Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.

–quipped Columbia University political science professor Wallace S. Sayre (well before Henry Kissinger).

Allen Guelzo argues, however, that those stakes, which include the opportunity to form the background assumptions and fundamental perspective of society’s educated elite, may not really be so petty after all.

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Until recent times, for most people, both food and sex were considerably less available than they are today.

In the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt meditates on the curious way in which, at the present time, the community of fashion has come to place a strongly principled ethical focus on eating, just when old-style sexual morality has been replaced by total latitudinarianism.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Yuval Levin, in Commentary, reflects on Sarah Palin’s candidacy and what it revealed about class and politics in contemporary America.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. …

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog‘s Best Essays of the Year.

Velociman has harsh, but fair, comments on the American left.

I have no gripe with those who believe there are different paths to an ideal, healthy America. I’m fairly convinced that America is no Leftist’s dream, however, hence the charge of dishonesty. The smallest of children can smoke out a platitude, and I take no solace in the Left’s charade that they want as I do for the nation, and western civilization as a whole. It is a bald-faced lie, built upon a shifting, unstable Sargasso Sea of prevarication. …

The sad truth is the Leftist cohort, proudly represented by the Democratic Party, has engaged in a decades-long lie of being for the “little guy”, the “forgotten man”, when in fact they are power-mad usurpers of freedom, whose only interest in the little guy is how much of his hard-earned money they can abscond with, and to what nefarious disproven social experiment they can apply it.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Gerard van der Leun via the News Junkie

Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, identifies the source of the irrational immoderation and limitless self-righteousness of today’s community of fashion as our Gramscian-hijacked educational system.

Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students’ absorption of their professors’ lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.

At least it’s unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God’s ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world — certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics — with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one’s knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.

In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning — after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

And hopefully right next to where the insufferable ass who wrote this lives:

The total population of terrorists ebbs and flows all the time. When the number goes up by one hundred, no one much notices. If the number goes up by one hundred because we release some previously identified terrorists, there is or will be a public outcry. But it’s the same consequence.

Fewer terrorists are better than more terrorists, to be sure. But a terrorist we release is not obviously worse than a terrorist who was free in the first place.

We evaluate outcomes differently when we feel we are in control or should be in control. We should examine this intuition carefully, since it is not always justified.

We also treat an outcome differently when we feel it allows an enemy of ours to “get back at us.” I suspect this difference in feeling is not usually justified and that it is the primary driver behind the fear of releasing terrorists.

I can think of “political theater” reasons why an attack from a released terrorist would be worse than an attack from an “already free” terrorist. Overall I do not yet feel that we are thinking about this issue rationally.

Tyler Cowen is obviously so smart that he’ll simply rationalize all those terrorists into utter irrelevance before they can shoot him or blow him up.

While somehow I really suspect, in my heart of hearts, that the learned economics professor would very vehemently object to becoming a personal part of his own thought experiment, on the other hand, from his disinterested point of view, releasing tens or hundreds of murderous fanatics far, far from the DC suburbs where they most probably will harm no one other than some Iraqi or Afghan civilians, or the occasional US soldier, constitutes a perfectly acceptable exercise in statistical theory.

One of my classmates this morning was demanding that I explain why Conservatism has taken an anti-intellectual turn (Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber). I replied:

Conservatism isn’t anti-intellectual. Conservatism is anti a pseudo-intellectual community of fashion following the lead of the treasonous clerks who have hijacked the academic establishment. Why should it be surprising in this “the-great-professor-has-no-clothes” era, when the elite university class rushes to support drivelling nonsense like Global Warming catastrophism and Socialism, that the contrast between the educated fools and the wiser representative of ordinary Common Sense has become a standard cultural meme?

Elite education used to be aimed at producing leaders capable of rational and independent judgement, familiar with the broad sweep of Western culture, men of integrity willing to defend their civilization, their country, and the right. What our elite institutions have been producing for a very long time is a cadre of adequately glib functionaries, nominally acquainted with the standard cultural heights (from a Cliff notes, test taking perspective), opportunistic and calculating and conformist, with no fixed principles beyond sentimentality and a watchful eye constantly fixed on the decrees of the community of fashion. The older elite could be calculated to rebuke folly and resist popular enthusiams. The current elite only aspires to prominent positions near the front of the mob. Our generation grew up more spoiled and pampered than any generation in previous human history. We were favored with greater ease and opportunity than our parents and grandparents ever dreamed of, so, when we went to college, what did the overwhelming majority of our generation do? They rebelled against the terrible tyranny of middle-class American life, betrayed their country and their less-privileged contemporaries fighting and dying in the field to support… Communism. What an opportunity for dramaturgy and self-righteous poses the Vietnam War provided! Any snot-nosed, spotty-faced adolescent could get up on a soapbox and commence denouncing his country and its adult leadership from a supposedly morally-superior high horse and catch himself later in his glory on the 6 PM Evening News. And the generality of today’s American elite hasn’t changed one bit with age.

This is the American intellectual community, a tree hugging, Socialism-embracing, holier-than-thou, cause-loving, empty-headed collection of noisy poseurs and conformists. American Conservatism is simply a movement applying a critical gloss to the mass politics of the last century and attempting a serious defense of the traditional values of the European West and the principles on which the Government of the United States was founded. These days you have to be an extremist radical to argue that state and federal constitutions should be read to mean what they actually say, not interpreted so as to turn seasonal rain puddles into “navigable waterways” or equal protection before the law into a mandate to coerce your fellow citizens.

Mencius Moldbug, most prolix of bloggers, goes on at great length, but is still often worth a read.

The mysterious Moldbug, it has been learned, is a 1992 Brown graduate who majored in Computer Science. Further details here.

In this alleged introduction to his blog, Moldbug accurately identifies the enemy (complete with whimsical H.P. Lovecraft allusions).

