Not quite the way to do it

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber recommends the new blog Left2Right, in which a bunch of Really Smart PeopleTMon the left are going to try to “speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right.” Fair enough. And so Gerald Dworkin, a philosopher at UC-Davis, makes a decent stab at it. I think he is not altogether on the correct track, but I’ll talk. And David Velleman asks some decent questions about why talking may be hard in the first place. The blog has potential, and could join the best on offer from the left (Mark Kleiman, Norm Geras, Kevin Drum, Crooked Timber).

But then Really Smart PersonTM Kwame Anthony Appiah tosses this out.

Some of those right-wing evangelicals apparently care whether or not we have a good opinion of them. (If they didn’t, the resentment they display toward the “liberal media,” would make no sense.) Whereas I know no one among the liberal media elite or among liberal academics who cares very much that many right-wing evangelicals have contempt for us. We care how they vote–for instrumental reasons; we may even care that they are mistaken, for their sakes; but we don’t feel diminished by their contempt. It doesn’t threaten our self-respect. (The situation is analogous to the one that obtains with respect to social respect in class and status based hierarchies: a peasant can spit when milord walks by, but it won’t damage his lordship’s self esteem. But when milord brings his handkerchief to his nose as the peasant approaches, the peasant is stung.)
Part of the truth here, I think, is that American anti-intellectualism contains a seam of intellectual insecurity. It’s not that the no-nothings are sure we’re wrong, it’s that they’re afraid we’ll win the argument, because we’re better at arguing. They feel about us the way many Greeks appear to have felt about the Sophists: sure they won the argument but that was not always because they were right. But they’re also not sure that we’re wrong. The discussion about what we ought to be doing about the cultural divide seems sometimes to presuppose that they’d want to talk to us if we showed up respectfully and offered, as we now say, to “dialogue.” But they don’t want to talk to us, a lot of them. And this, I think, is part of why.

Now, unlike Appiah, I am not the Laurence Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, so I am not an official Really Smart PersonTM. But even I can figure out that people on the right are not going to waste time listening with that approach. Even I can figure out that maybe right wing evangelicals object, not that the liberal media does not like them, but that the liberal media routinely misrepresents them in the eyes of more normal people. And even I can figure out that maybe right wing evangelicals don’t want to talk to Appiah, not because he might win the argument, but because he comes across as an arrogant jackass.
UPDATE: A reader, who appears to be in the military and therefore is not only not an official Really Smart PersonTM but in Appiah’s worldview probably not smart enough to tie his own shoes, nevertheless points out that a Really Smart PersonTM proclaiming how much smarter he is than all them there dumb evangelicals ought not to write “no-nothings” when he means “know-nothings”. Pot and kettle and all that.