Class war, populism and Republicans

what a gorgeous piece of writing, representing some great thinking

As a conservative NYer, sense that Brooks is not and never was much of conservative.It was a nice career move; and look where he is today but the New York Times. How much of this is a Manhattan-based writer finally succumbing to the pressure to conform to the mores of his neighborhood, at home and at work? There was nothing remotely conservative about Brooks' "American greatness" stupidity, and much of that kind of thinking got us into Iraq in the first place. This is Brooks and his ilk slinking back to where they really should be in the first place.

Go back to writing antectdotal sociology junk like "Bobos in Paradise", Mr. Brooks. I defy you to read that nonsense and stay awake.

Where does Palin fighting the ingrained corruption of her own party in Alaska and changing things for the better fit in the spectrum of "intellectual"? And where does the lockstep conformity of Obama's nonsense fit? Is "Yes we can" and "change and hope" soem great piece of intellectual genius?If you want to decry that our culture doesn't read enough or talk about the great ideas and philosophies, fair point. But it's both sides and a reflection of our society, not limited to Republicans.

Further,excuse many of us if we look at the universities and don't see the cost of the product as remotely justified. But it can churn out self-important blowhards like Brooks and Obama. The rest of us here in Adult Wrold like Palin viewed college as s something we had to do to move on, not some Eden.But from 43rd Street, Columbia/Harvard Law and a lovely speaking voice beat Idaho State, work and actual accomplishment.

Brooks identifies with Obama,another fan of the college dorm bull session. And so he doesn't take the Lightworker's empty rhetoric to task at all. I await Brooks' review of all the wonderful, thoughtful, intellectual fun of the next 4 years, with ACORN and the Daley Machine and their beloved Lightworker at 1600. And Brooks is voting for Obama.

I wouldn't call these people "intelectuals." If going to a trade school for law, business, computers, or medicine makes you an intellectual then I guess they are. Very few of them remember what they read in their college freshman English or Philosophy coureses. They may remember a line or two from Greek Mythology, but I very much doubt they are intellectuals - in the way I understand the meaning of "intellectual" to be.

Yes, a good piece of writing indeed. For me, an important part of my spiritual/religious journey was reading Francis Schaeffer's books. He became popular in the 70's, and he helped a great many young evangelicals, like me, to know that it is possible, indeed good, to be both intelligent and theologically conservative. Like a writer for "The Wittenburg Door" once said, "He helped us discover our minds." I myself am what could be called a left-leaning moderate. My dad, one of the smartest, if not the smartest, person I've known (he had a long career as a university professor of education), is literally a card-carryin' Republican, and has been since long before Reagan was president. To paraphrase a popular country song, he was "conservative when conservative wasn't cool". We disagree sharply on political matters, enough so that we have tacitly agree to disagree and not talk politics when we see each other, which isn't as often as either of us would like.

The thing that comes to mind in commenting on the shift toward anti-intellectualism on the right, which you name very well, Rod, is the appeal in politics of one of our cultural myths, namely "the wisdom of the rustic". In our culture, there is a sense that "too much book larnin' gets in the way of clear-headed thinkin'". It's the appeal of the plain-spoken, rough-hewn character who is educated in the "school of life" and in "the school of hard knocks" (read John McCain and, by a stretch, Sarah Palin), and conversely those who are well-educated and intelligent and are not afraid to show it (read Barack Obama), are seen as elite, effete, bookish and out-of-touch with everyday life and everyday people. To be fair, there are anecdotal examples that lend weight to those stereotypes. The problem is that when large enough groups of people unquestioningly buy into the myth of "the wisdom of the rustic" and buy into those stereotypes, we get eight years of "The Decider" in the White House and the vice presidential candidacy of an admittedly charming, clever, talented yet relatively uneducated and intellectually incurious woman, who not only appeals to "Joe Six Pack" but panders to him. Heck, how much more "rustic" can you get than a president who relaxes by clearing brush on his ranch and a vice presidential candidate who has lots of kids, uses words like "heck" and "doggone it", and can field dress a moose?

Spot on! The reverse snobbery in the Oklahoma RP is alive and well, as my husband and I experienced this year at the district and state conventions. Speakers issued a common theme that the *real* conservatives lived in the midsection of the nation and most everyone on either coasts were not. Ahem. As an east-coast southern ivy league educated (which reinforced my latent conservatism rather than diminish it) woman, I was appalled at the leadership's parochialism. We knew it was the last twitching of a dead party.

It never once occurred to me to listen to him, and to ask myself why people like him liked Reagan, and had started to vote Republican. I consoled myself with self-pity and contempt, e.g., "They're all idiots and probably racists too."

I kinda liked Reagan: he took naps. That is, sensible enough not to do anything.

That said, the coastal elites I'd vote to get rid of starts with the neo-conservatives, who seem to endorse something like a free market version of the communist party. Yuck. Not the party of Lincoln, McKinley, Coolidge, and Ike. (Or for that matter, the inheritors of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.) Meanwhile, the rest of the R party looks, talks, and walks like Dixiecrats. Although that seems a little unfair to Dixiecrats. Maybe calling it the South American party would fit better: at least then people could wear fruit hats.

As I said, it would be nice to have a sensible party, dedicated to liberty, duty and honor.

max
['We ain't got one of those.']

Rod,

Congratulations on an excellent post to follow up on your excellent post on *Mad Men* yesterday

Like Al Green in 1975, you are "full of fire."

Preach it, brother. *Preach* it.

As a Christian, non-leftist academic, let me venture to say that Republicans' and conservatives' critique of intellectual "elites" would be worth listening to more closely if more Republicans and more conservatives made any effort at all to get down in the trenches with those of us who do our damnedest every day to mount some kind of defense of the Christian and non-leftist life of the mind against its seemingly perpetual slide into oblivion, by offering students an alternative to the leftist indoctrination that has been a major focus of the education system, the fine arts and the popular culture, and even many of our churches for the previous third of a century or more -- all of which is culminating now in the ascent of his royal Lightness to the Presidency.

