Man, Ross is on fire today, getting all up in the face of conservatives who disparage elites and elite opinion.
Here's the thing: The Republican Party will be a populist party going forward, or it won't be a party at all. But the more populist it becomes - the more figures like Palin and Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty replace the blue-blazer Republicans of yore - the more it needs an elite capable of preventing it from spinning away into anti-intellectualism, hidebound dogmatism, and pure folly. Yes, sometimes these elites are snobbish and insidery, overly impressed with credentials, overly concerned about what their liberal pals think, overly willing to treat their party's base as an embarrassment. Sometimes the base is right and the elites are wrong. Sometimes you need a better class of elite entirely. But you still need them, and you need candidates who listen to them.
You cannot have a healthy conservative movement, or a healthy conservative party, when the only thing its members read are the collected works of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity et alia, and they are only conversant in the talk-radio vernacular. You just can't. Granted, you can't have a healthy conservative movement or party made up only of the staff of right-wing think tanks and opinion magazines either (or, ahem, blogs). We're all in this together. Besides which, conservatives are the last people who, philosophically, should be disparaging elites and elitism as a concept. We are supposed to believe in excellence over egalitarianism. Granted, defending Gov. Palin's candidacy has put many conservatives in a terribly awkward position on this front, but we do not want to throw out this important, indeed defining, principle for the sake of crude populist politics.But Ross says all this so much better than I do.
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"I think one of the problems is that the working-class intellectual seems largely to have disappeared -- people like H.L. Mencken, I.F. Stone, Mike Royko, and Studs Turkel, people who came from the working class and for the most part stayed there, who in many cases lacked a lot of formal education -- but who nurtured their intellectual curiosity, liked to read challenging books, liked to learn about the world, and liked to talk and write about ideas. But who could still feel comfortable having a beer in a union hall..."
I think Mark Steyn is a perfect example of this type of intellectual. The guy hasn't even been to college, but his head is packed with more knowledge – both trivial and otherwise – than you're likely to come across at any Yale faculty meeting. His wit and intelligence are beyond keen, yet he has an unflagging respect for the "regular American." Perhaps it's because he's... Canadian?
Conservatives may need elites, but how many true elites want to be conservative? It is said that Silicon Valley industry is predominantly Democrat. What does it say when the brightest minds are non-conservative? The fact is, in the high-tech and complex 21st century, the conservative mind simply doesn't lend itself to the cutting edge fields, which need flexibility in thinking. Conservative thinking is OK for simple and static tasks like writing and talk-show-ing, but good luck getting really bright people wanting to sign on to the party of Palin.
"Someone over at the Corner said a couple of weeks ago that it's not the idea of elites that bothers him - it's this particular group of elites that are the problem. I totally agree."
So do I.
And, it seems to be a point of agreement on this thread.
The problem with urban, liberal elites of the last half century - I think conservatives are largely in agreement about their fundamental flaw, which is what inspired Bill Buckley - hardly a blazing populist - to aver that he preferred being ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory over the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard. And it wasn't because he was a Yalie.
In the old Anglo-Saxon World - up until the early 20th century - elites might be privately less than virtuous, might be mediocrities, but they nonetheless participated and upheld a society (however imperfect, or prejudiced) which inculcated classical virtues which garnered broad agreement across the political spectrum. However, since the New Deal the old elites abandoned those virtues for an abiding belief in the perfectability of man and society and a keen willingness to social engineer as much as possible to bring them into being.
I'm curious where Ross's new conservative elites will come from. I suppose we can hope that this epic fail of McCain will prove a high colonic for Republican leadership and clear out some deadwood for new thinking and new faces. But what those will be remains to be seen - and remember, electoral disaster didn't prove a rejuvenating tonic for the Tories in 1997. There's no guarantee you get a 1980 out of every 1976 or even a 1994 out of every 1992.
Yes. Time was when every American schoo=l kid couldn't get out of HS unless they had passed their Ceasar, Cicero, Vergil examinations. So, we had our elites; they just happened to be long dead.
I prefer "time-tested". But, then, I'm a Latin and Greek teacher. :-)
Ayn Rand, a very conservative author, definitely believed in elitism because her experience in communist Russia where elitism was discouraged made her hate egalitarianism so much. Maybe Joe Sixpack should read "Atlas Shrugged". Its interesting that totalitarian governments of both the left and right always go after the intellectuals as the enemy of the state.
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