Shots In The Dark

Conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield stands up for Larry Summers in this Weekly Standard piece, in which he proves that intelligence in scholarship and wisdom in personal politics do not always go hand in hand.

Mansfield writes: "Summers is easily the most outstanding of the major university presidents now on the scene--the most intelligent, the most energetic, as well as the most prominent. So, alarmed at his abilities and intentions, the Harvard faculty decided it would be a good idea to humiliate him."

You see this technique so often in conservative punditry, I'm amazed that it seems to work, and yet it does. (Look at the success of Fox News.) A simple assertion that the side one supports is unquestionably right, followed by a wild caricature of the opposition's arguments. Do they teach this stuff at conservative summer camp?

Summers may have been humiliated, but this result was hardly the intention of his faculty critics, who were not, in any event, motivated by "alarm at his abilities and intentions." They are fighting about what kind of a place Harvard is to be, and what kind of a man--yes, so far, always a man—will lead it. Agree or disagree, isn't this a conversation worth describing with some pretense of fairness?

But no. Mansfield goes on to describe Summers' critics as "feminist women and their male consorts on the left." (For Mansfield, who has recently become interested in the subject of "manliness,"this means Alan Alda-esque wimps and gays.)

That's about half the faculty, he says. The other half are "moderate liberals who are afraid of the feminists rather than with them."

Huh. Is that how Mansfield would describe the forty-plus member department of economics, where there are two tenured women? The equally large department of mathematics,which has no tenured women? Or his own 43-person department, which by my count is about 75% male?

Mansfield goes on to write that Summers' "accusers were relentless and, as always with feminists, humorless."

This is another neo-con technique: to deliver some incredibly insulting remark and then, when people get pissed about it, respond, "You liberals just can't take a joke."

That Harvey Mansfield is at Harvard is wonderful. It's vital to have a range of political opinions there. I interviewed Professor Mansfield for Harvard Rules—on the record—and thought him gentlemanly, courteous, thoughtful, and quite a nice guy.

But this mode of argument—unfounded assertions, sweeping ad hominem generalizations, denial of competing realities—is beneath a Harvard professor. Can you imagine what conservatives would say if a liberal spoke like this?