The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Idiotic Eloquence of Tom Friedman

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | 16 Comments

Matt Welch engages in a world-historic dismantling of Thomas Friedman’s latest column, with its ”trademark sloganeering” and “what-Americans-want ventriloquism.”

In the former category, Welch catches Friedman shilling for his too-clever formulation, “nation-building in America” (alternatively, “nation-building at home”) which has been deployed in 14 Friedman columns over the past two-and-a-half years. In the latter category, the way Friedman abuses the first-person plural — “we,” ”us” and “our” – reminds me of the old joke about the Lone Ranger, the punchline of which is Tonto’s reply, “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

The combination of these two Friedmanesque tics results in entire paragraphs of laughable idiocy, to wit:

[P]eople intuitively understand that what we need most now is nation-building in America. They understand it by just looking around at our crumbling infrastructure, our sputtering job-creation engines and the latest international education test results that show our peers out-educating us, which means they will eventually out-compete us. Many people understand that we are slipping as a country and what they saw in Barack Obama, or what they projected onto him, was that he had both the vision and capability to pull America together behind a plan for nation-building at home.

Friedman conjures up a money-is-no-object consensus in favor of his own pet idea, which he attempts to sell with a fictional endorsement by Barack Obama, and which he asserts (or implies or merely assumes) was irrevocably ratified by the 2008 election.

But what about those 58 million Americans who voted against Obama? Why must Friedman conscript them into this amorphous consensus of “we”? What about Americans whose kids are performing well in school and thus are not part of the “us” being “out-educated”? What about states where the infrastructure is not crumbling?

(“Crumbling infrastructure” is mainly a problem in high-tax states without right-to-work laws, where repairs to roads and bridges are extraordinarily expensive because of inefficiencies inherent to unionized workforces. That guy leaning on the shovel in the highway work-zone? Yeah, he’s the union steward’s brother-in-law, featherbedded onto the payroll, but at least he showed up; the taxpayers are also footing the bill for phantom ”workers” who played hookie.)

Ranking the very worst New York Times columnists is always tough. They’ve got so many genuinely awful ones (Friedman, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and my pet whipping boy, David Brooks) that it’s hard to say which is worse. For some reason, Krugman escaped mention on Alex Pareene’s “hack list,” which ranked Brooks at #30 and Friedman at #3. I hate Brooks far more — “National Greatness,” my ass! — but what Pareene says about Friedman is worth quoting:

Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. . . .
He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.

It’s his unlimited expense account (Pareene isn’t exaggerating with that “literally“) which gives Friedman carte blanche to go flitting hither and yon in search of anecdotal evidence to support his own favorite public-policy themes.

And they are just that, themes. Friedman doesn’t get his hands dirty with the difficult business of pushing actual legislation through Congress. Far less does he concern himself with the arguably more difficult (and almost certainly more dirty) business of getting an electoral mandate for  his policy themes. If Friedmanism is so gosh-darn popular — if it’s what “we” really want — why isn’t it advocated in the platforms of both major parties? Why didn’t congressional candidates fill the airwaves with campaign ads calling for the enactment of Friedman’s ideas, or excoriating those small-minded obstructionists who stand in the way of our glorious Friedmanite future?

Jonah Goldberg (who got an undeserved #7 spot on Pareene’s list) absolutely loathes Tom Friedman, and once delivered himself of this memorable denunciation:

 [F]or Friedman everything is connected to everything else, so everything is a metaphor for everything. “In the Friedman mind,” writes Ian Parker in a 2008 profile for The New Yorker, “things tend to be like something else. The new is like the old. The foreign is like the American. The scattered has a pattern.” Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud famously observed — but not for Tom the Magic 8 Ball of cliché generation, the maestro of mixed metaphors. A cigar could be the key to understanding why geo­thermal energy is the only way to save the panda. Like the China Syndrome that inexorably leads to the perfect storm that breaks the camel’s back, Tom Friedman encounters no obstacles — factual, logical, or literary — between himself and the points he wants to make.

Exactly so. Friedman is a sophister, whose cleverness as a writer is employed to disguise the shortcomings of his ideas. This is a classic error of intellectualism: Conflating mere eloquence of expression with soundness of thought.

People who admire fine writing (and I do) must always be on guard against this error, keeping in mind that a man may be both (a) an excellent writer, and (b) an advocate for very bad ideas.

The unfortunate fact that an argument may be both superficially persuasive and fundamentally wrong constitutes an eternal temptation to the minds of those people who permit their admiration of literary excellence to overcome their common sense.