As we're told again (and again and again) by Republicans and "conservatives," the central conservative insight is that *culture* not politics is the most important thing in life -- that the good life results from a sound and solvent culture not from the machinations of the bureaucratic caste on behalf of their citizen-subjects.

One would have thought, based on this sense of things, that "conservatives" would devote most of their energy to shoring up and furthering the culture by becoming poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, directors, musicians, composers, painters, sculptors, architects, craftsmen, philosophers, members of the clergy, and on and on and on.

Now of course many, many, many people of conservative, moderate, and otherwise non-leftist turns of mind and of heart do all these things, but since what the Republican party and movement conservatism values most is business and ... of all things ... *politics* (and politics and more politics), it is very hard for most of these people -- myself included -- to feel very much at home in the Republican party or the so-called "conservative" movement.

A much better summation of what I've tried to say here was given by Claes Ryn in a special symposium issue of *The American Conservative* magazine in which he argued that the failing of the so-called "conservative" movement in the past forty years has been its almost total abandonment of the culture to the left, despite its constant smug and self-regarding claims to be engaged in some kind of conservation of what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said."

And the real tragedy is that much more of "the best that has been thought and said" would be pleasing to conservative ears if they ever stopped to listen than it is to many liberal and to most leftist ears -- and anyone can tell you who has been to college or university in the past thirty years and had to listen to one of the many, many leftist prosecutions of the thought-crimes of the cultural past that make for the bread and butter of curricula today.

Anyway, this is a subject on which I'm even more voluble than I am on the subject of the Reverend, so I'll leave it there for now.

Many people I know had been democrats all their lives until the abortion issue popped up. They honestly feel that the democratic party let them down big time on this issue. The reason many of them are coming back is because the republican party has been hi-jacked by the evangelicals. I know that many people who read Rod's blog are Catholic & I don't think you understand the mentality of the evangelical crowd. I do I was there at one time. We were brain washed in a way to think that just because the republican candidate was against abortion it meant that the candidate was at a Jesus level. They didn't care about his war policies, economic policies, or anything else. He was a born-again Christian. That small phrase means everything to them.

If you caught Anderson Cooper last night they interviewed born-again Christian moms calling themselves Mom's for Palin. They really believe that she is completely honest & wonderful because she has five kids (one of them being a down's syndrome baby). It wouldn't even occur to these women to look up her records or even question her. They felt that she could just come right in the door and have a cup of coffee with them. This comes back to my point - she is a born-again Christian & that is all she had to say.

You want more democratic leaders to say they are pro-life, but it has become the kiss of death for them to say that (many dems automatically assume you want to turn over Roe v. Wade). Even if a candidate says they are pro-life for themselves but they wouldn't appeal Roe v. Wade then it is over for them on the Republican side. I am pro-life for myself, but I don't want Roe v. Wade overturned for many reasons.

However, I do think that the Republicans won't be able to use abortion as an issue much longer because let's face it no one has done a thing about it. They are using it to keep people voting for them. I think that many conservative republicans feel that they are being dragged down this issue & rightfully so.

Think about this though, if you want to create your own party then the dems would probably get in every time. That ought to keep you up nights:)

Brooks makes some important points here. I agree that he's not much of a conservative, but he's an original, often insightful thinker, which is more important.

I'm also wary of the cruder forms of populism, anti-intellectualism, and Europhobia in so much conservative rhetoric. It's frustrating, because I'm absolutely convinced that grass roots conservatives would respond enthusiastically to a deeply thoughtful, articulate, and even urbane leader who shares their values.

Therein lies the rub. We really do have an intellectually impoverished professional class which fancies itself "elite" in this country. As an attorney with multiple prestigious university degrees, my own experience is that lawyers and other elite professionals areargely captive to groupthink. Don't tell me somebody is an "intellectual" because he's reading the same vapid Tom Friedman book that a third of his colleagues are reading. And more often, people in this (my) class don't read books at all -- they take their political and cultural cues from movies, NPR, whatever the trendy HBO prime time series happens to be, and other superficial media. Their habits and prejudices are often the "Stuff White People Like" -- which amounts to nothing more than shallow personal consumption preferences as a means of asserting social status. THIS is an elite?

If we're looking for a real elite to guide us wisely, it's not this class.

I call foul on this:

It's much easier to find pro-choice Republicans in positions of leadership than to find pro-life Democrats, for example. But that's a story for another day.

Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, is pro-life. He has a 29% rating from NARAL. Byron Dorgan is the policy committee chair. Who's in a position of power on the Republican side who's pro-choice?

I've put a couple of updates in the original post; y'all might want to check back on it.

I'm a young liberal-moderate and Crunchy Con has been my first encounter with conservative intellectualism. More thinking like this from the right and I may sometimes vote for GOP candidates. At present, I can't seriously consider it.

Rod,

This, and some of the comments, is what comes from putting winning about everything, and using wedge politics to win.

Elitism is about feeling superior, nothing more, and everyone evidences it in some manner. Some feel morally superior, others intellectually superior, others patriotically superior, and others economically superior. Wedge politics is about stoking that superiority and driving votes with it.

"Can you believe secularists actually think they're morally superior to religious people? Well, we know better than that!" "Can you believe that religious people actually think they're intellectually superior to secularists? I know, it's crazy, isn't it?"

The McCain/Palin campaign has boiled down to the elitist declaration "We're the REAL Americans, he isn't."

Nothing new here in American politics, but mass media makes it far more relentless.

