Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Nick Cohen was raised by liberal and very political parents, and never met a conservative until he was 13. In this post, he writes about the evolution of his thinking and about leftist attitudes toward Iraq.
Cohen’s book, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way will be published in February.
A&L links to The Common Review, which appears to be the “Great Books Club” official journal- but I may be wrong. It is clearly associated with Penguin. Do the Chicago lads (and lasses, I guess) know anything about the path of the Great Books Clubs from then to now?
A&L was looking at the review of a new E. D. Hirsch book, The Knowledge Deficit. Albert Fernandez begins with some grudging agreement with the argument Hirsch develops.
Architecture can move us and if we come to associate the institutions and offices of a democracy, the role of the rule of law, then those buildings are going to invoke in us a powerful allegiance. State capitols and county seats are the focus of our towns. In Europe, a visitor asks the natives where the cathedral is; a good tourist visits even the tucked-away chapel with the great painting. Few Europeans coming here find very satisfactory answers when they ask us. A few churches are lovely, of course. While we may be more religious in many ways than Europe, you can’t necessarily tell that from the beauty, centrality, or even inspiring nature of most of our churches. It isn’t just that we haven’t been religious as long and missed the great cathedral building centuries. We are splintered and take our religion a lot more personally.Across broad swaths of America and in small to middling towns, county courthouses define the geography, the history, and even the current social life of a town. Local citizens sit on the square, gossiping, watching the town’s life go by. As I sit wait to be taken or excused from a jury, I watch a cross-section of our community. Our history/government department put up a large poster of the county seats in Texas some old, some new. Students stare at them intently, trying to find their county. The poster connects them to both the towns from which they came and the importance of the requirements for American history and federal/state government.
A state strong enough to enforce property rights and contracts, but which chooses not to be a predator is a rare anamoly. We are lucky to be here. Lex
Lex’s post on political music startled me & I responded in a slapdash manner. I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. Of course, the left leaning nature of entertainment in general is hard to miss and the communist’s appeal to nineteenth century romantic folk traditions – all that singing around the fire in youth groups my ex-Iron Curtain friends describe – has paid for & encouraged groups that toured locally. Decades ago, the guy who edited the poetry magazine organized Wobbly songfests & my husband’s colleagues organized a party around Arlo Guthrie’s appearance. I was going to say I’ve found most of this politicized music as boring as it was irritating. But, then, I think, I still listen to Willie Nelson & Kris Kristofferson. Their self-indulgent & inconsistent stands are more leftish than anything though it’s hard to consider these as consistent political arguments. They are pretty much for the underdog whoever they perceive it to be. But that is the pull of such music the age old narrative of the underdog, of David, as well as the communal nature of the communal political. And that may be the power that Lex rightly sees in some of that music. (I always thought “I am Woman” was that kind of a song.)
Lex concludes:
Good governance cannot be sung about. But people need things to sing about.This is a real problem for people who love freedom in a sensible, empirical, small-l libertarian kind of way. It has no songs. It does not grab the heart. Our enemies will always be more powerful in this department as a result. Too bad. But I see this as a condition to be worked with, not a problem which can have a solution.
Lex is right in general, especially if you look at the genre of political songs and eliminate nationalism. But, then, if you take out nationalism, you take out one of the ways we associate institutions with our emotions. Communism, like terrorism, was a world-wide movement one based on a faux religion, the other on what may be a misunderstood but real one. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is in that tradition. But, the rule of law, the importance of private property, freedom of speech & religion, free enterprise all of these must begin within a country itself. Libertarian blogs bash the EU and the UN because they recognize that state control is not going to get looser the larger the body grows. A recorder of deeds is a part of government. This is embodied in the rule of law authorized & enforced by the state. Nationalism and these values are so intertwined that taking them out leaves only abstractions.
Kucinich talks of bringing back the “fairness doctrine”; probably it won’t go anywhere, but it reminded me of how much we listen to NPR, how wonderful and how irritating it is.
The left seems awfully worried about the right’s AM dominance, but for years, while we hauled our kids around to lessons and when I was running the shop for 16-hour days, the local public station played in the background. When she was in junior high, my middle daughter wrote a poem to Martin Goldsmith. It wasn’t a school girl crush, but rather about the pleasure she felt in the music he introduced, in his voice, in the peace those lovely string quartets brought to her radio every night. His show, Performance Today, is now hosted by Fred Childs and with her out of the house, I go back to my more regular fare. Still, it provided a wonderful experience, even for someone as musically illiterate as I am.