August 7, 2010

The Best and the Brightest? Yeah, Right

On any day that Victor Davis Hanson writes on any subject, everyone else can just shut up and sit down. I'll go first:

The common denominator? If one were to survey the elite campuses around 1975 and talk to those in law school, poly sci, or the humanities, then imagine them 35 years later as our elite leaders in government, the media, the universities, the foundations, and the arts, one could pretty much expect what we now have.

The present symptoms that characterize both our popular culture and current governance窶敗hrill self-righteousness; abstract communalism juxtaposed with concrete pursuit of the aristocratic good life; race/class/gender cosmic sermonizing with private school and Ivy league for the kids; crass and tasteless public expression; a serial inability to take responsibility for one窶冱 actions; the bipartisan mega-deficits; the inability to cut pensions and social security for the baby boomers窶杷rom the trivial to the fundamental, all derive from a bankrupt cohort that came of age in the sixties and seventies.

We see the arrested adolescence and hypocrisy that come from that sermonizing generation, whether in Al Franken窶冱 puerile face-making, the ideologically-driven suicide at Newsweek; the steady destruction of the New York Times; John Kerry窶冱 tax-avoiding yacht, the Great Gatsby Clinton wedding, Michelle on the Costa del Sol, Nancy Pelosi窶冱 jet, Tim Geithner窶冱 tax skipping, and the constant race-card playing of a Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Yes, one walk across the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed power. If that is reductionism, so be it. -- Works and Days サ A Rather Angry America

Posted by Vanderleun at August 7, 2010 8:27 PM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

History suggests that any people can be conditioned to view its political elite as a superior group, a class above and apart from the hoi polloi it's been appointed by God to shepherd. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it, after all. The Obamunists' error wasn't in thinking it could replicate that mindset among Americans; it was in getting the sequence of events wrong.

The groundlings-to-nobles mindset must be in place before the elite assumes aristocratic airs and behavior. That requires the steady -- "progressive," if you will -- application of two sets of measures:

1. One set must be designed to induce majority reliance on the government for all its needs and desires. That is, it must erect a welfare state so expansive and all-embracing that the common man comes to look first to the State for just about everything.
2. The second set, which should proceed in tandem with the first, must elicit a background buzz of fear of "them," against whom the State is the only defense. Every identifiable community of interest must have a "them" to fear. This is merely the application of the Roman maxim Divide et impera, which our under-educated populace has mostly never learned of.

Instead, the Obamunists have taken an America which is overwhelmingly still self-reliant and has treated it like a helpless welfare client. They've appealed to racial, ethnic, and sectional suspicions and hostilities that, while not wholly illusory, aren't nearly strong enough to support their ambitions. And they've taken on the behavior of lords and ladies of exalted rank, including several lordly and unwise counterblasts against conservative lese majeste, that few Americans are inclined to grant them.

Had they been in less of a hurry to award themselves the perquisites of aristocracy, they might well have succeeded in implanting themselves in our consciousnesses as exactly that. But they heeded neither Tacitus nor Orwell, and have reaped the whirlwind thereby.

Let's pray that their ideological successors won't learn from their mistakes. Posted by: Francis W. Porretto at August 8, 2010 2:58 AM

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