Mr. Dreher, the critical flaw in Brooks's (and, in part, your) argument with respect to losing the younger generation, of which I am a member, is this: the assumption that the young generation of liberals is interested in ideas (therefore Republicans must be losing them because Republicans are no longer about ideas).

On the contrary, the younger generation of liberals generally refuse to engage ideas different from the ones they hold because they understand values to be personal preferences, and preferences the basis of their identities. So it is extraordinarily difficult to talk about the true, the good, and the beautiful without them feeling "oppressed" and personally attacked "for who they are."

Combined with the premium they place on pleasant style and niceness, their emotivism keeps them from ever getting to the point where they question their deepest assumptions.

For them, politics is not about persuasion because persuasion is oppression; therefore, politics must be warfare where the (unquestioned) ends justify the means.

Mike F. I'm the opposite of you in pretty much every way. I'm the bookinh, non-jock type who voted Republican by default because I was too aware of what the Democrats meant politically. When I was growing up they meant coddling brutal communist regimes that tortured, imprisoned, and killed millions. They were for dishonrable tactics such as deciding that our agreement to come to the defense of South Vietnam after we pulled out didn

Palin is tapping into the real and legitimate resentment of people who know they are not of the elite; who do not hold much respect for the so-called intellectuals (not because they are incurious, but mainly because intellectuals assume fashionable ideas are good due more to their trendiness than anything else), and are tired of being excluded from the marketplace of ideas in the mainstream culture.

That said, I live in an academic town, and work in an intellectual profession. I hold an advanced degree and come from blue collar roots. I find openness to my orthodox Catholic values from my lefty liberal friends and coworkers but I do get the reverse snobbery thrown back at me from many of my fellow Catholics who live in less "elite" places than I do. I don't blame them. The ordinary person's values and beliefs (in God, country, family, property)have been mocked mercilessly and it seems to have gotten worse in the past 8 years and they see nobody willing to defend them except the Sarah Palins and Pat Buchanans.

Asleep06 wrote:

On the contrary, the younger generation of liberals generally refuse to engage ideas different from the ones they hold because they understand values to be personal preferences, and preferences the basis of their identities. So it is extraordinarily difficult to talk about the true, the good, and the beautiful without them feeling "oppressed" and personally attacked "for who they are."

Combined with the premium they place on pleasant style and niceness, their emotivism keeps them from ever getting to the point where they question their deepest assumptions.

I completely disagree, and as a homeschooled, conservative, '02 Hillsdale College graduate and a former resident of Ann Arbor (a.k.a. flyover Berkeley) I speak from personal experience.

Read After Virtue and imagine that MacIntyre is right; that we do not, as a people and a culture, possess the conceptual tools to articulate lasting, authoritative cultural values. Now imagine that you lack that rock-hard certainty the political Right possesses in spades.

I think you will find that most younger, intellectual sorts are in a _constant_ state of questioning their deepest assumptions. Being right, or being sure, keeps you from speaking their language.

Try listening more, and talking less. Try treating your own knowledge as contingent. Start more of your sentences with "I might be wrong, but it seems to me that..." Try the niceness that you deride.

Rod says: "political fighting about economics is not something we do anymore." Rod, are you living in the same country I am?

The Bush tax cuts were clearly aimed at the rich, and McCain's proposed tax cuts are even more so. Gore and Kerry both ran against Bush's tax cuts, and Obama's going to cut taxes on the lower 95% while raising them on the top 5%. That's fighting about economics.

Bill Clinton tried to implement universal health care, and succeeded in passing SCHIP. That was about economics. The Dems tried to expand SCHIP last year, which the GOP blocked, ditto. All three of the leading Dem nomination candidates this year had either universal health care plans (Clinton, Edwards) or something fairly close (Obama). All of that was about economics.

Clinton passed a minimum wage hike over GOP opposition in 1996. The Dems were blocked by GOP filibuster from passing a minimum wage hike in January of last year, though they ultimately got it through by attaching it to the Iraq war funding bill. That was clearly a fight about economics.

I could go on, but that should suffice.

"If Rod's Great Unraveling of the entire economic system happens (which I doubt), it would annihilate our elite professional class. Not just in the short term, but more importantly by rendering the luxury of a prestigious liberal arts post-secondary education unsustainable."

Not really. Professions were one of the few stable sources of employment during the great depression, because they provide services to the community as much as to the commercial, financial, and industrial sectors.

I could go on, but that should suffice.

But you should go on, noting that the GOP passed the Prescription Drug plan, while Clinton pushed for NAFTA and GATT. Most of what you list, save the disastrous Clinton Health plan that met its deserved end (at the hand of other Democrats), the differences between the two parties have been that of degree, not of kind.

Simon,

I disagree that committing oneself to cultural work *requires* some outside source of economic security -- though having one certainly helps. I come from a middle-class background in the small-town South. Neither or my parents were professionals. I went to a land-grant state university and earned my doctorate at at a public university as well, albeit one among the "elite" institutions in my field. While it's true that cultural work does entail economic risks and meager economic rewards, it is by no means that case that everyone committed to such work is a privileged toff indulging himself or herself in a frivolous luxury. The notion that culture is a frivolous luxury, the province of privileged toffs is at the root of the problem that Rod is getting at. People with liberal or left-wing views -- whether "rich kids" or not -- are much more willing to devote themselves to cultural work than people with "conservative" or right-wing views -- again, whether "rich kids" or not. Unfortunately, a downward spiral has now set in on the cultural front, in which the disinclination of "conservatives" to go into cultural work has produced a leftist hegemony in all the cultural fields, one that that makes them inhospitable not only to conservatives, but even to moderates and liberals (as opposed to leftists) unless they have very thick skins. That's the bad news. The good news is that the leftist hegemony in the cultural fields has made them as decadent and as ripe for revolution, paradigm-shift, and realignment as the "conservative" or rather the right-wing libertarian hegemony in business and politics has made those fields ripe for the move toward the left that we are now beginning to see. Conservatives are supposed to be prudent and to take the long view. In that regard, I can't help thinking that commitment to cultural work would be a wiser investment for conservatives to make going forward than investment in the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign or some such nonsense as that.

