does a remarkable job of misrepresenting some very basic facts.
The first two paragraphs contain ad hominem attacks against Campus Progress (oh my God, George Soros!) and an explanation of how the author couldn’t get into the debate, and therefore had to watch it from a nearby restaurant, where he witnessed “a native Arabic speaker trying out her Spanish on amused Salvadorans, listening to the debate over pupusas and tamales.” Um, cool!
Then, it was time to engage with some icky campus types:
After the debate, we joined the Campus Progress crew and sundry other Hofstra student groups in the main dining hall of the student center to get their impressions. As impressions go, they weren’t that impressive. There’s no great sport in getting young leftists to say dumb things, so we didn’t try. But even deploying such neutral questions as “What do you think of all this?” and “What do you think the government should really be doing right now?” we soon found ourselves receiving earnest sermons on the joys of life in Castro’s Cuba, “Peak Oil,” and all manner of leftish buffoonery.
That sure is fascinating, Kevin, that you managed to find college students with odd, silly viewpoints. You clearly have good journalistic instincts. But what, pray tell, does any of this have to do with Campus Progress itself?
It should be noted that the worst of this didn’t come from any official Campus Progress folks, but from the generality of the students gathered about them.
Oh, nothing. Okay. Thanks for clearing that up. Well, we’re now almost 400 words into the piece and we have yet to enter into orbit around anything of substance. As a young person raised in a Web 2.0 world, I sure am losing patience with this article.
Indeed, Campus Progress’s boss on the scene was something out of the underground laboratory of a mad political scientist, a young Obama-Palin hybrid: Erica Williams, CP’s director of policy and advocacy, is a tall, confident black woman[.]
An “Obama-Palin hybrid.” For you see, she is both black and female. Stay classy, K-Will.
Unlike some of the loopier young ones orbiting the room, she didn’t talk crazy-talk about the worker’s paradise that is Castroland or the need for America to transform itself into a society of small-scale collective organic farmers for reasons of ecological necessity and “emotional benefits.” She talked voter turnout.
Williamson, like so many of his ideological compatriots, is caricaturing the left: We’re all socialists! We all want to wear Birkenstocks and work five hours a day helping maintain our “organic farms” (read: hydroponic marijuana production facilities)! We all love Cuba–I mean really, really love it!
This is all nonsense–and worse yet, stock nonsense. It’s conservative porn, almost, an aging bit of rhetorical B-roll dug up from a back room at NR, dusted off, and presented with shocked indignation. Williamson should be congratulated for having successfully pointed out that there are people on the left who espouse radical ideas. God knows it would be impossible for me to find anyone on his side of the aisle who has ever said anything crazy.
But has Williamson done any research into what relevant, effective progressive youth organizing seeks to accomplish? Apparently not, as he appears to be shocked by the idea of a young person concerned with voter turnout. If instead of nurturing his bizarre leftists/Cuba fixation (fetish?), Williamson actually, say, interviewed more twentysomethings who have jobs in progressive politics and policy, his horizons on this topic, which seem positively anorexic, might expand a bit. He’d see that his shallow stereotypes about young progressives simply don’t apply to the vast majority of us.
Unfortunately, Williamson’s ignorance seems to spread outward like hypothetical democracy in a hypothetical Middle East, converting every subject it touches into poorly thought-out nonsense:
One thing the polished Miss Williams did buy into, something that seems to be gaining traction in the progressive hivemind, is the promise of “green jobs.” Senator Obama talked about green jobs and the promise of a new energy economy. I posited that government’s bipartisan management of ethanol, a single energy product, has been so clownish and corrupt as to bring into question goverment’s ability to manage an entire energy economy, one that will presumably have lots of products, many of them more complex than corn-gas, and most of which presumably do not yet exist.
Did anyone ever say anything about the government “manag[ing] an entire energy economy”? Williamson seems to be referring to Obama’s plan, so let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth: Obama claims (PDF) his scheme will “Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean government future” [emphasis mine].
So the answer is no. No one is proposing that the government “manage” the energy economy. I’m not well-versed enough in energy policy to know whether Obama’s plan is a good one, but Williamson, through either laziness or an exceedingly poor grasp on the English language (I would imagine he at least read the Obama plan… right?), manages to skirt the question of the plan’s merits entirely, instead choosing to attack another, different plan that exists only in his remarkably fertile imagination. (It was truly shocking, given that up until this point Williamson hewed so closely to the dictates of logic and reason, to see him go after a straw man.)
