Those Inferior City-Dwellers Need To Stop Being So Elitist!

In all my years of reading CNN, rarely have I seen a column as schizophrenic, offensive, and breath-takingly idiotic as the bit Ruben Navarrette just phoned in "defending" Sarah Palin. Navarrette trots out the tired canard that Palin was "targeted" by the media because she wasn't sufficiently "elite". I'd guess she was targeted because she wasn't sufficiently "talented", but that's just me.

But honestly, that's not what troubles me. What pissed me off to no end was Navarrette's hit job on Colin Powell, whom I lauded earlier this month for striking back against the idea that there is something inferior about the "values" of big cities. "[M]ost of us don't live in small towns," Powell said. "I was raised in the South Bronx, and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx."

Navarrette's response to this is astounding:

You'd think the presidential campaign was about conservatives picking on urbanites. It wasn't. Sure, some Republicans probably made a mistake by using phrases such as "real America" or "real Americans" as a rallying cry for the base. Americans who live in cities might have thought they were being slighted.

Gosh, what an absurd thought! Cast aside that "some Republicans" includes Palin herself, the woman Navarrette feels compelled to stand up for. The idea that the Republican Party isn't anti-urbanist is so fanciful I didn't even realize it was up for discussion anymore. There is virtually no overlap between "city resident" and "Republican" voter. Cities are primarily made up of groups that the GOP has always dripped contempt for: non-Christians, people of color, and GLBT folks. Nobody misses the code: When Republicans talk about "San Francisco values", they mean gay; and when they talk about "cosmopolitan elitists", they mean Jews.

But what's most striking about Navarrette's piece is that -- literally paragraphs after saying that nobody has anything against city people -- he then proceeds to launch into a broad-based attack assailing the values of ... urban dwellers.

After Powell attacked Palin, one of the governor's most vocal defenders, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, returned the favor by attacking Powell.

"What is this hatred for conservatives and small-town people and Sarah Palin?" Limbaugh asked on his radio show. "I know a lot of people that are from the Bronx, Gen. Powell, and if you think the values there in the Bronx today reflect the ones you grew up with, take a trip back and see if the street corners and the activities there are the same as when you were growing up."

Limbaugh got it. When people use phrases such as "small-town values," it's as much about time as it is place. The idea isn't that people who live in small towns have better values than people who live in cities. It's simply an attempt to recall, with nostalgia, what life was like when more Americans lived in small towns.

It used to be that more families ate dinner together and high school students worked summers and after school. It used to be that our schools didn't make excuses for why some kids don't learn because they were too busy trying to teach them.

It used to be that parents weren't interested in being their kids' best friends, only good parents. And it used to be that people pulled their own weight and would never dare ask for a handout.

Rush %*%#ing Limbaugh? And you're trying to pretend like you're the victim here? This defies belief. And you know what life was like when most American's lived in small towns? I couldn't tell you -- Jews often weren't allowed in, and Blacks got lynched. I actually have no problem with contemporary small town values -- but I'll be damned if I let this faux-nostalgia for apartheid America be recast as something noble.

I know people who grew up in inner-ring suburbs (like myself). And we're doing fine. I know people who grew up in small towns in America's heartland (like my girlfriend). And they're doing fine too. And I know people who grew up in the middle of America's great cities. And they're doing fine as well. There's nothing wrong with being from Bethesda, just as there is nothing wrong with being from Owatonna and there is nothing wrong with being from Chicago. And Barack Obama -- who will be our nation's first President with urban roots since at least JFK -- hopefully will let people like Navarrette know that, loud and clear.

You Can't Have It All

Though I think this Duck of Minerva post on "certifying idealism" comes down a little hard, this paragraph is very wise and deserves repeating:

[T]he conjoining of "certifying" and "idealism" troubles my Weberian sensibilities to no end. If we are doing anything at all for our students -- and this applies broadly to everyone in the academy, I think, but perhaps especially to those of us who teach about politics -- we ought to be pressing them to deal with the conflicts between their ideals and the means of implementing those ideals. We should also be pressing them to deal with the fact that not all idealistic value-commitments point in the same direction, that not all normatively desirable ends can be accomplished all at once, and that in the end not all ideals can be rationally reconciled -- in other words, our students need to be appraised of the failure of the Enlightenment project of bringing all values together under the common head of Reason, and of the consequent need for hard and perhaps un-rationalizable choices and commitments.

Not everything that falls under the metric of "good" can be accomplished at the same time. Trying to do that usually leads to more harm than good, either because it engenders quiescence in people who refuse to do anything unless it can be done perfectly (which means nothing will ever happen), or because it encourages people to jettison values that really are important wholesale because they see them as barriers to the "ultimate" project (be it fostering the revolution, increasing liberty, reducing the size of government, securing the nation, or what have you). It is, of course, true that the opposite is true as well: people can be too quick to compromise and never take a stand to demand more than the bare minimum, and political movements can spin their wheels if they get stuck in an endless cycle of aimless, small-scale demands without any sort of larger vision of what they want to accomplish. But this interplay merely reinforces the point: mediating between those poles is tough, it will inevitably resist formula, and the best strategy is not a naive belief that one can be a messianic figure for political change, but rather acquiring the social and political agility necessary to make the world a better place.