COLUMN: Judith Rodin's intellectual politics

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99Judy wants to have a chat with you. Well, OK, not with you specifically. Actually, what she has in mind is something much loftier than shooting the breeze. She wants to have a "discourse" with you, a "dialogue" that will move beyond the "polarization" of right and left, a thoughtful "conversation" that will transcend the simplistic "entertainments" that now pass for politics. The PNC is a Who's Who of the liberal intelligentsia, dedicated to analyzing not politics per se, but the "health" of political debate. Rodin has assembled a crack team of almost 50 political players. These include academics, professional Democrats such as Bill Bradley, Clinton flack John Podesta and campaign sugar-daddy Teresa Heinz; and local notables, including professors Drew Faust, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Martin Seligman. What all have in common, according to PNC Executive Director Stephen Steinberg, is that they are all "experts on issues of public discourse and the democratic process." Monday evening at the White Dog Cafe, Rodin officially "introduced" the PNC's work to the public. The White Dog soiree was really just a formality. But despite the PR gloss, the PNC has produced some real results since convening in 1996. As proof of this, read the transcripts of the PNC's speeches and discussions at its World Wide Web site. Amid the expected boilerplate and self-congratulation are some thought provoking discussions, like the debate between affirmative action advocate William Gray, director of the United Negro College Fund, and Ward Connerly, a businessperson and leader of California's fight against racial preferences in government and state universities. Rodin should be congratulated for this achievement. Still, the PNC ultimately promises more than it can deliver, both because the panel is not as ideologically diverse as it could have been and because, on some level, the structure of political debate is inextricable from politics itself. First, inclusivity. Republicans and conservatives are noticeably underrepresented, which is a problem in a forum that purports to discuss the consequences of America's culture wars. In response to this criticism, Steinberg told me, "If you have people with certain views who can't work with somebody with different views, you're not going to get anywhere." Yet this country does not lack for reasonable, intelligent conservatives. Where is former Senator Warren Rudman, former Education Secretaries Lynn Cheney and William Bennett, editor Irving Kristol or historian Gertrude Himmelfarb? How about Penn's vocal conservative historians, Walter McDougall and Alan Kors? The Commission seeks to engage "public-opinion makers," yet there is not a single representative from conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute or Stanford's Hoover Institution. Perhaps the most notable absence is Sheldon Hackney, a History professor and former University president. Several years ago, as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hackney spearheaded a "National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity." Not only did Rodin virtually copy Hackney's idea and then not invite him, she made pains to distance the PNC from her politically tainted predecessor. "I thought, 'There has to be a better way to offer and demonstrate moral leadership than by imitating a 600-pound elephant squashing or drowning out what behaviors or opinions it dislikes,'" she said at a PNC session. "First, we've got to learn to tolerate the intolerable. It is the antithesis to political correctness." I interviewed Hackney extensively early last semester. Rightly or wrongly, he still thinks "political correctness" is a red herring in public debate, and he has a thoughtful argument to back it up. Rodin, for personal and political reasons, does not want to hear it. Besides these flaws in membership, there is also a flaw in goals. The PNC cannot live up to its own expectations because of the impossibility of becoming completely non-partisan. At the White Dog, for example, Rodin praised Hillary Rodham Clinton for her role in the national health care debate in 1994. There are many political analysts, of course, who saw Hillary's closed-door strategy meetings as a secretive, heavy-handed perversion of public discourse. There are others who are equally critical of the GOP's manipulative ad blitz. I doubt whether a platonic panel devoted to "discourse analysis" can separate politics from process, but Judy's experts are giving it the old college try.