Poor George Packer. Fooled by Bush & Cheney into supporting the Iraq War II. Fooled by the neo-liberal project. And now, afraid to confront the consequence of the neo-liberal project in New York City's public schools, where cultural radicalism reigns over issues of political economy, Packer starts to sound like a liberal in 1968 who has been mugged. Last month, Packer extolled the execrable Michael Bennett, a squishy US Senator from Colorado (a State that has yet to do penance for its anti-union history). Bennett wouldn't know a vision if it punched him in the face, notwithstanding Bennett being supportive of universal pre-K. Bennett's hostility to Medicare for All and free public college tuition, his inability to understand the American Empire, and inability to speak with any passion about the need for systemic changes in this Reaganite-Clintonite-global economy, and his use of right-wing arguments, make Bennett execrable as a presidential candidate.
The reason I write this post is not to damn Packer as another example of corporate media punditry, where no matter how wrong you are, as long as you stay within the elite corporate executive approved opinion, you always have your perch. I write this post because I just finished Packer's extraordinary and powerful book, The Blood of Liberals (2000), which I recently found in a used bookstore. I bought the book not just because it was about his maternal grandfather (George Huddelston), a Southern Populist from the start of and into the early 20th Century, who took that road from economic radical to anti-New Dealer, falling on the sword of racism, and his own father, Herb Packer, a New Dealer who ended up in a technocratic worldview trap against his own will, and who unsuccessfully tried to stem the madness which developed in the late 1960s student movement (Herb Packer was against the Vietnam War for what seems to have been an anti-Cold War basis, which made him very different from too many of his higher education contemporaries, who kept looking at the war as some sort of one-off "mistake," instead of an imperialist pattern). I bought Packer's book because, in the back end acknowledgements, Packer stated his book was informed by the late historians Christopher Lasch and Richard Hofstadter, both of whom, for the past two years, I have been re-reading as I come to grips with the madness which has engulfed the American political discourse. As I complete Packer's book, I can definitely say Packer is a brilliant mind and, unlike too many others, Packer has closely and accurately read Lasch and Hofstadter, which makes Packer's insight and analysis of his grandfather and father powerful, compelling, and poignant. Packer's book is as great an introduction to the history of the American 20th Century as anything one may read anywhere.
Packer is three years younger than me, and it appears, from his discussion of his own reading, our reading has largely tracked. Packer even read Clark Kerr's multiversity lectures-essays, which may make Packer and me one of the relative few non-academics who have read those lectures-essays in the last forty years (meaning, Packer, me, and Seth Rosenfeld). Packer's book later goes into Packer's own journeys after college, where I laughed at how we both found the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s, just when the word "socialism" had reached its nadir as the dreaded Soviet style regimes were falling under their own weight. I did not get the sense Packer read much, if at all, Michael Harrington (I ingested every Harrington book). Surprisingly, however, and considering Packer's later trajectory, Packer shows, in his economic analysis of America in the 1980s and 1990s, he understood the Harringtonian analysis. Our lives greatly diverged during the 1980s and 1990s as Packer was in a position to journey, having both elite access and good physical health--so he did not have to maneuver inside the American medical system and seek employers who had insurance. Packer also carried within him an elite confidence which helped him as he played in the world. It is fun to read of Packer's audacity and pushing into places he may not have been welcomed.
As with earlier sections of his book, Packer provides a reader with an acutely sharp perspective, and he is very insightful about homeless people he met, and the people he met in Africa while in the Peace Corps. Packer is also prescient about what was happening to American society in the 1980s and 1990s, which we may term the Reagan-Clinton era. However, what was completely missing from Packer's book is any awareness of the press critics from Irwin to Sinclair to Seldes to Stone and Parry--though I think I saw one reference to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)--and how corporate media perpetuates corporate executives' worldview and limits the scope of our public discourse. This forms my supposition as to why Packer was fooled regarding the Iraq War II and why he continues to avoid directly confronting the political-economic issues that are at the foundation of so many challenges our society faces, and forms the reason our corporate media highlights many of the cultural food fights. Had he been willing to speak of these things, he may have seen why and how those people who run the urban public schools are ultimately economic reactionaries even as they sound radical on culture and even issues of Empire. What strikes me about Packer's still important article about his, his wife's and children's experiences inside the NYC private pre-school and later public school systems is Packer never once bothers to analyze how the neo-liberal project and global inequalities emanating from and pushing back into the United States led us to the confounding things he correctly finds so frustrating.
But let's get personal here. Packer never once tells us whether he and his wife considered moving out of the city and into a suburb with a good and functioning public school system. As a powerless person who never got to write for Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, I found a simple solution to what was so clearly beyond my control. Unlike Packer, I made a conscious decision to move our family to where it was best for our children, not myself or my wife. My wife and I could have moved the family to a poor urban neighborhood to be with really cool people, or else, to save big mortgage bucks, moved to some rural area to allow me to write, and my wife to paint, and follow our own paths. Instead, my wife and I (well, more me, as my wife trusted my decisions) chose to move to an upper middle class suburb, about 30 minutes from downtown San Diego, which contained one of the best public school systems in California, the Poway Unified School District. Poway still has the highest Republican registration of any city in San Diego County, and, paradoxically has a high level of cultural anti-intellectualism, which is reflected in the idiots running the city council. However, its relative economic wealth allowed for a good and functioning public education system, which benefited our children.