After criticizing Erica for suggesting that, hypothetically, the government could help provide people with green-job training, Williamson just keeps on rollin’:
The belief that having the Right People in office means that we can repeal reality is, of course, superstition. But there is nothing of the messiah-seeker in Miss Williams. She doesn’t make one think: drooling devotee. She makes one think: community organizer.
Once again, Williamson skips that whole pesky “make a coherent argument” step and jumps straight to the inflammatory language: These young hippies think the government can or should have a role in job training! What are they trying to do, repeal reality? Yet he never explains in what sense this is an unreasonable notion.
Williamson ends with a bang. His penultimate paragraph:
Organizing for what? The answer to that can be found here at the “I’m Voting For …” site put together by Campus Progress. On this site, youngsters deliver short video sermonettes on the issue that matters most to them in the upcoming election, e.g. “I’m Voting For … a New Foreign Policy,” “I’m Voting For … College Affordability.” The website catalogues the invincible sense of entitlement that characterizes progressive politics, particularly among the young. One poor dear moans, Michelle Obama fashion, that he is going to have to borrow money to pay for law school. Another speaks very sadly of her late mother’s health-insurance travails. At some point, it became obvious to these young people that the chief administrative officer of the federal government is ex officio responsible for loaning them grad-school money and overseeing their moms’ health-insurance plans. Jonah Goldberg didn’t call his book Liberal Fascism for nothing; they demand a totalitarian government because they suffer from totalitarian narcissism. Ask what your country can do for you? They’ve got a list worthy of Santa’s in-box.
It’s “totalitarian narcissism” to state that you’re struggling financially? To argue that your deceased mother shouldn’t have had to struggle so mightily with health care bills?
It’s been easy to make fun of Williamson, who has managed to portray himself as an ultra-partisan, ill-informed neophyte on the subject of youth organizing. But this is a different sort of idiocy, to brand as narcissistic those struggling with the very issues that have defined this presidential campaign–issues that those on both the left and the right agree are hurting Americans everywhere.
Williamson works for a magazine whose editors would have been fine with amending our Constitution to ban gay marriage (their only problem with Bush’s proposed amendment was that it was unlikely to pass); who bemoaned the fact that the Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws; who downplayed the cost of the Iraq war; and who have no problem with the notion of a government that can detain suspected terrorists without due process and then waterboard them.
In short, Williamson works for a magazine with no qualms about the concept of “big government” when it comes to addressing ills like terrorism or perceived ills like homosexuality. But at the mere suggestion that we could lessen the economic strain on many Americans by improving or implementing this or that policy, we get from him a rambling, babbling paroxysm in which he strikes out against every straw man in sight and sputters arguments that would have been outdated in 1980.
It’s painful to watch, yes, but at least it clearly demonstrates the right’s desperate need for some new ideas.
At some point, the right is going to have to come to an important, very basic realization.
This smug, vindictive contempt may really appeal to their inner circle. Hard right wingers seem to enjoy laughing with one another about minorities and poor people and altruists and those who need things or who lack opportunity. They showed this in their convention, McCain showed this in her reactions to Obama at the debates, and Palin put this contempt and nervous, laughing hatred on national display. This Williamson hack performs that hatred here, heaven knows. This is a puff piece of contempt and derision.
What I don’t understand is how they think this will work. The logic and method of Fox News and the Inner Circle’s mockery doesn’t work in a truly mass audience. Williamson’s dependence on straw man, stereotype and preaching to the choir limits his audience, ensures he can preach only the choir. They may realize this, they may still be counting on importance of maintaining the cohesion and insider’s unity of the Republican party, but surely they must realize their coalition is coming apart. Surely they must have seen the numbers. Their demographic is aging, their base is rattled, and the larger world of independents and persuadable democrats is turning from them.
Preaching to the choir is no longer enough. At this point, it isn’t even adequate to prevent additional losses. If anything, Williamson’s entire genre of screed is becoming increasingly counterproductive. However giggly he may get with his buddies at his wicked burns here, he comes across as a childish idiot and an inexperienced writer overly reliant on freshman turns of phrase and style. He will convince no one outside his circle of anything but that he seems kind of unlikeable, like a mean, bitter dork.
