David Brooks is unhappy that ordinary Americans are so ungrateful as to reject the gracious willingness of their betters to take charge of the country, correct its failings, and run their lives for them.

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation. …

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.

Being an educated sort of person myself, I find it remarkable that the positions of the community of fashion “educated” class, amounting to Luddite Catastrophism, Hedonism (tinged by a covert eugenic impulse), Appeasement, and Pacifism, really all represent extremist, self-indulgent, fantastical, and intellectually indefensible ideas, universally rejected by the mainstream traditions of Natural Science and Moral and Political Philosophy.

Education seems to have succeeded in inculcating a sense of group identity, featuring a habitual reliance on conformity as a status marker, but it has obviously not succeeded in the generality of its beneficiaries in producing people able to distinguish between established science and unverifiable models. It has produced a prominent and recognizable portion of the population with an exaggerated sense of self-entitlement and an overweening confidence in its own expertise, which at the same time demonstrates a complete inability not only to learn from history, but even to remember more than a couple of years into the past.

Our soi disant educated class typically has none of the fruits of education, beyond that produced by effective training in sophistry: skill in the manipulation of words, symbols, and ideas. Ordinary Americans commonly have a profound intellectual advantage over today’s educated elites in the possession of character and an independence of mind capable of rejecting the impulses of fashion. Ordinary Americans see through Global Warming because they have common sense. What passes for education in Mr. Brooks’s view of the world is the willing subordination of independent thought in favor the echo chamber consensus found in the establishment media. Bow to the Times’, the New Yorker’s, the New York Review of Books’ authoritative positions and perspectives and you are educated.

Some education.

This photo is making the rounds via viral email.

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

Arnold Kling sees the culture wars spinning further and further out of control and experiences despair.

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand. However, I think, also, that the progressive elite is making a last stand. My guess is that doubts are mounting among many independent voters about whether they want such a highly-charged politics. I am sticking with my bet that the Democrats will hold onto their House and Senate majorities as well as the Presidency through the elections of 2016, but relative to six months ago I feel that I am depending more on Republican incompetence than overall political trends to win that bet.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

Jeffrey Lena admires the MSM’s reportial double-standards.

On March 2nd there was a demonstration in Washington D.C. It was billed as the largest demonstration for green power/global warming awareness/stop dirty coal/ let’s all go live in a tepee, ever held. It was attended by, (are you ready for the number?), 2,500 people. That was the largest one ever! This demonstration was covered by every major television and news service. No station or alleged newspaper gave any coverage to opposing opinions. Ironically there was a blizzard that day another fact which, to the best of my knowledge, was not noted by any major news outlet.

Thirteen days later one of the first of the grassroots “Tea Parties” was held in Cincinnati Ohio. Over five thousand average middle-class folks showed up on Fountain Square in the center of the city. Their message was simple, we can’t afford our government! Did you see it on CNN? Maybe you caught it on ABC or MSNBC? If you did you need to check the strength of your prescriptions, it wasn’t on any of them. …

In thousands of cities and towns across America, hundreds of thousands of plain folks came out into the streets to say. “Enough!” This was not a protest against any party or person in particular but against a paradigm in governments from Washington D.C. to the local city halls that assume there is no end to the amount of money we are willing to kick in.

You wouldn’t know that from the coverage. Everyone from CNN to MSNBC to my local paper went out of their way to make it seem like anyone who attended one of these gatherings was a right-wing extremist! Right-wing extremist, hummm where have I heard that term lately? Wasn’t there some sort of government document leaked to the public the day before all these Tea Parties? I am not a believer in coincidence, especially in politics. I believe that the Department of Homeland Security report was released in an effort to intimidate some citizen and keep them from attending the anti-tax rallies.

These demonstrations were too many and too big to be ignored so the leftists in the media moved to their second tactic, belittle and mock.

When any small group of fringy leftwing kooks and nutcases protests anything, the leftwing punditocracy gravely stroke its collective chin and warns of the rising tide of popular indignation. But when thousands and thousands of Americans participate in more than 600 protests against taxes and federal spending in cities all across the nation, the left sneers at the symbolism and dismisses the protests as unrepresentative and contrived.

Marc Ambinder was the rare exception in the liberal punditocracy who questioned the official party-line.

The… tea-party enthusiasm on the American right has provoked a fairly typical reaction from the organized American left. It’s a fake. It involves tea bags and (a) Dick Armey. It’s got the consistency of astroturf, not natural grass. …

In the age of hyperconnectivity, just what would an organic grassroots movement look like, anyway? Are people who’ve organized on behalf of causes before forbidden from joining? Can the movement not accept help and money from outside players?

Ambinder’s right, of course. And the scale of yesterday’s protests ought to be considered far more significant in the light of the consideration that protests and street theater are not really our thing. Conservatives write angry letters to the editorial page and argue with liberal friends. We don’t typically march around in public waving signs.

Conservatives tend to be busy and productive people with responsibilities. It’s a lot harder to assemble a mob of mortgage-paying adults with jobs they need to be at than to get yourself a gang of students and urban slackers ready for a lark. The thousands seen yesterday obviously constituted only the smallest tip of a much larger iceberg, an iceberg which does reliably vote.

Don Surber admires the fair-minded impartiality of the Bridgeport (Renamed: Connecticut) Post.

Not that after 30+ years in this business that I know anything about newspapers. I mean, after all, I do not think that the most important news story in the state of Connecticut would be the agitprop theater of federally financed lefties (ACORN takes grants) protesting executive salaries.

That involved 40 people including some from Washington. This is what they do for a living. They are professionals.

AP originally reported the reporters and news crews outnumbered the Paid Protesters 2-to-1.

The Conn Post gave this item two big pictures, a main story, and a side story.

Buried inside was a story of 300 people in Ridgefield staging a Tea Party against the entire $700 billion bailout and the subsequent $787 billion stimulus.

An actual grassroots movement was brushed off with “Tea Party’ protests spending to stimulate economy.”

The reporter assigned to the story, Eugene Driscoll, had an ironic line: “The difference here: many of the protesters were political conservatives who had never felt it necessary to take to the streets before.”

One of the classic examples.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.