I don't really have a whole lot to add except to give Rod kudos for an excellent post. The only thing I might say is that all movements, conservative and otherwise, tend to go through stimulating, bursting-with-ideas phases, success, overconfidence, and then decadence. It was the Democrats in the 70's and 80's, it's the Republicans now. The difference is that at their worst, the Democrats were never anti-intellectual--stiflingly conformist, maybe, but not anti-intellecutal per se. Republicans seem to have adopted anti-intellectualism as a standard. This has been evident in its opposition to climate scientists, enviromental scientists (think of McCain and the bear study), and so on. Now science isn't perfect, and consensus is often tricky, but to dismiss the scientific community as pushing a covert liberal agenda, as the GOP has tended to do, rather than to concede that they might be dealing with, you know, facts, is anti-intellecualism in a very pure form.

None of this is to support elitism in the bad sense, or to say that the needs and issues of "Joe Sixpack", to coin a phrase, are unimportant, or that intellecutals always get it right. It's just to point out that we don't need some kind of polarization between the salt-of-the-earth real people who proudly need no eddycation, and those pointy-headed elites. At one time, even in rural communities, there was a certain respect for those who went off to college; and the college grads had a respect for the farmers and miners and working people. Would that we could get back to that.

Turmarion,

As evidence that anti-intellectualism is alive and well on the left, just look at what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.

For the thought-crime of simply proposing that there might, just might be some scientific evidence suggestive of marginal differences in intellect of certain sorts between men and women, Summers was run out of Harvard on a rail ... and not on intellectual, but merely on political grounds.

And Summers is a liberal.

All academic work in this country -- scientific or otherwise -- is very tightly circumscribed by left-wing ideology and political correctness.

The institutions in this country as strongly dominated by the left as much of the federal government has been dominated by the right in recent years are every bit as moribund and intellectually dead as the Republican party.

And we're about to find out just how moribund and intellectually dead the Democratic party also is.

"It's much easier to find pro-choice Republicans in positions of leadership than to find pro-life Democrats . . . ." Really? Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid is pro-life. Pretty high "position of leadership," it seems to me.

I know I have a copy of Nash's book around here someplace, but being unable to lay hands on it easily, I settled instead for my ancient copy of "What Is Conservatism?," edited by Frank Meyer in 1964. (btw, I've always thought it funny that "Nash" is Ukrainian for "ours." It's our Cosa Nash-tra, you might say. Joking, joking . . . especially as I can't say "ours" since I've been voted off your tight little island.)

Anyway, opening to the first essay, "Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism," by Meyer himself, I read:

The intellectual bankruptcy of the [movement] which has dominated American thought for the past half century becomes every day more obvious. The imagination, the verve, the spiritual passion that once characterized it in its days of movement towards power have long since been replaced by a tired repetition of slogans empty of content and sustained only by the weight and inertia of bureaucratic power. . . . There may be a gap of years, of decades, between the onset of the impotence of a false world-view, and the decay and defeat of the power structure which has arisen upon the foundations of that world-view. But its defeat is, given time, the necessary result of the re-emergence of truth in the consciousness of those who are concerned with matters of the intellect, with matters of the spirit, of those who--though they may have little control over material power at the moment--determine the foundations of the future.

Well, well. The term I have replaced with "movement" in the first line was, of course, for Meyer, "collectivist Liberalism." But what has he said here that is not equally true--nearly a half-century later--of the bankrupt so-called "conservative" Republicanism of today? The message from one of the founders of the conservative movement is clear: attend to matters of the intellect and spirit if you want to build for the future.

I turned next to what is, in my view, one of the more interesting essays in the book, "The Conservative Search for Identity," by Stephen J. Tonsor, about whom Joseph Amato wrote a retrospective biography in the latest issue of "Modern Age." Again I quote from the opening of the essay:

The stern necessities of an age of ideology demand conformity, and, locked in his preconceptions, [he] is impotent to do more than mourn the passing of an age in which variety and the dialectic of opposites produced a rich and dynamic society. He desires movement but refuses to pay the price for movement; he desires nonconformity and creativity but refuses to tolerate the divergences of viewpoint and the frequent eccentricity which are the price of nonconformity. He wishes creativity but is uncomfortable with the messiness of failed experiments and failed lives which creativity produces. For the organic reconciliation of opposites, which is the measure of a healthy society, he has substituted the myth of "pluralism," the dream of a multitude of mutually exclusive and hostile social units and individuals which coexist, but which fail either to stimulate to action or to enrich the common group.

As before, the term I elided is "Liberal intellectual" in the original, but it could at present be the opposite just as easily. Tonsor continues:

It would be false to assume that, unlike Liberal thought, conservative thought has avoided the spirit of the age and that it is broader, more inclusive, more dynamic and creative than the doctrinaire Liberalism which is its counterpart. The blunt truth is that most conservatives do not know what manner of men they are; they have no clear conception of the society they wish to create, have no organic relationship either to the present or the past, hold no grand design, entertain no enduring principles, and are responsible to no whole and healthy vision either of man or society. Their discourse consists of the platitudes of political criticism, and, however salutary and necessary this may be, it is neither a substitute for principle nor a guide for action.

I'm tempted to go on quoting, but I won't. If you're serious about rethinking conservatism, this book--and this essay in particular--is not a bad place to start, either.