This demonstration of mean, ineffectual dorkiness is a microcosm of the greater Republican failure throughout this campaign. They need to appeal to new blood and people unfamiliar with their treehouse club of insiders. But instead, they roll out these crusty old stereotypes. Instead, they bring in xenophobia they can’t even properly characterize, a schizophrenic message of fear and paranoia they dance back and forth from while they try to cling to their dignity and be outrageously undignified at the same time.
This is particularly problematic for right wing intellectual shills like Williamson. He wants so desperately to be credible and intellectual. He’s very dependent on his delusions of intelligence and merit. And yet here he sits, peddling 3rd Rush Limbaugh stock monologue. This isn’t intellectual writing, this is pablum. The poor boy doesn’t know if he’s a fancy author or a salt of the earth common sense sort of guy who isn’t fooled by those pie in the sky liberals with their malarky and what not. His disdain for researching anything or engaging his topic at all is supposed to reflect his everyman cred (though I doubt Williamson is actually aware of how his own technique functions), while Williamson’s overwritten style is supposed to grant him the illusion of intellectualism.
He runs in two directions and goes nowhere. He talks from both sides of his mouth and cancels himself out. All he’s left with is his tone - insecure, derisive, mocking, and totally insubstantial but for his acrid contempt. Just like his party, he has nothing to say and a small, petulant way of saying it. What on earth is this supposed to accomplish?
October 16th, 2008 at 5:55 pmEvery time I hear or read something else from conservatives like Williamson, I am surprised that they haven’t given up this weak and nonsensical rhetoric. The empty attacks being employed by Republican candidates for all levels of office and by Republican supporters clearly are not doing anything for their party, and maybe they realize it’s too late to change the ideas people have about their candidates and their party, but why they don’t just give something else a try is beyond me.
Republicans should be looking to the future of their party and that future is going to be in the hands of the young people. By criticizing young people speaking out at a post-debate event, Williamson is not helping out his party in appealing to the crowd that they most desperately need to mobilize in the coming years. The young people participating at the CP event last night maybe did not make the most polished statements, but the members of Williamson’s own party are not doing any better and that’s what they’re supposed to be doing as politicians. I agree with Jesse and Randolph that Williamson shouldn’t have posted such a ridiculous piece without knowing what he’s talking about.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:19 pmWilliamson’s article is a perfect example of how out of touch conservatives are with today’s youth. He accuses progressives of favoring “totalitarian narcissism,” which is offensive and downright untrue. Personally, I am progressive because although I have been lucky enough to receive a good education, health insurance, live a relatively comfortable life as a middle-class American, millions of people have not and their situations are only getting worse. For that, I would hope no one would label me as a narcissist.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:19 pmWhat can your country do for you? Well, Williamson had it right on one thing. Americans (and not just liberals) are looking for their country to do something for them…. something… anything. Right now, even Bush is admitting that the unregulated market got out of control and that maybe this ‘free market’ should have been regulated months ago by the government. Even McCain is recognizing that the government needs to increase Pell Grants (yet again) so that more young people can afford to go to college without accruing tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even step foot in their first jobs. It’s hard to work for your country when there are no jobs after college. It’s even harder when you can’t afford college!
So, yes. Maybe liberals might be “bemoaning” the fact that they have to take out loans for school or that their “late mother” had too much debt from her illness. But, believe me, it’s not just liberals. Most of the country is looking for health care reform right now—both McCain and Obama are talking about it—and the reform will come from the government. It was the government that passed legislation last year to increase Pell Grants and decrease loaning agency corruption—that was good for everybody. There are certain things that we can all agree on and if affording an education or having access to healthcare isn’t one of them, then it doesn’t make you a liberal or a conservative… it makes you all alone on the sidelines.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:29 pmClearly something else is missing from The National Review’s office these days other than Christopher Buckley. Williamson’s piece evokes the same, tired list of arguments against progressives, doing nothing to expand or stimulate the argument. Indeed my favorite is when he says that “we soon found ourselves receiving earnest sermons” about hot-button issues, such as health-care (in his words “the joy of life in Cuba”) and our world’s dwindling oil supply (again in his words, “Peak Oil” with quotations meant to invoke the possibility of its non-existence. Maybe he should work on his “argument”). It’s exceptionally interesting to hear that he deems his conversations with students sermons. The late William Buckley, founder of the National Review, is the also considered the father of modern intellectual conservatism. Key word being intellectual, it seems that to Williamson, the only true intellectuals exist in his office and their undoubtedly oldest subscriber, the American Enterprise Institute.
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