Maxim Matusevich has written an interesting piece about the political inclinations of Russian immigrants.
http://www.sensusnovus.ru/opinion/2010/10/31/1898.html
I can imagine that this strikes close to home and may not make for the most pleasant reading. But I'm curious what you think.
After we talk about this, I'd be more than happy to have a discussion along the lines of "why are the liberal arts so liberal?" In other words how to explain the overwhelming leftward tilt of American academia in general, and the humanities in particular. But first, what about this childhood illness of Russian immigrants? Is Maxim on to something?
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ReplyDeleteI am sorry, Nathan, but I cannot seriously discuss Maxim's piece. This article is simply beyond ridiculous, and I say this not because I feel offended by it. I do not associate myself with people he describes in his post, so it is not personal to me. It is just that this post represents the worse of what I despise about political writing - a collection of empty declarations not supported by any evidence. He is probably so full of himself that he believes that his proclamations are words of God: once he declares something true it automatically becomes true just by virtue of him saying so. You see, I am trained as a natural scientist, and I believe in something called scientific method. I understand that social sciences have there own methods, but there must be some standards even in social sciences. It looks like Maxim missed those classes where his professors taught him those standards.
ReplyDeleteI am not ready to talk about Israel because I do not have enough solid facts even to formulate a point of view, but as far as Russian immigration community in New York is concerned, he simply has no idea what he is talking about. I will provide only two solid facts, which invalidate the entire premise of his post and make his "arguments" not worthy of any serious discussion. 1. The only elected official with roots in Russian community (a State representative from a district, which includes Brighton Beach) was elected on the democratic party line. 2. During current election season, Davidzon radio, the most popular Russian radio station in New York, bent over itself to agitate for McMahon, a Democratic candidate in US Congress representing Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, whose campaign blamed his republican opponent for taking "Jewish" money (he lost, by the way, to my great relief). I think that these two examples say everything about Maxim's proficiency in the subject he writes about. I hope that in his scientific papers he makes more sense.
Actually, I am more interested in seeing your response to my comment in our previous thread, as I spent significant amount of time formulating it.
OK--fair enough. I can't say I'm surprised by your reaction. What you're saying as I understand it is that Maxim's whole premise is based on a factual error and that Russian immigrants in America are no more prone to harbor right wing sentiments than native born Americans of a similar socio-economic profile. Perhaps this is true, and there really is a colony of Russian liberals hiding out somewhere. But my experience (purely on an anecdotal basis, admittedly) coincides with Maxim's impression.
ReplyDeleteLocal politics are not necessarily indicative of these overall ideological tendencies. Few would dispute, for example, that Manhattan is as liberal a piece of territory as you can find in America. But yet New Yorkers happily voted for the Republicans, Guiliani and Bloomberg, as well as Ed Koch who is about as conservative as you can get and still call yourself a Democrat. In local government, people are interested in results and ideological matters often take a backseat.
So I guess what we need is for someone to actually study the question and come up with some real data (maybe it's already out there?). If Maxim and my impression is confirmed, then I think it's a legitimate exercise to ask how this can be explained.
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ReplyDeleteAs I said I am dealing with available facts. And the facts that I have tell me that all Maxim's rhetoric has no real value whatsoever. And by the way, these are not local elections that I am talking about. One guy sits in Albany while the other tried to get to Washington. There is a very serious difference between these examples and mayoral election in NYC.
ReplyDeleteI am ready to talk about it, once there is something more than anecdotal "personal expressions" to support the premise. And even in this case the level of argumentation should be by two orders of magnitude more scientific than naive and pathetic attempt at psychoanalysis undertaken by Maxim. Conservative friends that I have, all live outside of Russian ghetto, speak, read and write almost perfect English, more educated than Maxim. I also know people with similar personal qualities tilting to the left. Thus, once again, let's talk when there are some hard data. Otherwise, this is just an exercise in self-aggrandising.
OK. I'm willing to put this one the rest--it hasn't been one of our more productive threads. But I did want to add a few words in defense of Maxim who has received a generous helping of condemnation for his "non-scientific" approach, but not a lot of actual discussion of his ideas
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, context and genre need to be taken into consideration. A work that appears on a journalistic site under the heading "opinion" is not going to meet the same standards of evidence as a scientific paper published in a professional journal. But just because ideas aren't expressed in the language of science doesn't mean that they have no validity.