(Oh, but I forgot--there's no reason for you to listen to me. I AM TEH EEEVIL!!1!11! I am the enemy of all that is good and right. : P Never mind . . . .)

"The least commendable part of your post is your assumption that Sarah Palin is an unreflective, unthinking, incurious individual. How can you and David Brooks be so certain of this? I detect a touch of arrogance in your certitude. It reminds me of the way the intellectual elites viewed Reagan in the 1970s ... or perhaps of how young Rod viewed his Reagan-leaning father in the early 1980s."

Wrong. There was lots of evidence that Reagan had studied domestic and international issues. He had given many speeches (including at the Republican convention) and written much. With some minimal effort. you could find 16 to 20 years of his thoughts. With maximal effort you find nothing from Palin.

Steve

Shorter Brooks: Stuff I don't like is ignorant and anti-intellectual. Stuff I like is smart and cool.

Maybe the appeal of hot gun-toting baby machines to the good men and women of the heartland is not an expression of their ignorance, but their wisdom in preferring leaders with the habit of virtue to smart and dirty people. It is perfectly rational to prefer virtue in a statesman over intellectual credentials. Both would be great, to the extent both are possible.

And Brooks might have a point if anti-intellectualism existed within the GOP. But it doesn't. For Brooks, evidently, Thomas Flemming, Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, and Samuel Francis are all ignorant boobs. He fails to recognize that there are intellectuals who are led to mostly the same conclusions held by less educated but virtuous members of the heartland. And then there are intellectuals who are dirty and nasty. Brooks only acknowledges the later as intellectual. I guess because he's anti-virtue.

JLF,

Go back and actually *read* my post.

It is the government as much an anything else that is engaged in coercing people into living according to secular liberal beliefs -- emphasis on *coercing.*

The fact that most people live within parameters set by secular liberals does *not* mean that most people adhere to secular liberal beliefs.

In fact, most people do *not.*

The secular left has merely been more successful than the so-call religious right in imposing its views on other people.

The religious right's efforts are mostly defensive, mostly an attempt to play the cultural game on the terms laid down by the secular left.

Until the late sixties or so, "social issues" were handed politically only on the local level, to the extend that they were politicized at all.

Secular liberals continue to be haunted by the ghost of a Hegelian or Marxiam sense that history is leading "progressively" and inexorably and inevitably to the realization of all their goals.

So they have had few qualms about hurrying that "progress" along through non-democratic means -- particularly through the politicization of the federal judiciary, though by many other means as well, including the transformation of the education system into, in very large part, a venue for indoctrination of children toward the secular liberal norms.

Everything that you object to that is done by the religious right is merely people with different values from your own following the secular liberal script, following, that is, what seems to be your own advice, which is to use any instrument at hand to impose one's will on other people.

So what's your complaint with how the religious right *behaves* as opposed to what it *believes* ... since it behaves the same way that secular liberals behave?

Simon,

As I know myself only too well, sacrifices are required for those not independently wealthy to pursue economically unremunerative careers in the cultural fields.

But the fact remains that liberals and leftists make those sacrifices every day, and they do so to a greater extent than conservatives and moderates do.

Which is part of why conservatives and moderates are in as much trouble as they seem to be in now -- not only on the cultural front, but now on the political front as well.

Self-sacrificial service toward the common good is still a part of the conservative ethos where military service is concerned and also private charity, in both of which areas conservatives and moderates put liberals and leftists *to shame.*

I just think that some of that ethos ought to be applied to other endeavors as well, as it always was in the past, until a generation ago.

If it's not going to be, then conservatives and moderates should not complain about their losses to liberals and leftists on the cultural front.

Rod,
You asked for only posts on the substance of this post. You specifically said you wanted to avoid the typical back and forth over Palin. I'm going to split the baby and talk about something that's off-topic, but not at all about Palin. I'll understand if you delete it.

You say;

I have to laugh, sardonically, when liberals accuse the Republicans of being closed-minded on social issues; the Democrats are as bad or worse. It's much easier to find pro-choice Republicans in positions of leadership than to find pro-life Democrats, for example. But that's a story for another day.

I'm not sure that's really true. If you define "pro-choice" as being for allowing ANY, abortion, even if limited to victims of rape or incest, and define "pro-life" as not allowing any abortions, including in cases of rape or incest then yes, there are more "pro-choice" Republicans than there are "pro-life" Democrats. But, there are a lot of people, Republican, Democrats, politician, party members, and unaffiliated, who are in between the extreme positions of the respective parties.

I guess what I'm saying is this. What you say is true, if and only if, you define your terms by the most radical elements of your party (on this issue, I don't think you are radical in general). But, the exact same would be true if you defined the terms by the most radical elements on the Democratic side. There are more Democrats who support some restrictions on abortion, than there are Republicans who believe any abortion, anytime, anywhere should be legal. It's a matter of defining the extreme of your party as the norm that let's you make that observation. Once again, most people whether politicans, party members or unaffiliated, on both sides of the aisle don't agree with the extremes of either party.

Again, this is off-topic, and I'll understand if you delete it. But I think it's an important issue that let's you, and a lot of others in the Religious Right, paint the Democratic party as a lot more radical than it is.

I am always fascinated with this discussion... For the moment, let's just ignore conservative/liberal and focus on the common definition of what an "intellectual" is.

Here's the pop culture icon's (wikipedia) definition of "intellectual".
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Intellectual" can be used to mean, broadly, one of three classifications of human beings:

An individual who is deeply involved in abstract erudite ideas and theories.
An individual whose profession solely involves the dissemination and/or production of ideas, as opposed to producing products (e.g. a steel worker) or services (e.g. an electrician). For example, lawyers, professors, politicians, entertainers, and scientists.[1]
Third, “cultural intellectuals” are those of notable expertise in culture and the arts, expertise which allows them some cultural authority, which they then use to speak in public on other matters.
++++++++++++

Now, if you disagree with this, my comments won't apply.

