SACRAMENTO, CA - My Labor Day weekend is ruined every year by the annual convention of the American Political Science Association (APSA), but at least this year the nation’s academic political scientists chose the Left Coast for their meeting place. Perhaps this is out of embarrassment.

During last year’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., an enterprising Washington Post reporter went up to Capitol Hill--where the highest concentration of people whose day job is the conduct of real politics is found--to ask if any of them would find the proceedings of the APSA useful. Most responded that they didn’t even know that the APSA was in town, but that, no, they really didn’t think they had much to learn from academic political scientists. To which a sensible citizen can only say, Amen.

Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous description of “San Francisco Democrats” back in 1984? San Francisco political scientists are little different. In 1984, the APSA took a survey of its members’ voting preferences in the upcoming election, and over 90 percent responded that they intended to vote for Walter Mondale. Most of the other 10 percent were voting for independent candidates further to the left of Mondale; only about two percent intended to vote for Reagan. This result makes academic political scientists even further to the left than the news media, which may be one reason why the APSA has not taken a presidential preference poll since 1984.

The APSA annual meeting consists of hundreds of panels on topics both germane and obscure. I gave up counting the number of papers with the word “gender” in their title, though my favorite paper title of the whole meeting managed to combine two of the hot-button lefty buzz-words: “Theoretical Approach for a Non-Gender-Blind Theory of Sustainability.” This entry had stiff competition, such as “Gender, Culture, and Assimilation: Baseball and Talmud.” Or, “Gender and Welfare State Restructuring in Japan.” Or, “Elections or Ideas? Explaining the Timing and Nature of the French Socialist Party’s Gender Based Quota.” This must be a short paper: it’s the French Socialist Party. Does this really require explanation? Finally, for a goofy entry not tied in gender knots, try this one: “Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: The Jubilee 2000 Campaign for Third World Debt Reduction.”

Naturally, most academic practitioners of political science believe themselves smarter than and superior to both the public and actual politicians whose names appear on ballots. There were at least seven panels about the 2000 presidential election, mostly to denounce the outcome. Still more panels were devoted to the imperative of blocking Bush’s judicial nominees, which makes explicit that many political scientists are engaged in advocacy rather than scholarship. But all is not lost.

Here and there in the corners of the nation’s campuses are numerous individuals--and occasionally an entire department--that stand against the tides, like Albert Jay Nock’s “remnant,” of postmodernism and other trendy left-wing enthusiasms. We typically meet in darkened corners at the APSA meeting and renew old graduate school ties. And many students these days see right through the pretensions of trendy left academics, which is why the most popular professors on campuses are often the conservatives. Who’s fighting the established power now?

--Steven Hayward