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Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror

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nota bene

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Whether you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent, I think that if you're a fair-minded and reasonable person, you may find what Paglia has to say provocative and worth discussion. At least I hope so. She certainly lives up to her self-description of "dissident feminist." Paglia is her characteristically blunt self about transgenderism and the other topics summarized in the article, but these are topics for another thread. Here she offers a cautionary analysis that makes sense to me.

After reminding her interview that she is a registered Democrat who supported Sanders in the primary and voted for Stein in the election, Paglia explains what Democrats don't seem to understand. Here is one of her observations:

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Paglia then talks about how nobody seems to have been listening, as "fixated" as the media was on the Comey testimony, to Trump's speech at the Department of Transportation, and she links and also provides the text of that speech, observing that middle-class journalists pay no attention to laborers unless they can be "shoehorned into victim status." And she states that if ordinary-Joe workers think and vote independently of what their journo "liberal overlords" think, they're branded as pariahs and rubes. Paglia warns that if Democrats hope to regain the White House, they need to abandon the "rabid rhetoric" and focus on the pragmatic reality that ordinary-Joes understand.

Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror | The Weekly Standard!
 
nota bene said:
Whether you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent, I think that if you're a fair-minded and reasonable person, you may find what Paglia has to say provocative and worth discussion. At least I hope so. She certainly lives up to her self-description of "dissident feminist." Paglia is her characteristically blunt self about transgenderism and the other topics summarized in the article, but these are topics for another thread. Here she offers a cautionary analysis that makes sense to me.

After reminding her interview that she is a registered Democrat who supported Sanders in the primary and voted for Stein in the election, Paglia explains what Democrats don't seem to understand. Here is one of her observations:

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Paglia then talks about how nobody seems to have been listening, as "fixated" as the media was on the Comey testimony, to Trump's speech at the Department of Transportation, and she links and also provides the text of that speech, observing that middle-class journalists pay no attention to laborers unless they can be "shoehorned into victim status." And she states that if ordinary-Joe workers think and vote independently of what their journo "liberal overlords" think, they're branded as pariahs and rubes. Paglia warns that if Democrats hope to regain the White House, they need to abandon the "rabid rhetoric" and focus on the pragmatic reality that ordinary-Joes understand.

Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror | The Weekly Standard!
Click to expand...

One of the reactions that you'll get to this -- though maybe not here, now, as I'm calling attention to it early -- is to attack the Weekly Standard as a right-wing rag. And thus, it shouldn't be paid attention to, because anything in it must be rabid right-wing talking points. Else, why would the Weekly Standard run it?

Of course, what Paglia is saying here isn't right-wing. It's critical of elite Democrats, but that's not the same thing as being right-wing. She presents straightforward, reasonable ideas that any fair-minded thinker, whether they lean right or left, should find some value in. In fact, what she says is so straightforward as to be almost mundane.

Why it only appears in conservative publications like the Weekly Standards says a lot more about an epistemological closure of the left than it does about that the ideas Paglia expresses. The left has largely adopted rigid, narrow, fiercely-enforced lanes of thought from which straying is punished. This attacks that very closure, and thus, no "respectable" left-wing publication -- and the "mainstream" publications which want to be respected by those left-wing ones -- will touch this. They won't because they're either deep into that closure, or they don't want to risk the punishment.

The only outlets which WILL are mostly the conservative publications. And so it feeds into that epistemological closure: no one will publish this except for the right wing, therefore it must be right-wing, therefore it must be attacked, or at least ignored. It's nice, convenient, entirely closed-minded circle.
 
Well, that's true. Killing the messenger never seems to go out of fashion, does it? I'm anticipating attacks on Paglia herself because a "real" Democrat wouldn't say what she does. I actually spent decades loathing Paglia, with whom I was familiar for non-politican reasons, but in the last ten years, I've rather "buried the hatchet" with her because while we still often disagree, she's pretty fearless about speaking her truth and being fair. For example, Paglia is ardently pro-choice but has publicly states that she believes the feminist tent is big enough to include those who are pro-life. Heresy! She must not be a "real" feminist! ;)
 
nota bene said:
Well, that's true. Killing the messenger never seems to go out of fashion, does it? I'm anticipating attacks on Paglia herself because a "real" Democrat wouldn't say what she does. I actually spent decades loathing Paglia, with whom I was familiar for non-politican reasons, but in the last ten years, I've rather "buried the hatchet" with her because while we still often disagree, she's pretty fearless about speaking her truth and being fair. For example, Paglia is ardently pro-choice but has publicly states that she believes the feminist tent is big enough to include those who are pro-life. Heresy! She must not be a "real" feminist! ;)
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's the kind of thing.
 