I think our concept of who and what is "intellectual" and the gravitas assigned to those who achieve the lable is misplaced. Not to impugn people who are engaged in "intellectual" occupations, but to recognize that lots of people are intellectual, but whose lives are not engaged in the production of ideas for pay.

I'm not an intellectual by most definitions. On the other hand, no person who is NOT an intellectually curious, broadminded, and imaginatve c an do what I do and what I have done all my life.

I once held a job for a number of years that I often referred to as "a job that could be done by a trained monkey". It required little but rote learning and memorized actions and procedures.

There's lots of people who do what I do... and are as good or better than me, but the "lots" refers to a sizeable selection of the people you can fit in, say, a large theater.

This number is in the hundreds.

And I'm self-taught.

So, I guess the question is... Does being self-taught put me in the lofty position of an ... "educator"? One of those "intellectual" labelled careers?

Does it not because I spend my days with a laptop, people's computers, and occaisionally braving a blizzard to restore a failed site?

I don't ask this, because I wish to make any claims or implications of my own intellectual might, but because I want to challenge the notion of who and what is "intellectual".

I note with some amusement that many people accept the notion that unless you choose specific avenues of career or education, you're not an "intellectual". But some of the people who are actually in those careers are... forgive the crudeness... stupid.

My father was a mechanic and logger. Different times of his life put him in those roles. He had no idea who Ayn Rand was, never heard of William F Buckley, Jr, and could not tell you the difference between a philosopher and an interrogator.

But my dad had fantastic innate artistic skills. Had he pursued art, he would have been an American artist of some note.

None of which I inherited.

And you're wondering where I'm going... It is this, that our cultural view of what is an intellectual has degenerated a lot. It has become narrow, effete and perhaps a little snobbish.

And that's to the detriment of intellectualism itself.

There are people who engage their lives in farming, logging, mechanics, nursing, or any other trade, who have profoundly enlightening thoughts, but are not "worthy" of consideration because they're not "intellectual".

And this is why we have the "reverse snob" effect on display. People without wisdom, holding positions of ASSIGNED respect, smugly condescending to those who are their intellectual superiors.

Is the average person one of these? Hardly so. It is also not even slightly hard to understand the negative reaction by common people when someone who is uncommon is slighted as being "common", when we have created an artificially constructed notion of who and what is "intellectual" and it's not based on the inherent capacity of the individual, but rather, by arbitrary and self-serving definitions.

So, while the hoi poloi moan and whine about the "tribalism" which they see as having "ruined" the country and our politics, remember, tribalism starts with artificial distinctions between individuals... distinctions not earned, but assigned. It's as much the fault of the "elite" or "intellectual" tribalism as that of the "commoner" tribalism being bandied about.

As other commenters have noted, there are plenty of tactical, partisan reasons the Republican Party has ossified around a rejectionist and anti-intellectual core. Whether the GOP - and American conservatives in a broader sense - can re-embrace their historical intellectualism as Brooks clearly hopes is a momentous question. But for the purposes of this blog, I would pose a different question: Can American Christianity re-embrace theological intellectualism?

Two centuries ago, in this country's infancy, an immensely diverse community of Christians pursued a spiritual life that was in most ways far more intellectually vibrant than it is today. The cross-currents of Christian identity - revealed v. mystical; doctrinal v. spiritual; deism v. fideism - produced a debate that demanded intellectual engagement. That debate played out in churches, in homes, in public life.

Today, those debates have been relegated to academic circles - and, happily, blogs like this one. But in public life, I would argue that revealed religion, doctrinal religion and fideism have become the popular definition of Christianity in America. True, there remains a diverse Christian community, but those of us who follow a Christianity that is mystical or spiritual or deistic in nature have been defined as fringe Christians at best and more often as 'fake' or dishonest.

Moreover, I worry that the strong currents of absolutism that run through revealed, fideistic Christianity have too often resulted in a view of Christian identity that is hostile to introspection and hostile to a robustly intellectual engagement with faith. In turn, the lack of debate, introspection and intellectual struggle has played into the hands of those who capitalize on wedge politics.

Those politicians and partisan deal-makers have, in turn, reinforced those absolutist tendencies by arguing that any voice of dissent or debate presents a point of weakness for the 'other side' to exploit. And the mass media has played along. When reduced to sound-bites, absolutism - in faith, in policy, in world-view - comes off as clear and no-nonsense. Intellectual engagement comes off as vague and ambivalent. And we all know how well vague, ambivalent politicians do.

So again I wonder: Can we, as Christians, re-embrace an energetic, engaged, intellectual and ongoing examination of our faith? Can we, as citizens, demand that our political leaders exhibit the same level of engagement and examination when it comes to questions of policy?

Some of our nation's greatest thinkers grappled wonderfully with the defining questions of what it means to be a Christian, understanding that the struggle made their faith stronger, not weaker. Let's not lose that heritage.

Cyntax, I'm Catholic, so no problem with evolution. Big problem when evolution is presented as "And thus, we know there's no God," which is the way it gets taught quite a lot in my experience. Bigger problem when public schools treat God as contraband like nail clippers or cell phones, and present an overwhelmingly atheistic worldview as the norm to their students.

As for the anal intercourse thing, even heard of AIDS education? It begins in the fifth grade in many districts. My fifth-grader is ten (though we homeschool, so maybe more fifth-graders are eleven; I don't know). Among the curricula descriptions out there mention is made of discussing the fact that AIDS is not spread by touch, etc., but only by specific kinds of sexual contact (they don't mention whether they discuss blood transfusions, but as the classes fall roughly under the "sex ed" category I don't suppose they do). The level to which the sexual contact is described, or simulated with the condom-banana-cardboard tube props the teacher's supposed to have on hand, varies.

