Now, my friend Graham and I have been arguing ever since grade school — in fact our ongoing "rock vs. magnet" debate, predicated on an object that neither of us has seen for a decade, is the stuff of legend — so disagreement is nothing new. We're both rational people and there's a lot of common ground that goes unmentioned. Though we rarely seem to convince each other, it's a rare argument that doesn't end amicably.

Lately — ever since he posted on "The importance of being partisan" — it seems like I've been disagreeing with Graham more than usual. It's quite refreshing, actually, to have so many good arguments on IM.

He plays the spirited partisan and I try to moderate. Just like old times.

Graham's latest post, provoked by some needling by a Hamlinite named Justin, demonstrates both his skills as a rhetorician and his increasing (and for a moderate like myself, worrying) idealism and liberalism. A good fisking is in order.

(I don't mean "liberal" in a perjorative sense, by the by. It may be a dirty word in the rest of the Midwest, but I'm Minnesotan. We had Wellstone.)

Graham's post begins with a trick I just learned about in Writing Biography: the block quote. Did you know that most people don't actually read block quotes? We tend to skim them and accept the writer's analysis of what the quote is saying, which is great for the writer. Justin's point in the first quote is that Hamline graduates are hypocrites, and his main point in the second quote is that the three factors he mentions (public school teaching, scholarship-funded travel, envy of more financially successful conservatives) make people remain liberal after college.

I'm not saying Justin is right, just that Graham ignores those contentions at this point in his post, focusing instead on attacks peripheral to the argument. While the criticism in Justin's post applies to Graham, it clearly applies to others as well: my friend makes it personal to get our sympathy and justify his response. So we find him defending the merits of his Fulbright and saying nothing about whether it has let him remain liberal.

The next paragraph contains a textbook example of what some rhetoricians call "warrant" — a fancy word for a buried assumption that makes a connection seem logical. Graham writes:

Well, lest we get into a flamewar between pretentiousblowhard.org and livejournal, I'd just like to point out some foolishness in his post regarding liberals in the academic world.

The axiomatic warrant here (if Graham's "lest" isn't merely ironic or disingenuous) is something like this:

If I point out foolishness in Justin's post, then we will not get into a flamewar.

That's the funny thing about warrants. Sometimes they're hidden because writing them out would destroy the argument they support. Nothing about Graham's post will prevent a flamewar. Quite to the contrary, I suspect.

On to the meat of Graham's argument. I'm beginning to understand why I've never done anything like this before.

1) Are college campuses liberal because they're separated from the real world? Or because higher education draws people who take "a more complex, measured view of reality," what amounts to a "liberals are just smarter" explanation? Graham supports the latter claim, and I doubt that many in his audience would disagree.

Personally I don't think Graham's politically diametric outlook is complex or measured, but college students in general do seem more receptive to a wider spectrum of ideas, left-shifted though it may be. You'd be hard-pressed to find a group of people who take thinkers like Marx, Freud, or Peter Singer as seriously as we do. A lot of that does have something to do with our separation from the real world: we're placed in an environment where it behooves us to be receptive to a wide variety of new ideas. In a sense both Graham and Justin are right.

Take a few steps back, however, and you'll see that Graham has created a false dichotomy. Aren't there other reasons why college students would be more liberal? Some credit needs to go to the generally liberal character of most college professors, a phenomenon Peter Levine analyzes here. Another explanation is attitude amplification among likeminded individuals, which could exaggerate college liberalism. I'm taking my very first sociology class right now, but I'm sure there are still more options.

(And before anyone pats himself on the back for choosing all the liberal/wisest positions on political issues, a study by Paul Goren at ASU, which I read about in a New York Times Magazine article last year, found that voters typically formed their party affiliations before they knew what issues their party stands for. Why some people switch is more complicated.)

1a) As part of his contention that liberals at college campuses take a more complex, measured view of reality, Graham posits a conservative approach to sociology. As usual at pb.org, Graham can count on the sympathy of most of his audience and abandons intellectual honesty in favor of a crude, sarcastic caricature of conservatism.

Apparently all conservatives think that "personal responsibility" is the only thing sociologists need to worry about. However, while many conservatives do believe that "poor people are poor because they're lazy and need to work harder," traditionally conservative fields of study like economics have been brought to bear on sociological issues, most recently in the best-selling book Freakonomics. One of my ongoing arguments with Graham recently has been over using revealed preference to explain human decision-making; like Carry Out at Lawrence he's uncomfortable with economic measurements that show us putting a price on things like rainforests, life, and dignity.

