{"id":918,"date":"2008-10-15T11:39:46","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T16:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?p=918"},"modified":"2008-10-30T21:16:56","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T02:16:56","slug":"ill-winds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/ill-winds\/","title":{"rendered":"ill winds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben smith picked up this snippet today from First Read<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A polarized electorate:<\/b> NBC\/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a hard time accepting him as president, while a similar number of Obama voters (36%) say the same thing of McCain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Smith’s comment<\/a> is “Whoever wins, doesn’t look like we’re in for a new era of good will.”<\/p>\n

And speaking of ill will, I’ve been trying to sort out Leon Wieseltier’s antipathy for Louis Menand, most recently displayed in the current New Republic<\/i>. Wieseltier takes Menand to task for several crimes against right thought (and Lionel Trilling) in this week’s column. Here’s a little<\/a> of it:<\/p>\n

what really rattles Menand is Trilling’s magnitude. In his conception of the intellectual life, Trilling was big. Menand is the professor of littleness. He is a man in flight from the seriousness of his own vocation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It turns out that Wieseltier is using Menand’s recent New Yorker<\/i> essay on Trilling<\/a> as a reason for continuing an attack on Menand that goes back some years, at least to 2003 when Wieseltier accused Menand of impure thinking about George Orwell. Here’s a site<\/a> that reviews some of this, though a few links are out of date.<\/p>\n

So — the culture wars aren’t over. Whatever change we’re engaged in runs deep and generates powerful antipathies. I guess I’ve written a bit about that already, but it’s beginning to seem to me (even though there’s no longer a real academic debate about it) that vituperation like Wieseltier’s against a fellow humanist is maybe an index of something deeper than disagreement. I’m going to think about this and write some more after a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben smith picked up this snippet today from First Read: A polarized electorate: NBC\/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,4],"tags":[70,69,67,68,22],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-politics","tag-george-orwell","tag-leon-wieseltier","tag-lionel-trilling","tag-louis-menand","tag-presidential-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":978,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions\/978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}