nota bene said:
Well, that's true. Killing the messenger never seems to go out of fashion, does it? I'm anticipating attacks on Paglia herself because a "real" Democrat wouldn't say what she does. I actually spent decades loathing Paglia, with whom I was familiar for non-politican reasons, but in the last ten years, I've rather "buried the hatchet" with her because while we still often disagree, she's pretty fearless about speaking her truth and being fair. For example, Paglia is ardently pro-choice but has publicly states that she believes the feminist tent is big enough to include those who are pro-life. Heresy! She must not be a "real" feminist! ;)
Click to expand...

I don't give a **** if Camille Paglia is a "real" Democrat, feminist, or whatever she claims to be. She's a dunce. Paglia will take any stance that will offer her kudos from the "other side" for being so "brave." She hasn't done dick-all to advance any feminist or liberal cause in years. She has basically become a professional concern troll.
 
Best part for me:

Liberalism of the 1950s and '60s exalted civil liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech. "Question authority" was our generational rubric when I was in college. But today's liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It's all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.
Click to expand...

Oh how far we have fallen.
 
Kobie said:
I don't give a **** if Camille Paglia is a "real" Democrat, feminist, or whatever she claims to be. She's a dunce. Paglia will take any stance that will offer her kudos from the "other side" for being so "brave." She hasn't done dick-all to advance any feminist or liberal cause in years. She has basically become a professional concern troll.
Click to expand...

Astute observer and public intellectual, both of which have become very rare and valued by the wise.

There are more than enough people pushing agenda's anyways, way too many actually.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Astute observer and public intellectual, both of which have become very rare and valued by the wise.

There are more than enough people pushing agenda's anyways, way too many actually.
Click to expand...

You think Pags isn't pushing an agenda?
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Best part for me:



Oh how far we have fallen.
Click to expand...

Oh, **** her. "Defining that group in permanent victim terms"? Sounds like Trump supporters, or Trump himself, to me.
 
Kobie said:
You think Pags isn't pushing an agenda?
Click to expand...

I am not getting into that...I am saying that she does not need to be pushing any agenda at all to be great, so dont expect to get anywhere with " She is not pushing some particular agendas, so therefor she sucks".
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I am not getting into that...I am saying that she does not need to be pushing any agenda at all to be great, so dont expect to get anywhere with " She is not pushing some particular agendas, so therefor she sucks".
Click to expand...

What.
 
Kobie said:
Oh, **** her. "Defining that group in permanent victim terms"? Sounds like Trump supporters, or Trump himself, to me.
Click to expand...

True/Not True is the test Kobie.
 
nota bene said:
Whether you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent, I think that if you're a fair-minded and reasonable person, you may find what Paglia has to say provocative and worth discussion. At least I hope so. She certainly lives up to her self-description of "dissident feminist." Paglia is her characteristically blunt self about transgenderism and the other topics summarized in the article, but these are topics for another thread. Here she offers a cautionary analysis that makes sense to me.

After reminding her interview that she is a registered Democrat who supported Sanders in the primary and voted for Stein in the election, Paglia explains what Democrats don't seem to understand. Here is one of her observations:

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Paglia then talks about how nobody seems to have been listening, as "fixated" as the media was on the Comey testimony, to Trump's speech at the Department of Transportation, and she links and also provides the text of that speech, observing that middle-class journalists pay no attention to laborers unless they can be "shoehorned into victim status." And she states that if ordinary-Joe workers think and vote independently of what their journo "liberal overlords" think, they're branded as pariahs and rubes. Paglia warns that if Democrats hope to regain the White House, they need to abandon the "rabid rhetoric" and focus on the pragmatic reality that ordinary-Joes understand.

Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror | The Weekly Standard!
Click to expand...