What Maxim's article has done, to put it in scholarly terms, is to pose a problem and suggest a research agenda. I see a piece like his as the start to a discussion, certainly not divine judgment from on high. It is, I grant you, polemical and as a polemic it aims to provoke a response--hopefully one which goes beyond name-calling and actually engages the premise.
Maxim begins, like a good scientist, with an observation of a natural phenomenon--a tendency toward right wing sentiments among Russian immigrants. Your response, Lyova, was to dispute the validity of the observation. Fair enough, but this kind of stops the conversation in its tracks. I'll grant that we don't have solid public opinion research to back up the initial observation, but if you approach the matter from a common sense perspective, I think you'll agree that this is not merely a figment of Maxim's imagination. Others have noted the same phenomenon. Here's a reference to an article in the Israeli press by an author who seems to have spend a great deal of time looking into this:
http://geopolitica.ru/Articles/670/
Plenty of other references can be found in various Russian language blogs and news pages. Putting aside tactical quibbles, anyone who has much exposure to the Russian language press and former Soviet citizens will agree that this phenomenon exists. Maybe it's not as universal as it might appear, but it's out there.
to be continued...
Once we accept the premise that Russian immigrants are disproportionally inclined toward right-wing views then we can try to arrive at an explanation. Maxim has put forth the hypothesis that this rightward tendency is related to the experience of growing up and receiving an education under the Soviet regime. I can see how this would be offensive to Russian immigrants who pride themselves on their absolute rejection of the Soviet heritage. But more dispassionate observers would probably agree that this is not an unreasonable hypothesis. This is how I would make the argument: First, people are shaped by the atmosphere in which they grow up and by the character of their educations--this is a truism that I don't think any reasonable person would dispute. Second, the Soviet system of education had very specific features that made it quite successful in some areas (technical and scientific skills, for example) and much less successful in others (i.e. the humanities). Thirdly the right-wing tendencies that we are discussing are manifested not only among immigrants in the US, but also in Israel, Europe and in Russia proper (not to mention the "near abroad"). Liberalism, I'm sure you will agree, has not exactly thrived on Russian soil since the fall of communism. All of these points it seems to me lend credence to Maxim's suggestion that there is a relationship between the illiberal tendencies manifested among Russian speakers both at home and abroad and the habits of mind cultivated by the Soviet experience.
ReplyDeleteI would, however, add a few caveats that Maxim may not have included in his piece. First of all, this is a trend, but it is not destiny. Not everyone who grew up and and received an education in the Soviet Union will show these traits. This is particularly true of Russians who receive their higher education abroad, but even those who arrived in America as fully formed adults can go against the prevailing trend. Russian-speaking liberals are few and far between in my experience, but they do exist.
Secondly, I would argue that Soviet background by itself is not enough to explain political attitudes and behavior within the immigrant community. There are other factors that need to be entered into the equation. I would also note, for example, the traditions of the Russian emigration, going all the way back to the first wave after 1917. Certainly passionate anti-communism was a dominant thread throughout and this tradition has continued to shape the character of the Russian language media. Finally, I think it is important to look at the ways in which immigrant groups interact with various native political and ideological strains within their new environments. What were seeing now is a good example of this. If there is an inherent predisposition toward right-wing sentiments among Russian immigrants, it is undoubtedly reinforced and focused by the American right-wing media--Fox News, most notably, as well as various right wing bloggers and radio personalities. In this respect, I don't entirely agree with Maxim that the problem is one of isolation within the Russian language media and community. Quite to the contrary, what I see is quite a dynamic process of interaction between the right-wing media and the Russian press. What we're dealing with is a broader problem facing American society as a whole--the tendency to surround ourselves in information cocoons that filter our opposing viewpoints and draw in ideas and opinions that reinforce our own. I hope this blog and other venues like it perform a service in helping at least on a small scale to penetrate these cocoons.
So that's my two cent's worth. I'm certainly not trying to provoke or offend by bringing up this issue and commenting. As I said, I'm more than happy to drop the topic, but I did want to give Maxim's article a little more substantive consideration.