Go read David Brooks’ infamous 1997 ode to “national greatness” and you will find no shortage of literary skill. Clear away the superficial eloquence, however, and you recognize that Brooks is arguing on behalf of the same sort of big-government, guns-and-butter, welfare/warfare state agenda that led LBJ into the political/policy debacle of the Great Society, the Dien Bien Phu of 20th-century American liberalism.

Karl Marx was a witty writer with a demonstrated aptitude for clever aphorisms (e.g., “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) and sloganeering: ”Workers of the world, unite!” Yet Marx’s eloquence as a writer was exercised on behalf of what proved to be the most deadly idea in all human history.

Marxism was always more beloved by college students than by the working class, simply because the university is a place where words matter (or at least seem to matter) more than deeds. And the same can be said of the profession of journalism, whose top practicioners too often confuse their stock in trade – an excellence of written expression – with an actual superiority of intelligence, knowledge or wisdom.

This is an enduring problem Friedrich Hayek examined in his landmark essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” Hayek’s insight seems to have been ignored by our intelligentsia, whose hubristic self-satisfaction with their own eloquence is the taproot of their folly.

(Hat-tip: Insty.)

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Category: New York Times

Comments

  • The Wondering Jew

    Well played, sir. I’ve had the misfortune of interacting with Friedman on a few occasions in a professional setting and can vouch that as a hacking blowhard, he has no rival.

  • http://the-belfry.tumblr.com/ Andrea Harris

    That’s why when some liberal oozes on about some progressive hero or other (say, Obama) being wonderful because he’s such “an eloquent speaker,” I think back to all those films we were shown in school (and I went to public school, in the 70s) of Adolph Hitler ranting in front of his followers, in order to caution us about the inadvisability of falling for some leader’s “charisma,” I wonder that these same people, who no doubt have nothing nice to say about Hitler’s speaking skills, have no sense of the irony of their position. It’s true that seventy years on we can see Hitler for a ranting fanatic with a harsh voice, but to his followers he was all that and a basket of kittens. And didn’t TIME magazine make him “man of the year” in 1939?

  • Anonymous

    “(“Crumbling infrastructure” is mainly a problem in high-tax states without right-to-work laws, where repairs to roads and bridges are extraordinarily expensive because of inefficiencies inherent to unionized workforces. That guy leaning on the shovel in the highway work-zone? Yeah, he’s the union steward’s brother-in-law, featherbedded onto the payroll, but at least he showed up; the taxpayers are also footing the bill for phantom ”workers” who played hookie.)”

    Care to cite anything that proves this thesis…or should we just take it on faith? Meanwhile, I laugh at the idea that Mississippi or Alabama has a better infrastructure than “any high tax state,” like a New Jersey or Connecticut.

    In my low tax state, Indiana, storm water pushes raw sewage into the streams, the air is filthy, and the roads are crumbling. Guess the American Society of Civil Engineers is a bunch of Unionized, Socialist wackos when they produced this report about Indiana? http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-page/indiana and gave the entire country a D for infrastructure. I guess the fact that our country basically invented the internet and now has internet speeds which pale in connection to every other industrialized nation is another union plot? I’ll remember to mention the lack of need for infrastructure to the folks in Minnesota, whose families fell into the river when an interstate bridge failed.

    I’m not a fan of Friedman, who is a douchebag, but your disdain for one of the few things a functioning government should do well tells all we need to know about the Far Right’s commitment to helping America: there is none. No matter what the issue (high speed rail, carbon emissions, weaning the country from foreign oil and gas, stopping factory farms which pollute groundwater, safer mining, etc) y’all oppose it.

    Are the only purpose of government to bomb other countries and give tax breaks to rich people?

    Frankly, Stacy, your opposition to this once again points out how you are no different from Calhoun and Jackson in opposing American Progress. it’s the Maysville Road veto on a national scale! Your side was wrong about EVERYTHING then and you’re still wrong now.

  • Anonymous

    “(“Crumbling infrastructure” is mainly a problem in high-tax states without right-to-work laws, where repairs to roads and bridges are extraordinarily expensive because of inefficiencies inherent to unionized workforces. That guy leaning on the shovel in the highway work-zone? Yeah, he’s the union steward’s brother-in-law, featherbedded onto the payroll, but at least he showed up; the taxpayers are also footing the bill for phantom ”workers” who played hookie.)”

    Care to cite anything that proves this thesis…or should we just take it on faith? Meanwhile, I laugh at the idea that Mississippi or Alabama has a better infrastructure than “any high tax state,” like a New Jersey or Connecticut.