Now, of course, in MA, CA, and, today CT, since gay marriage is legal and same-sex couples are supposed to be legally identical to heterosexual couples, it will quickly become mandatory to teach about gay sex any time students are being taught about heterosexual sex, regardless of how young they are.

"B) Because a minority of people with a particular religious belief are generally unable to force those upon the majority forever."

Steve, a poll taken in June by CBS showed that only 30% of Americans thought same-sex marriage should be legal. Why should the majority have to bow to the will of the decided minority in this matter? Isn't this a democracy?

Also, nothing can make our political/economic elites happier than the bulk of society reducing politics to cultural wars, again for obvious reasons.

National poll I presume. Would love to see how poll was worded. I will look for it.15 second search found this.

"Jun 3, 2008
63 percent of Americans say gay marriage is OK by them!
Six in ten Americans say the government should not regulate whether gays and lesbians can wed the persons they choose, a new survey finds.
As same-sex couples start lining up to get marriage licenses in California on June 17, the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found 63 percent of adults say same-sex marriage is "strictly a private decision" between two people. That the government has the right "to prohibit or allow" such marriages was stated by 33 percent, and 4 percent had no opinion."

I also found polls that supported gay marriage in CT and Ma. I think those are your cited states. Before you ask, I do believe that our laws make some attempt to protect minorities from the possible tyranny of the majority, especially on a short term basis. In the long run, the majority usually has its way.

Steve

Erin,
I'll re-post the challenge that someone above made. You comment that;

Now, of course, in MA, CA, and, today CT, since gay marriage is legal and same-sex couples are supposed to be legally identical to heterosexual couples, it will quickly become mandatory to teach about gay sex any time students are being taught about heterosexual sex, regardless of how young they are.

Where do you see any evidence of this happening, except in your worst nightmares? Who has ever argued to make teaching how to have sex mandatory (even for heterosexual sex)? What I've seen of sex ed went something more like this; make sure it's wrapped. That kind of advice applies regardless of where a penis is going to be put. I also remember hearing about dental dams. Once again, that can apply to both heterosexual and homosexual sex. Oh, btw, I didn't hear about these things in public school. It was from friends, and later in college I heard about these things. Can you maybe, just tone down the rhetoric a little bit and come back to the real world that the rest of us live in?

As a conservative-leaning centrist and college professor, I often feel frightened by the vitriol unleashed by conservatives against anyone who has intellectual leanings or ideas beyond a narrow orthodoxy. While living in the academy certainly puts me in daily contact with (equally repulsive) reflexive leftists, the sort of classic conservatism that I always admired and felt a part of seems to be dissolving into a reactionary populism that admits no place for me. I'm sorry to have to go.

Steve, a poll taken in June by CBS showed that only 30% of Americans thought same-sex marriage should be legal. Why should the majority have to bow to the will of the decided minority in this matter? Isn't this a democracy?

To represent national opinion pollings a little more adequately, it is also true that only 35-40% are sure SSM should be banned completely. And that number is probably declining- it's certainly not growing- and generationally based, just like the support of the conservative side on other major social issues.

Nationally there are another 8%+ and growing that lean in favor of SSM, 15% and declining that lean against, and a pretty constant 8% that have no desire to decide either way. Trends in the numbers are tricky, but the general sense is that around 2020 support for SSM will have majority support nationally.

In 1967 opinion polling showed between 70% and 90% opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v Virginia and legalization of interracial marriage. 50% support was first polled in 1993. Was the ruling in Loving wrong or injust?

I'll be interested to see what happens to conservatism in the wake of November's landslide. You guys lost me. I didn't vote in 2004, and I voted Donk for the first time in 2006.

I was excited by the news Culture 11 was coming, and I went over to check it out. What did I find? Some discussion of how the lack of vampires proves the existence of god.

If that's conservative intellectualism, you're never going to win my vote back. Maybe I'm not typical, but I'm certainly typical among my right-leaning Generation X friends. Sure, I'm a knowledge worker who lives on the West Coast. But conservative/libertarian friends of mine in Red States are voting for Obama this year, because the last 8 years have been a total disaster. Everything the GOP whined about under Clinton has been done by Republicans, along with much, much worse.

Where has most of the Right been? I had such high hopes for Jonah Goldberg - the Right needs folks who can hammer home a point by eliciting a laugh. Then he comes out with 'Liberal Fascism' when we should be debating torture and eavesdropping, to say nothing of 'nation-building.'

To the GOP I say: Keep your stupid echo chamber. Enjoy it, along with your waning relevance.

All I can hope for is that the Libertarians run someone better than Barr next time around.

Erin, you say you've experienced this:

"And thus, we know there's no God," which is the way it gets taught quite a lot in my experience.

Any sort of bias towards is or isn't in terms of god is completely and totally unacceptable in my opinion. But having come up through the public shool systems in SF (the darkest heart of liberalism), I never once experienced that. What exactly do you mean by "a lot" in your "experience?" Are you a acting as an assistant in classrooms? Is this hearsay od some kind? I can only refer to my own personal experience but you seem to be appealing to a broader (and thus more authoritative) experience, yet you're vague about where it comes from.

As for the anal intercourse thing, even heard of AIDS education? It begins in the fifth grade in many districts. My fifth-grader is ten (though we homeschool, so maybe more fifth-graders are eleven; I don't know). Among the curricula descriptions out there mention is made of discussing the fact that AIDS is not spread by touch, etc., but only by specific kinds of sexual contact (they don't mention whether they discuss blood transfusions, but as the classes fall roughly under the "sex ed" category I don't suppose they do). The level to which the sexual contact is described, or simulated with the condom-banana-cardboard tube props the teacher's supposed to have on hand, varies.

