Kessler-Harris starts off by stating her disappointment with Obama's presidency, and immediately my hackles are up. Dionne's argument about the necessary difference between being in power and being a critic is still on my mind, and so Kessler-Harris's oblique criticism seems weak. How can we critique Obama when we (and by that I mean the extended Left) have been so pitifully absent? We can criticize all we want, but if we aren't organizing then we have no one to blame but ourselves, really. Criticism without action is empty.
But Kessler-Harris's essay is not about Obama, but rather about the failure of intellectuals to engage both politically and with mass culture (meshing questions 1 and 3). She makes some cogent, if unoriginal, points. For many years intellectuals have pointed out that there has been a failure on the Left to find language as effective as the Right. How did "liberal" become a dirty word? How did "right to life" or "family values" become embedded in the fabric of American culture? Why can't we do that? Much of it is that intellectuals cannot, by virtue of the fact that they are intellectuals, speak the language of mass culture. And perhaps they should not.
Kessler-Harris writes, "Fifty or sixty years ago, we might have argued that . . . magazines like Dissent . . . could reach out beyond the intellectual community to serve as conduits to the desks of presidents and politicians. But today, in the light of powerful Internet media . . . the influence of these outlets has been diluted." Of course, the reason that they have been diluted is because the people have lost faith in their government and turn to alternative sources of authority to tell them how to think and those alternative sources do not include Dissent or any of the other intellectual stomping grounds.
If the Left is going to reach out to the people, it is going to have to leave intellectuals behind. Who are the most effective voices on the Left? Kessler-Harris points to Michael Moore as one, and I agree. But I would hardly call Moore an intellectual who speaks the people's language. He is a populist. Her other icons of Left-wing populist speech are more questionable: Arthur Miller? There is a guy who intellectuals get all emotional over and think speaks to the people, but how many Americans have read Arthur Miller (and felt it speak to them) or even less likely - seen his work performed?
The Right has its intellectuals and populists, but the populists run the show - they're the ones out in front. The Left has many intellectuals, but the populists tend to be denigrated - truth, in all its messy glory, trumps emotion. And most of us like it this way - there's something heroic about holding on to Truth, even if it means losing election after election.
So, the answer for intellectuals: be intellectuals - trying to speak the people's language is just going to sound like grandpa trying to be hip. Intellectuals have their important role to play vis-a-vis mass culture, but trying to be part of it doesn't even make sense. Rather, the Left needs to foster its own populists, a la Michael Moore, and there needs to be a relationship between them. If I remember my Gramsci, that was his point about hegemony and the role of intellectuals in the revolution - they should play a role, in fact they should be leaders, but they can't be the whole movement. And they can't control culture, culture is controlled by the people - populists need to take the ideas of the intellectuals, cut out all the complicated stuff, and put the basics out there. Das Kapital was for intellectuals; the Communist Manifesto was for the populists; the populists took the Manifesto and synthesized it for the people into: screw the rich; equality for all; let's get ours.
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