A Matter of Degree

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, December 17, 2020

 

A  riddle: A father and his son are in a pedagogical accident. The father fails to retain the material and is declared learning-disabled on the spot. The son is rushed to an early-intervention center, where a doctor sees him and says: “I cannot assess this boy’s reading comprehension, for he is my son.”

 

Who is the doctor (of education)?

 

Why it’s the boy’s mother, you bigot! And as I type, social media are entering day four of an outrage cycle over an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that first-lady-to-be Jill Biden’s Ed.D. (which I am told you can treat with pills purchased over the Inter­net) doesn’t rate the “Dr.” honorific on which she and her people insist.

 

Every part-time pundit, and most everyone with a newspaper subscription during the Obama years, has noticed the “Dr. Jill Biden” thing. It sticks out, both because public life is full of people with academic doctorates who don’t make similar demands (paging Dr. Gingrich!) and because the press’s editorial practice in the matter is wildly inconsistent. I particularly remember noticing as far back as 2011 or 2012 a spate of “Mr. Carsons” in New York Times articles about the current HUD secretary and longtime brain slicer. Of course, the Times has an editorial policy on appellations that ostensibly explains this apparent slight, but a quick search of their website reveals it is applied willy-nilly, and not to good Doctor Jilly.

 

But all that said, this just isn’t that big a deal one way or the other. So why did 10,000 smartphones leap from their scabbards to avenge even an op-ed that threatened her with insult? Why did dozens of functionaries in the center-left ruling class, up to and including Hillary Clinton and the Washington Post, savage the Journal for its impudence, and Merriam freaking Webster weigh in with a reminder that “doctor” comes from the Latin for “teacher”?

 

I think it so rankled this set because entire political ontologies are held together by their ability to force you to say the right things about them. It’s not just that knowing the shibboleths marks you as a member of the in-group. It’s that the very truth of their central propositions consists in and turns on getting you to acknowledge them, repeatedly, in public. And so meritocrats on the left whose access to the levers of power depends on the incantation of their credentials freaked out when someone deadnamed Dr. Biden as a mere baccalaureate. Masters and Mistresses of the Fine Arts and Public Policies feared that they would be next. Impostor syndrome is an affliction of the accredited. Nobody worries he’s a phony landscaper.

 

But the way in which the perceived value and righteousness of an individual or a group is, in a key sense, a conspiracy extends beyond the well-heeled Left. Anyone who recalls the many tables of the high-school cafeteria, and the retrospectively ridiculous clothing and hairdos that marked the upper echelons thereof, understands intuitively that what counts as hip is a conspiracy among the hipsters. And so it’s the kids with the killer instinct to enforce the code both within their group and outside it who end up with the cultural power. Power over those who care, anyway. The real nerds, geeks, dweebs, and spazzes operate on a different frequency and are largely indifferent to the pecking order even if they occasionally suffer under it. And, of course, grown men and women look back on all the empty intrigue as the absurd and childish thing it was.

 

“Stop the Steal” seems to work a lot like this. A conspiracy about conspiracy theories, the in-group forces those who seek its approval to say increasingly ridiculous things, and not say increasingly obvious things, in public while the rest of us look on in bewilderment.

 

The punishment for apostasy is banishment, as Brian Kemp, Doug Ducey, and others are finding out.

 

Of course, in our epoch it’s the progressives who have raised banishment to the level of an art form. And the rules aren’t always obvious. Take for instance the case of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who in recent weeks has been the victim — and there is really no other word for it — of an unpersoning campaign that would make a Bolshevik blush. It started with whispers, and then a full-fledged hit piece from The New Yorker’s awful Jane Mayer, about Feinstein’s political sins and alleged senility, aimed at coercing her to step down from chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee. Quick on Mayer’s heels, although apparently for only vaguely related transgressions, a committee of functionaries in San Francisco recommended renaming Dianne Feinstein Elementary School.

 

Near as I can tell, the senator’s greatest crimes were hugging Lindsey Graham at the end of the Barrett hearings and refusing to intone the Democrats’ now moot refrains about ending the filibuster and packing the Court.

 

Feinstein, who was the first woman mayor of San Francisco, and with Barbara Boxer one of the first women senators from California, has a biography similar to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, and arguably more impressive from a slay-queen perspective. Her voting record in the Senate is robustly liberal, and whatever unwoke skeletons she has in her closet are surely matched by Ginsburg’s notorious (as it were) all-white clerking corps and repeated public acknowledgment that Roe is trash jurisprudence. And yet Ginsburg is a deity, and Feinstein a heretic. Why?

 

Maybe it’s because she never got her law degree.