Not satisfied with polluting the local market, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is now exporting his personal brand of analytic idiocy across the pond. In a Financial Times treatment of Bush’s resort to gay bashing as a campaign rallying cry, Weisberg manages to equate the Democratic party’s attempts to raise the minimum wage with the Republican party’s annual efforts at constitutionally outlawing the casual incineration of the US flag.
Those issues, he says, give off “a whiff of pandering, the flavour of insincerity, an aura of desperation. They aim to stir passion but have little, if any, effect on most people’s lives. They are touchstones for the party’s base, but run a risk of alienating the centre.”
Got that? Touting a jingoistic constitutional amendment to ban flag burning is equivalent to efforts aimed at raising the standard of living for the 2 million or so Americans who earn the minimum wage, which was last adjusted ten years ago, and the additional millions earning more than the current minimum but less than the prospective new one.
Maybe Weisberg is just catering to what he imagines are the prejudices of his audience. Financial Times readers are, after all, generally well off and more conservative than not. What better way to soften them up than to ridicule what remains of the Democratic party legacy of concern for the less well off? Or maybe it’s just a manifestation of his privileged life: if he ever worked for the minimum wage, it was likely on a lark.
Whatever the cause, the equation is supremely, breathtakingly, maddeningly stupid, not just by way of the casual contempt for everyone who would benefit from a rise in the minimum wage, but for the equally casual assumption that pushing the issue creates “a risk of alienating the centre.” (I wonder if Weisberg adopted the British spellings of “centre” and “flavour” on his own or if the editors helped him out.)
We already know that Weisberg isn’t big on editorial fact checking; he thinks it’s a positive impediment to good writing. Apparently the prejudice extends to his own work: far from alienating the center, raising the minimum wage is a veritable magnet for it. A Gallup poll conducted late last year found 83% in favor — beg your pardon; that’s “favour” — of the idea even though those polled thought the current minimum wage was nearly 10% higher than it is.
The other 17% are Republican members of Congress, their families, their campaign contributors and the fortunate, such as Weisberg, who’ve forgotten the oblige of their noblesse. However much Weisberg might like to think those people represent the political center of this country, they don’t.
And of course that’s not the worst of it, or at least not the end of it. The actual subject of the column, the insincere pandering in question, the attempt to constitutionally enshrine discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans, would affect the lives of some tens of millions of citizens. Is Bush pandering? Sure. Is the pandering meaningless? Not hardly; it represents the deep attraction bigotry holds for a substantial percentage of the Republican party, an attraction they’ve worked hard and with considerable success to inject into the mainstream of American political discourse. The president’s support for the amendment validates their view that gays and lesbians are, in effect, less than human.
To Weisberg’s minimal credit, he recognizes the bigotry for what it is (and helpfully notes that Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford has embraced it). Beyond that, willfully or not, he’s just a wonderfully eloquent moron.
If Ford embraces it, that’s bad news … it is somewhat as disappointing, though not as much, as Sen. Obama’s support for the powers that be as noted by David Sirota in a recent Nation piece.
We should be waking up at nights sweating if moronic points of view like this is what we can hope for once BushCo is kicked out of power.
I meant to say Ford’s alleged bigotry here is more upsetting though Obama’s support of Lieberman etc. leaves a bad taste as well.
Just because you agree with it and see a benefit, doesn’t mean its not pandering. I’d love to be pandered to a lot more, come to think of it: mandated affordable housing, raising the profile of artists and designers through enterprise zones for creatives, same-sex civil unions, same-sex immigration sponsorship, higher gasoline taxes, more transit funding. And on and on. I can give a list of why all these things are necessary and helpful. But it would still be pandering.
Christopher, I think your definition of pandering is a bit over broad — my dictionary says it’s “to subserve or minister to base passions, tendencies, or designs,” and I don’t think raising the minimum wage or championing any of the other things you mention qualifies — but my quarrel wasn’t with Weisberg’s use of the word, only with his belief that raising the minimum wage and institutionalizing discrimination wouldn’t have an impact on anyone and that the former carries any risk of “alienating the centre.”
Joe, Ford is on record supporting the amendment, although I’m sure he doesn’t characterize it as bigotry. I don’t understand why he and other Democrats in conservative states don’t take the states rights path on the issue.
Thanks … I was going by your statement on the Weisberg piece, which is behind a subscription wall (though one can get a free trial), so I didn’t totally trust his judgment.
As to your perhaps rhetorical question, bigotry in some fashion has something to do with it, plain and simple. Gay marriage is so dangerous, as are those darn federal courts with a majority of judges appointed by Republicans, that you simply cannot trust it to the states.