1b) Graham goes on to claim that some conservative students hold this simplistic "personal responsibility über alles" view, and they shouldn't complain when a professor contradicts them. Such students probably exist, and I really have no objections to this scenario. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, etc.

I suspect that Graham believes conservative students have more trouble growing up, learning, and rejecting black-and-white conceptions of society than liberal students, who either a) have grown up already (back to the "liberals are smarter" contention) or b) have an easier time accepting the teachings of the liberal professors who predominate in certain disciplines. Obviously Graham is generalizing without evidence, but I don't necessarily disagree with b). At least one study has shown that conservatives students have it easier in conservative disciplines.

2) Graham then turns to Justin's argument that, except in the situations noted in the second block quote, graduates "either have to a) go back to suckle on the teat of malto-milky academia to remain truly liberal or b) sell out." Note that Graham doesn't mention the exceptions from the second block quote, choosing instead to oversimplify the issue. Even with the exceptions, I don't disagree with Graham, but the Justin we get here has a bit of straw, if you get my drift.

2a) In response to this claim of Justin's, Graham observes that, lacking a trust fund or comparable means of support, most "college students do feel the pressure of the pocket book" and yet "still feel 'charitable' and believe in a world that can be made better by progressive cooperative action."

Who's he talking about? I agree that many students feel economic pressures while in college, and many of my Hamlinite friends dealt with those pressures without giving in to The Man. But do you see the way he made all the struggling college students liberal?

I'll go tell my old paleo-conservative roommate to stop worrying about those student loans, right now. Presumably he's got a trust fund he doesn't know about.

Perhaps Graham didn't mean to generalize, didn't realize he was ignoring the struggling conservative (and moderate: I know at least one wishy-washy moderate who's tens of thousands of dollars in debt) students. Rhetorically, though, he's now in the excellent position of speaking for all the poor students, now presumably liberal.

2b) Now we're talking about the liberal students outside of college. There's some fine (if vague) rhetoric about many of the liberal students feeling that way until the day they die. Graham presents no figures about liberal attitudes over that time period, and I certainly have no such figures with which to refute him. But we both know that "many," like "arguably," is a journalistic weasel word that's very difficult to prove wrong. It certainly sounds nice.

Here's another passage with a nasty assumption:

And yes, many, till the day we die (even not having had sucked on academia's teat the whole time). Why is that? Because we aren't just looking at the bottom line.

The warrant?

If we don't just look at the bottom line, we are liberal.

This is an example of what I've described as Graham's increasing idealism: his equation of an economically-oriented view of the world with conservatism (you don't have to be an old-fashioned Marxist to think liberalism is compatible with economics) and his equation of that same economically-oriented view with selfishness (the Copenhagen Consensus is a good counterexample).

His juxtaposition of Justin's plastic fantastic rock 'n' roll lifestyle with that of the fair-minded liberals who "want a better world and a better country" — in Graham's black-and-white world there are few, if any conservatives who want such a thing — poses a false dilemma between utopian idealism and being a selfish jerk. Liberals stay liberal because they're better people.

2c) But some liberals end up apparently "selling out," and it's them Graham turns to now. These students have debts to pay off and saving the world doesn't tend to pay well.

i. He opines that students in traditionally liberal majors aren't obligated to "walk a narrow path of self-righteous charity work," which seems like a nonsequitar. I think Graham means that they can work for money (in Corporate America?) without soiling themselves morally. I certainly agree with this, but I don't know if it's justified by anything else in the post. Does this counter Justin's claim (blockquote one) that liberals are hypocrites? Wasn't a problem with conservatives that they didn't feel charitable obligations?

ii. The next claim, that while they might like to walk that narrow path, they can't afford to, is more palatable. Here he's not talking about a lack of obligation, he's talking about feasibility. They're just doing what they need to to survive and get out of debt.

Graham points out that both these claims (the inexplicable one and the appeal to necessity) add a complexity to his argument that was lacking in the dichotomy he attributes to Justin. Again, remember that Graham made that dichotomy by ignoring some of the complexity in Justin's argument. Another straw man defeated.

3) The end of the post contains a few proposals of Graham's for getting rid of these financial burdens, and since whatever disagreements I have with those proposals have more to do with my libertarian leanings than with a fault in Graham's last-registered-Democrat logic, I'll skip them here.

The last paragraph, with its caricatures of both factions, is a rhetorical flourish, and a rather nicely done one, reminding people of the complexity and nuance of our nation's partisan divide.