Erin, I have to say your postings put us in the position of having to take your word for the crux of your arguments. Arguing in good faith would mean providing a little more substantiation; are there some school websites or some such that you can point us to? It would be helpful. But is your objection about the topic of AIDS or the age at which it's being taught? If the former, why? And if the latter, when would you prefer to see it mentioned?

Now, of course, in MA, CA, and, today CT, since gay marriage is legal and same-sex couples are supposed to be legally identical to heterosexual couples, it will quickly become mandatory to teach about gay sex any time students are being taught about heterosexual sex, regardless of how young they are.

Interesting leap that your making here, but I imagine that the sex-ed already in place isn't predicated on who is or isn't allowed to be married. Sex-ed should be age appropriate and I would think that such a determination should have a lot of influence from the community the class is being conducted in.

Most of your objections to the sex-ed seem to be based in what I would call moral judements, as an example, your use of terms like "sexual libertines." Further you seem to assume that teaching children about sex-ed is in some undefined way linked to the stance that children should be having sex, that it will, in fact, encourage children to have sex. Let's examine that a moment. Following your logic, as I understand it, education about a topic or preparation for some situation is tantamount to approval of said topic or situation. That being so, were I to come to your town and teach a class on CPR, by your logic I would be hoping that people have heart-attacks. Given the way that you've explained your views so far, in my opinion you're simply using religion to justify your prejuidices.

Now this could simply be a matter of us having a failure to communicate but it does seem strange to me that I could have grown up in the city that many have termed a modern day Sodom and Gommorah and yet have experienced none of the terrible liberal plots that you detail.

Erin, as always, I must challenge you:

"Why does "contemporary appreciation" trump our entire national history, the religious and moral beliefs of a vast majority of Americans, and the undeniable fact that any meaningful objection to this grotesque imposition becomes impossible in a climate where the only ruling principles are "contemporary appreciation" provided that appreciation comes from the intellectually bankrupt but self-satisfied "wisdom" of our liberal ruling elites?"

The South thought the same thing 150 years ago re: slavery. And what is the purpose of a judiciary but to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority?

You find people acting on principles you disagree with a "grotesque intrusion" but are resentful when some then consider the general way people like me have been treated since mostly time immemorial to be a grotesque intrusion on *our* personhood?

What you find grotesque is that there are actually a sizable number of people whose principles inform their belief that for far too long, people like me have been beaten, killed, jailed, driven from family and church and generally disenfranchised, and that our attempts to live life with some dignity and some relationships is not only good for us, it's good for society. So acting on these principles must be labeled grotesque intrusions, they can only reflect hedonism, nothing more, and so they must be trivialized or demonized.

Because it was writ in Levit some 4000 years ago, inherited by Paul and as widely understood as truth by the Church fathers as the fact that the earth is flat, the sun orbits the moon, and there is ether in space to transmit light, you claim it as your inheritance and call it objective truth. That is how I see this rigidity, and you are free to do so.

The ironic thing, of course, is that the whole idea of marriage is a rather, err, conservative sort of idea for gay people. Surely it must mean something that *this* is the fight we have. I wonder if you realize how it looks to more moderate live/let live folks, who scratch their heads that the thing you assert is so dear, namely the importance of marriage, is something that we're all actually in rather violent agreement about. And it's not divorce that is being used to rally people, it's the idea that those gays actually want to marry too!

To more moderate live/let live folks who are sympathetic to concerns about decline of the family, don't you think they scratch their heads when so much organizing and rhetoric is spewed about gay marriage and so little about divorce? Do you think they scratch their heads when you say "marriage is important" and their same-sex neighbors down the way say exactly the same thing? Why are we in such a violent agreement here?

It is this cognitive disconnect between stated values and political priorities, between an inflexible, unyielding rigidity and the more circumstantial realities of people's lives. They don't think divorce is a good idea, but they are sure glad their daughter was able to get out of that bad marriage. They don't like sexual wanton-ness, but they're relieved their son and his wife waited a few years to have children.

And 5:29 was me ...

You know, Erin, I honestly don't think you're very likely to be thrown in the pokey on this or any other planet for stamping your feet and intransigently telling your gay friends (assuming you have some), "Your marriage is so absolutely NOT fabulous!!"

I know it's going to be hard for you to accept this, but language is not an absolute. It's a social construct. If enough of the population started calling The Color Formerly Known As Purple "pale green"--guess what. In a few generations, that wavelength, while it would still exist in an absolute sense as a measurable wavelength, would be known among humans as "pale green." Similarly, if you think marriage is a measurable property of the universe, like the electromagnetic spectrum, then it can't change. If, however, marriage is a human institution, then we can call different arrangements "marriage" and not be lying. It might, from your point of view, be a mistake to do so, but it wouldn't be a lie. We've already established that marriage has changed, even within the Judaeo-Christian worldview.

I've heard that really orthodox Jews refuse to acknowledge marriage with a non-Jew. Rather than accept such a marriage, parents will consider their child dead. Society allows them to maintain this fiction in their own minds, but not to prevent the marriage from taking place or legally interfere with it. In a world where "marriage" includes same-sex couples, you'll be free to consider their marriages a lie and maintain this view in your own mind, no matter what the law says. I doubt that many people will pester you to confirm their gay marriages as "fabulous."

geesh! that whole thing that started with Sarah Palin.... do you even know what you said? by the time i got through all the 'i'm out to impress you' verbage, i was too irritated to want to digest. even conservatives at times do not know how much they are influenced by left, media, pop, intellectual think tank, academic, crap. as a side note...Palin was the freshest breath of down to earth air that has come along since...well i can't remember it has been so long. she also obviously has polish... some people will complain just for the art of complaining and the supposed intellectual posturing