For me, Packer's article was very familiar, and again frustrating, reading, and is consistent with what I have read for the past 25 years regarding the class issues inside private pre-schools, the education administrative establishment, and cultural liberalism run amok. Too often over the years, I have found people who style themselves "progressives" in the education establishment were the type of people at Stanford, circa 1988, screaming, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!" With Gore Vidal, I shared a disdain for such anti-intellectualism, and those cultural radicals' inability to see the richness and continued relevance of studying the Western canon and classics (one should give credit here too for Martha Nussbaum's brilliant essay review taking down the late but unlamented Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," where she showed Bloom knew far less than he believed about antiquity and how exciting antiquity writers continue to be). I find too many cultural radicals reach for extreme cultural solutions because they are afraid to confront the economic inequalities arising from the Reagan-Clinton era and the entire economic elite's project, since the start of the Cold War, in dismantling the New Deal. Things get even more complicated when the English major lit-crits end up in charge of public schools or higher education, as these are people who essentially deny empiricism as a societal good and would get rid of all testing, instead of asking what they should be testing and why. And never once does Packer go outside his own world to ask, Why do the Finns get no-testing right? What did they do? I get it that Finns are mostly white, but really, are we that incapable of recognizing diversity is supposed to be pursuing the pluralist philosophy that there is nothing genetically stopping an African-American, Latino, Asian, transgender, gay, etc. person from learning critical thinking, critical writing, and having multiple perspectives? Packer ends up in a corner where my old right wing neighbors in Poway get to say to him, "See, stupid liberal? We were right all along." To which I say, you are certainly right-wing, but you are still wrong. Oh, and if you think diversity has substantive meaning, such as African-Americans and Latinos, etc. can't do what I just said, then you are a racist. Packet knows this well, but refuses to pull himself out of neo liberal and corporate capitalist traps.
Packer's passage about the school administrators making a decision to have gender neutral bathrooms also reveals Packer's self-imposed limited perspective. He is focused on the fact the school did not give parents a chance to voice their opinions. For what? If we're going to protect transgender students, then isn't a gender neutral bathroom a consequential public policy change that flows from that protection? I find this due process argument to be suspect. What would we have learned from these parents at a parents' meeting other than hearing their own uninformed prejudices? Notwithstanding this, I would have set a meeting to allow these parents to vent before making the decision, and letting the anti-trans parents pull their kids out of the school if they wished. I did, though, find it amusing how, after the policy was enacted, over time, the students simply ignored the directive such that the boys went to the formerly boys' restrooms and the girls went to the girls' restrooms. What is not stated in the article is whether there was any improvement in the treatment of transgender students along the way, as I can bet there was.
Packer builds his "liberal-who-was-mugged" argument from a poll which showed how most Americans believe "political correctness" is a "problem." Not once does Packer wonder if this is simply a reflection of corporate media propaganda. Not once does Packer wonder, Well, if it is problem, why aren't political candidates talking about it in terms of public policy? Does anyone really believe "political correctness" is more of a problem than student and medical debt, more of a problem than raising the minimum wage, more important than climate change? Simply saying "political correctness" is a "problem" tells us very little. I am a politically incorrect guy in some ways, but I also find those who are obsessed about political correctness tend to be either racist or sexist and feel threatened by the very idea of pluralism. Unfortunately, for Packer, the poll and his reaction to what he is seeing in his children's schools plays into his own worldview, which is to not directly question the political-economy that is the foundation of our society and how our society's political-economy got us here.
It remains telling to me how people like Packer and others, so disastrously wrong about things like the Iraq War, still have their perch in corporate media. I really do think George Packer is a brilliant mind with strong comprehension skills, particularly based upon his wide reading, his family background, which gives him a deeper perspective of American society than many other Americans, and his particularly insightful reading of historians such as Lasch and Hofstadter. Packer is clearly superior to Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, Wolf Blitzer, and the like. However, I find Packer's judgment in this century to be no better than these mandarins and, therefore, terribly lacking. Packer could have been an adult in the room amongst these overrated pundits. For the life of me, I cannot understand how Packer gets to those conventional and elite establishment judgments, unless Packer is that concerned with the opinions of those he may meet at a NYC or DC cocktail party. I know I would be a skunk in those rooms and, admittedly, I have been a skunk on too many occasions going back to the late 1980s, when I started talking in elite Orange County, California political circles about the NAFTA the Reagan and then Bush administrations were negotiating, how we were beggaring our industrial cities in the Mid-West and South, and how the Democratic Party was consciously stepping away from its New Deal roots. I then went against the OC Democratic Party elite by pushing for the Reform Party when it formed, seeing the working class potential behind Perot's proper anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and then moving to the Green Party when Nader was working in it and Perot's party disintegrated into xenophobia and racism when Pat Buchanan came in. It is probably just as well I am barred from what George Carlin called The Club to which you and I are not invited. It is significant how Carlin's bit starts out with him saying how the education system is designed to make people just smart enough to follow orders, but not to question the system. As I contemplate Packer's article, I see how reluctantly he pushes himself to fit into the class based system, and how his reaction to the private school and public school systems are perhaps related to Packer's continued poor judgments and nostrums. His desire to be a player may explain why he selfishly put his children into a difficult school environment and why he never moves beyond acting like a liberal questioning his liberalism because he has been mugged, this time through a dysfunctional inner city public school system. I see this, too, when Packer, earlier this year, tried to float the hapless Sherrod Brown for president. It is clear Packer thinks Bernie Sanders has no business running for president and that Packer has been looking for somebody--anybody--to speak to white working class issues who is not a racist, despite Sanders staring him in the face. I can see Packer saying to himself, "I just can't imagine facing my friends if I was a Sanders supporter."
As I say, Packer's The Blood of the Liberals is a deeply perceptive and insightful book, which I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. However, what I cannot recommend is Packer's insights and analyses since the publication of that book at the dawn of this new century and millennium.
