Dick Armey, intellectuals, and the Jews

I doubt that House majority leader Dick Armey is going to go down in history as a great intellectual heavyweight. His weapon of choice is more the sledgehammer than the scalpel, and his less-than-subtle pronouncements on the Palestinian question have got him into trouble in the past.

In an interesting twist, however, the man who was accused just a few months ago of calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is now being accused of anti-Semitism. In a discussion in Florida in front of a largely Jewish audience, he said that there were two types of Jewish Americans: those with "deep intellect", who work in "occupations of the brain" like engineering, science and economics; and liberals, with "shallow, superficial intellect", who work in "occupations of the heart". He meant artists, not cardiac surgeons.

Florida is the center of the fight between Democrats and Republicans for the Jewish vote, which has historically been overwhelmingly Democratic. Over the past year, however, the Republican rhetoric of pre-emptive action against Arabs who want to kill us has resonated with many in the Jewish community. Hence Armey's presence at the discussion, and hence the Democrats' gleeful response.

Much of the debate is extremely boring: just as socialists used to call anybody who disagreed with them a "fascist", now Republicans and foreign-policy hawks are using "anti-Semite" even against prominent Jewish Zionists such as Gerald Kaufman. So if the tables are being turned and Dick Armey is getting a taste of his own side's rhetoric, I don't really mind, even if it's clear that he's no more anti-Semitic than Kaufman is.

What's much more interesting is Armey's non-apology apology the following day, when he told reporters he was simply making a broader point about liberals' wrong-headedness. "If you were a southern Anglo Baptist liberal, I promise you I would say you were not well educated and probably not a very deep thinker, because that's what liberals are," he said. "Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people. They don't think deeply, they don't comprehend, they don't understand a partial derivative, they have a narrow educational base as opposed to the hard scientists."

Southern Anglo Baptist liberal? Who could Armey possibly be thinking of? Surely not the world's most famous Rhodes scholar, the man who even conservatives agree was one of the most intelligent presidents ever? Whatever else you might accuse him of, being "not well educated" and "just not bright people" seems a bit of a stretch. But even putting that to one side, it's an interesting piece of rhetoric. It fits into the famous Charles Krauthammer thesis that conservatives think that liberals are stupid. Liberals, of course, don't believe the opposite: we might oppose everything Condi Rice stands for, we might think she's wrong, but we don't think she's dumb. I've even known a couple of bright right-wingers personally: one, a distant relation, was Keith Joseph, the house intellectual of the Thatcher era.

More interestingly, however, Armey has taken the standard Democratic/Republican distinction and overlaid it onto CP Snow's "two cultures" distinction between the humanities and the sciences. In his book, it would seem, the liberal arts are the Liberal arts, and the basic conservative laws of science (mass, energy, momentum) are actually Conservative as well.

It's quite a brave thing to say, especially in this most anti-intellectual of administrations. (Somehow I doubt that George W Bush is a whizz with partial derivatives.) It also goes against the standard dumbbell view of Democratic voters: that they're generally either very smart or very stupid, while the GOP gets the broad mass in the middle.

And, in the final analysis, it's very unlikely to be true. The most left-wing university in Britain has historically always been the London School of Economics. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of nothing but hard scientists, and is hated by all self-respecting conservatives. What's more, scientists tend to work in universities, and universities are generally very liberal places. If voting were confined only to those people who understand partial derivatives, I think the Democrats would be very happy: they could finally make political capital out of the astonishing mess that is president Bush's economic policy.

Does Armey know this, deep down, do you think? Probably not: for all his posturing, he's not really a scientist, he's merely a former economics professor. That's why he chose proficiency with partial derivatives as his metric for whether one belongs on the side of Einstein or that of Shakespeare. I'm sure he's very good at them: economists usually are. But they're also very good at getting into lengthy, heated and incoherent debates with each other. Maybe that's how Armey got his present lofty position in politics.

Posted by Felix at 11:07 EST