Nathan, I do want to respond to it. First, from journalistic point of view, Maxim's article is a typical example of yellow journalism. It is not polemical, it is provocative in the worst possible way, and, as such, is not very inviting for discussion. The tonality of the piece is that of author's general superiority over poor backward Russian immigrants, whose refusal to accept all-powerful and the only truly correct liberal ideology is simply the result of their stupidity, luck of culture and education, closeness of their minds and simply bad character. Articles written like this are not intended to originate a discussion, they simply do not leave any room for an opponent to go in without loosing self respect. The only purpose of such papers can be to resolve author's own personal issues. May be he suffers from inferiority complex and compensates for it by lashing out at "Kiev and Moscow" engineers who are doing better them him financially. I do not know what his real motives were, but I am positive that it was not to start a substantive discussion.
ReplyDeleteI refused to discuss his article for several reasons. First, I do not believe that its premise is correct, because I do know Russian immigrants with very liberal, and even ultra-left views (not too many of the latter, though). I saw them among my colleagues, the scientists, among older generation of my friends' parents, but all this is not significant. What is important is that one cannot use a proposition based solely on some anecdotal evidences such as personal acquaintances or blogs as a foundation for a scientific hypothesis. I have much stricter standards. The only facts I know are the ones that I pointed out to in my Comment and they contradict the premise of the article. Of course, people vote for a variety of reasons, and newspapers support various candidates for their own financial gains, but these are the only solid statistical information available to me and I cannot discount it.
The second reason, why I did not want to discuss this article, was related to another aspect of its tone. It implied that having more conservative political views is somehow wrong and unnatural and needs to be explained away. I just do not see it this away, and I think that conservative views of Russian immigrants are no less natural than Maxim's progressive views. This brings me to another point actually made by Lena. Why does Maxim think that political inclinations of Russian immigrants are any different from other first generation immigrants? Did he gauge ideological inclinations of Italians of earlier immigration waves or Irish immigrants, or these days Chinese or even Latino immigrants? The latter do vote for democrats predominantly, but this is only because democrats bribe them with the promise of immigration reform. This single issue vote cannot be considered as an ideological indicator (unlike Russian votes, which do not have a single issue). How about a hypothesis like this: immigrants have conservative inclinations because they have to work real hard to move forward in their new country and they hate to see lazy people born here who are sitting and waiting for welfare checks and do not want to move their fingers to help themselves? Not placing Russian immigration in a more general context of immigrants' ideological inclination is a serious methodological error, which also makes any discussion of this article senseless.
A quick response (I hope--I'm spending much too much time on all of this). Your points are very well taken. I understand entirely the problem with deterministic arguments that box the 'other' into a rhetorical dead-end -- this is the way you are, because of who are, and you can never be otherwise. If fact, it seems to me that you have made quite an eloquent albeit implicit defense of much maligned 'political correctness' that tries to impose a taboo on precisely these sorts of discussions.
ReplyDeleteI also sympathize with your rejection of normative discourse--treating right wing views as a kind of unnatural aberration--a psychic disease whose causes must be identified and treated so that the conservative subject can be restored to the healthy liberal norm. What you are calling for, in fact, is cultural relativism--understanding political cultures on their own terms without imposing judgments based on external standards.
I may be a little less sensitive to the nuances of tone in Maxim's article, but my approach to the issue is slightly different from what you are characterizing. I don't see this "pravizma" as a disease to be diagnosed and cured. I simply see it as a identifiable phenomenon that can be explained. It's no different than asking why male white southerners are overwhelmingly conservative or why university professors in the humanities are overwhelmingly liberal. There is nothing deterministic in recognizing that the trend exists and considering possible explanations.
Your point on the political orientation of other immigrant groups is very interesting. I agree that there may be ways in which the immigrant experience itself creates a predisposition toward certain positions. Back in the last great wave of immigration roughly 100 years ago, the orientation was toward the left. Immigrants tended to work in low wage, low prestige jobs, often in factories, where they were vulnerable to exploitation and hence receptive to calls for unionization, redistribution of wealth and regulation of industry. Many groups, for example Jews from Russia, saw themselves as victims of political oppression in their home countries and tended to sympathize with the fight against oppression overall. Now, of course, things are different, but I think some traces of this orientation remain. But these things vary a great deal from group to group and I don't think that the mentalities and predispositions that immigrants bring from their home countries is entirely irrelevant in explaining these variations.