    In my low tax state, Indiana, storm water pushes raw sewage into the streams, the air is filthy, and the roads are crumbling. Guess the American Society of Civil Engineers is a bunch of Unionized, Socialist wackos when they produced this report about Indiana? http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-page/indiana and gave the entire country a D for infrastructure. I guess the fact that our country basically invented the internet and now has internet speeds which pale in connection to every other industrialized nation is another union plot? I’ll remember to mention the lack of need for infrastructure to the folks in Minnesota, whose families fell into the river when an interstate bridge failed.

    I’m not a fan of Friedman, who is a douchebag, but your disdain for one of the few things a functioning government should do well tells all we need to know about the Far Right’s commitment to helping America: there is none. No matter what the issue (high speed rail, carbon emissions, weaning the country from foreign oil and gas, stopping factory farms which pollute groundwater, safer mining, etc) y’all oppose it.

    Are the only purpose of government to bomb other countries and give tax breaks to rich people?

    Frankly, Stacy, your opposition to this once again points out how you are no different from Calhoun and Jackson in opposing American Progress. it’s the Maysville Road veto on a national scale! Your side was wrong about EVERYTHING then and you’re still wrong now.

  • Anonymous

    Except for the fact that it’s Copperheads like you in favor of slavery on the plantation / collective.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, SDN, not exactly a Copperhead then or now. But, exciting use of a term you don’t understand. I can see you right now casting that 1864 for McClellan….

  • Anonymous

    I laugh at the idea that Mississippi or Alabama has a better infrastructure than “any high tax state,” like a New Jersey or Connecticut.

    Laugh all you want, chump. I invite you to travel the highways through Massachusetts and New York, and then travel from Virginia down to Florida — which I did in the last month of the fall campaign — without reaching the conclusion that the roads up north are worse, both in terms of construction and maintenance.

    The real root of this problem goes back to the 1960s, when the Cloward-Pivens plan for expanding the welfare rolls forced states and municipalities to divert more and more of their resources toward social programs and away from legitimate functions of government — roads, bridges, police, etc. New York City was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by that process.

    And, yes, labor unions — especially government-employee unions — are deeply implicated in the decline of the Rust Belt. Every time some liberal starts bemoaning the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to overseas competitors, I point out that foreign manufacturers employ many thousands of American workers in plants in states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

    That obtrusive fact also falsifies the claim by Friedman and others that American workers are unemployed because of deficiencies in our education system. If that is the case, why are industries relocating jobs to impoverished Third World shitholes (Malaysia, Mexico or Mississippi) and not Sweden or Minnesota?

    Tim Burns, you need to stop lecturing people as if they were your inferiors and instead go read some good books like Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed.

  • Anonymous

    “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.”

    - Mark Twain.

    In Tom Friedman’s case, I suspect it’s the tapeworm talkn’.

    Hey, timb116, “the fact that our country basically invented the internet” is because programmers, scientists, and inventors aren’t unionized thugs. And the fact that “the roads are crumbling in Indiania” means that Indiania roads were built by unionized thugs (and Indiana is sorely in need of a right-to-work law). Tell THAT to your tapeworm!

  • Anonymous

    Except, Stacy, you ARE my intellectual inferior.

    Being an autodidact in the intellectual swamplands of Southern conservative politics does not make one particularly well-read in American history. Certainly, urging someone to read ANYTHING by Thomas Sowell, a man so enlightened he criticizes any government program to combat poverty AND the Civil Right Act of 1964, is once again part of the free service to the rich and comfortable you generously provide with your various apologia.

    PS Any idea how many times Northern roads freeze and thaw versus Southern? Any ideas about population densities of the two regions? Lastly, any notion how about arguing from anecdote is not data? Still, nice try. It’s not often one sees a “pundit” challenge Friedman and lose!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    Anything you need to know about the NYT, the people it employs, and the dwindling people who read it can be discovered by feasting your eyes upon a picture of L’il Pinch Sulzberger and repeating the Confucian maxim, “In the third generation, disaster.”

    By which standard Timb116′s grampa set the bar pretty low for the family…

  • Anonymous

    Projection — it’s timmy’s dinner.

    I know exactly what it means, which is why I apply it to you liberal slavemasters.

  • Dave

    “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so”

    The creatures outside looked from speach to man, and from man to speach, and from speach to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

  • Anonymous

    The I-35 bridge failure had everything to do with engineering and nothing to do with a lack of maintenance funds. Not that you’d know that from reading the Star Tribune or listening to Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee at the time, who deftly shifted blame onto the state of Minnesota.

  • Anonymous

    Ah, I see we’ve run out of even the pretense of reasoned argument and gone for the insults already. Truly, ye shall know them by their works.

  • Embarrassed Dave

    Oh, that’s lovely. My teenage son now has programed misspellings into the browser dictionary. How the hell do I get rid of those?

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