Camille Paglia is my favorite liberal of all times, or at least she is right up there at the top along with William Raspberry and a very few others. I so respect her writing, her thought processes, and her intellectual honesty that I've never ever questioned. No, I don't always agree with her, but she is somebody I would be so proud to call my friend. And she was spot on with this essay.
 
Harshaw said:
One of the reactions that you'll get to this -- though maybe not here, now, as I'm calling attention to it early -- is to attack the Weekly Standard as a right-wing rag. And thus, it shouldn't be paid attention to, because anything in it must be rabid right-wing talking points. Else, why would the Weekly Standard run it?

Of course, what Paglia is saying here isn't right-wing. It's critical of elite Democrats, but that's not the same thing as being right-wing. She presents straightforward, reasonable ideas that any fair-minded thinker, whether they lean right or left, should find some value in. In fact, what she says is so straightforward as to be almost mundane.

Why it only appears in conservative publications like the Weekly Standards says a lot more about an epistemological closure of the left than it does about that the ideas Paglia expresses. The left has largely adopted rigid, narrow, fiercely-enforced lanes of thought from which straying is punished. This attacks that very closure, and thus, no "respectable" left-wing publication -- and the "mainstream" publications which want to be respected by those left-wing ones -- will touch this. They won't because they're either deep into that closure, or they don't want to risk the punishment.

The only outlets which WILL are mostly the conservative publications. And so it feeds into that epistemological closure: no one will publish this except for the right wing, therefore it must be right-wing, therefore it must be attacked, or at least ignored. It's nice, convenient, entirely closed-minded circle.
Click to expand...

Paglia is a lifelong Democrat and Bernie Sanders supporter and has never claimed to be anything else.
 
AlbqOwl said:
Camille Paglia is my favorite liberal of all times
Click to expand...

Yeah, because she tries to tell liberals how they're supposed to act, lest they upset conservatives. She a concern troll.

Camille Paglia is useless to any liberal cause.
 
Kobie said:
Yeah, because she tries to tell liberals how they're supposed to act, lest they upset conservatives. She a concern troll.

Camille Paglia is useless to any liberal cause.
Click to expand...

I don't think she cares a whit about upsetting conservatives or anybody else.

Your focus on utility, beyond being surprisingly narrow, is very telling.
 
nota bene said:
Whether you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent, I think that if you're a fair-minded and reasonable person, you may find what Paglia has to say provocative and worth discussion. At least I hope so. She certainly lives up to her self-description of "dissident feminist." Paglia is her characteristically blunt self about transgenderism and the other topics summarized in the article, but these are topics for another thread. Here she offers a cautionary analysis that makes sense to me.

After reminding her interview that she is a registered Democrat who supported Sanders in the primary and voted for Stein in the election, Paglia explains what Democrats don't seem to understand. Here is one of her observations:

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Paglia then talks about how nobody seems to have been listening, as "fixated" as the media was on the Comey testimony, to Trump's speech at the Department of Transportation, and she links and also provides the text of that speech, observing that middle-class journalists pay no attention to laborers unless they can be "shoehorned into victim status." And she states that if ordinary-Joe workers think and vote independently of what their journo "liberal overlords" think, they're branded as pariahs and rubes. Paglia warns that if Democrats hope to regain the White House, they need to abandon the "rabid rhetoric" and focus on the pragmatic reality that ordinary-Joes understand.

Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror | The Weekly Standard!
Click to expand...

If it was only about Trump's construction site like language, I'd have no problems with him. I think Camille is missing a big part of the dissatisfaction the Left has with Trump.

But, she certainly is not wrong about the D needing to reconnect with the average Joe. I'm not even sure they can anymore. Unlike CP, I do not only blame the D for that though.
 
Kobie said:
Yeah, because she tries to tell liberals how they're supposed to act, lest they upset conservatives. She a concern troll.

Camille Paglia is useless to any liberal cause.
Click to expand...

Her schtick is to be verbose, first and foremost. And, her angle is to pick apart the "Academic Left."
 
nota bene said:
I don't think she cares a whit about upsetting conservatives or anybody else.

Your focus on utility, beyond being surprisingly narrow, is very telling.
Click to expand...

Far out.
 
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