You are drawing me into this discussion. Of course, speaking in general terms about mentalities and predispositions, they do matter, but not in the way it is described in Maxim's paper. By the way, Lena came up with another non trivial "explanation" of political attitudes of Russians: people who never paid taxes under communism regime, come here and see how much of their hard earned money the government takes away. They naturally associate themselves with people who wants to cut their taxes. I am personally not sure, if this sentiment actually plays a role, but the other day, Sergey came home with his first "official" check and suggested that we go to a Tea Party meeting. This was a joke, of course, but you know in each joke there is a part of a ... joke. By the way both of my sons, especially Sergey, even though they were educated in US are, while socially liberal, economically rather conservative.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I suggest that you check out this book, which describes immigrant experiences of 100 years ago: http://www.amazon.com/Anything-Can-Happen-George-Papashvily/dp/0312045247. This is a short and very interesting book.
I think that we must be clear: Bolshevism as a form of the Russian communism is a very extremist movement. People who lived in the Soviet Union were poisoned by this ideology every single day. The problem is that not everybody was able to make necessary self-cleaning: this is a question of education and culture. Unfortunately both in the USA and Israel the situation is worsening. Israel was always a socialist country but now it becomes more and more nationalist. This is a common place that Bolshevism and Nazism are ideological brothers and this is a reason why people brainwashed by Bolshevism like this tendency in Israel.
ReplyDeleteThe situation in the USA is bad too. I agree with my colleague from Columbia University (see "New York times" from November 4th this year) that Tea party is a result of bad education. It is a normal that Americans are very badly educated in science and math but now this problem is just widening. Now Scandinavian students speak better English than American, and social sciences education is coming down too.
We can see the consequences of bad education in Pakistan. In tribal areas there are no normal schools only religious one. The name of students in these schools is "Talib". Talibs have only one book to read - Quran, and many followers of Tea party also read only one book - the Bible. Thus, the Tea party is American Taliban: they have the same roots of bad education and extremism. I am pretty sure that Taliban is strongly "pro-life", against the stem cell research, and they do not care about global warming as well.
Here you go, Nathan, a Russian educated "liberal". Unfortunately, Ildar knows very little about Tea Party, therefore he allows himself such ridiculous off-hand comments about them. Equating Tea Party with religious right is a favorite theme for liberals, but it is a topic for a different thread. Also, Ildar, on this blog we are trying to avoid such polarizing statements as Tea Party = Taliban because they have no substance and do not add anything new to discussion. Please, no expletives, empty declarations and ideological demagoguery. Let's try to stay within factual and logically deducible statements. I hope Nathan will agree with me.
ReplyDeleteNice to see someone else jumping in. Welcome to the discussion, Ildar! I agree with your overall sentiment, Lyova, but I don't think we should get carried away with policing ourselves. What I don't want to see is personal invective, ad-hominum attacks (judging character based on opinions), abusive language, and out and out obscenity--this is what I mean by expletives. But empty declarations and ideological demagoguery are often in the eye of the beholder. You've let loose a few whoppers yourself. The best response is to refute such statements not forbid them.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the comparison between the tea party and the taliban may seem a little far fetched. But sometimes out of seemingly wild comparisons, useful insights can emerge--such as the danger when education as an open ended search for truth is replaced with education as a mechanistic recitation of dogmatic formulas. When biology in schools is replaced by "creation science" then it seems to me that we're moving in that direction.
I also think that Ildar has a point regarding education. Perhaps there are tea partyers who are reasonably well trained in their particular area of expertise--there are probably some fairly competent auto mechanics, accountants, interior designers, mortgage brokers, computer programmers, etc. etc. But what you certainly won't find in the tea party are professional historians. That's because the version of history paraded around at their events is simply and profoundly wrong--I challenge you to find a single reputable historian who would endorse it. But how do tea partyers and their leaders react when historians politely information them that they're a little of the mark? They denounce the entire enterprise of academic history as a left wing conspiracy. What we see, in other words, is outright hostility to the scholarly pursuit of truth, when the results prove not to their liking. I could make a similar point regarding the blanket rejection of climate science which has become almost de rigueur even among supposedly moderate republicans. But I'll leave this debate for others better versed in the technicalities. So the problem isn't so much lack of education per so as it is a willful disregard for the idea of objective truth. I've noticed for a long time that the right wing in America has a drawn a lot more from post-modernism than they would likely care to admit.
I have some things to say also about the relationship between the tea party and the religious right, but I agree that this is better addressed in a separate post.
You know, I am trying to keep the discussion as analytical and cold headed as possible. Whenever I make occasional rhetoric slips I try to acknowledge them in a self-conscious manner making it more or less an ironic statement (does it make me a modernist, or post modernist?). SO far we managed to stay mostly within this framework.
ReplyDelete