[I]n post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, “public opinion.” This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag.

Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of “public opinion.” Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.

This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty. …

There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. Nor, most important for our hypothesis, did they come from the universities; in the 20th century, periods of reaction are always periods of anti-university activity. (McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.)

The principle applies even in wars. In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field.

And we are starting to piece the puzzle together. The leftward direction is, itself, the principle of organization. In a two-party democratic system, with Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, etc, the intelligentsia is always Whig. Their party is simply the party of those who want to get ahead. It is the party of celebrities, the ultra-rich, the great and good, the flexible of conscience. Tories are always misfits, losers, or just plain stupid – sometimes all three.

And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral – although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with. …

Whatever you make of the left-right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries. Whatever this unfathomable stellar emanation may be, it has gotten us from the Stuarts to Barack Obama. Personally, I would like a refund. But that’s just me. …

intellectuals cluster to the left, generally adopting as a social norm the principle of pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit, because like everyone else they are drawn to power. The left is chaos and anarchy, and the more anarchy you have, the more power there is to go around. The more orderly a system is, the fewer people get to issue orders. The same asymmetry is why corporations and the military, whose system of hierarchical executive authority is inherently orderly, cluster to the right.

Once the cluster exists, however, it works by any means necessary. The reverence of anarchy is a mindset in which an essentially Machiavellian, tribal model of power flourishes. To the bishops of the Cathedral, anything that strengthens their influence is a good thing, and vice versa. The analysis is completely reflexive, far below the conscious level. Consider this comparison of the coverage between the regime of Pinochet and that of Castro. Despite atrocities that are comparable at most – not to mention a much better record in providing responsible and effective government – Pinochet receives the full-out two-minute hate, whereas the treatment of Castro tends to have, at most, a gentle and wistful disapproval. …

[T]he problem is not just that our present system of government – which might be described succinctly as an atheistic theocracy – is accidentally similar to Puritan Massachusetts. As anatomists put it, these structures are not just analogous. They are homologous. This architecture of government – theocracy secured through democratic means – is a single continuous thread in American history.

Joel Stein happily admits that conservatives are right: lefties like himself don’t love America

Conservatives feel personally blessed to have been born in the only country worth living in. I, on the other hand, just feel lucky to have grown up in a wealthy democracy. If it had been Australia, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Israel or one of those Scandinavian countries with more relaxed attitudes toward sex, that would have been fine with me too.

Read the whole thing.

Reading this makes it even more depressing to remember that these kind of people won the last election.

Nicholas Kristof finds himself forced to admit that, despite their constant yammering about the less fortunate, liberals are typically not personally very charitable at all.

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Read the whole thing.

Really there is nothing surprising here.

Liberalism is a philosophy of limitless self-entitlement, which undertakes simply to dispense with Constitutional limits, federalism, and the wisdom of the ages in order to get what the liberal desires… right now. What liberals desire is power, affirmation of their self-importance, the ability to call the shots, and massive federal intervention to tidy up the world on their behalf.

Liberals live in a comfortable haute bourgeois mileu, and are susceptible to self doubt concerning their own worthiness. The existence of different, less eligible human circumstances both offends the liberal aesthetic sense, and makes the liberal conscience uneasy.

Naturally, the liberal feels that all of the world’s untidyness, unruliness, and unhappiness ought to be promptly and efficiently cleared away at the public expense. Tax dollars taken from wealthier people engaged in less obviously defensible occupations than the liberal’s own will be more than ample to pay for all that, the liberal just naturally supposes.

It is precisely this unmoderated selfishness, this unlimited sense of self-entitlement which makes the urban enclaves where liberals abound so unlivable. Government in those places is always impractically overreaching, administratively incompetent, and fiscally wildly out of control. Local politics is always a snakepit of activism, corruption, and interest groups squabbling over every issue, every decision, and every dollar like a pack of wolves.

Joseph Epstein has taught for too many years to believe that conspicuous success in today’s elite universities is commonly a testament to good character. Au contraire, Epstein argues: “Some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools.”

Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to what the world–“that ignorant ninny,” as Henry James called it–thinks superior schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the London School of Economics; like dead flies on flypaper, the names of the schools Obama’s new appointees attended dotted Brooks’s column.

Here is the column’s first paragraph:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

This administration will be, as Brooks writes, “a valedictocracy.” The assumption here is that having all these good students–many of them possibly “toll-frees,” as high-school students who get 800s on their SATs used to be known in admissions offices–running the country is obviously a pretty good thing. Brooks’s one jokey line in the column has it that “if a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Since my appreciation of David Brooks is considerable, and since I agree with him on so many things, why don’t I agree with him here?

The reason is that, after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as “the good student.” …

Read the whole thing.

Mark Stinson, in the Chatham (North Carolina) Journal Weekly, laments the invasion, and take-over, of Siler City by intolerant representatives of the contemporary community of fashion.

We have a certain number of people that are transplanted here because they wanted some space. We have others that have money that wanted space too; that like the city life but want to live in the country. These people use their wealth to force the rest of us to do what they want. …

Bobby Smith of S&W Speed Shop in Siler City has occupied the same corner lot for almost 40 years. He has been a constant tax paying citizen and local fixture around this area. …

This brings me to the invasion of the jug making pot heads that want to turn Siler City into a smaller version of Chapel Hill. You see the arts incubator has grabbed a chunk of mid down town Siler City and proceeded to start transforming the town into a Chapel Hill / Carrboro clone. Bobby never in 40 years had one complaint about a vehicle sitting in his parking spots beside his shop or parts of vehicles stored in his lot behind his shop until the artsy bunch cleaned up town (as they put it) and located a pottery next to him. They have constantly whined and complained to the town forcing Bobby to move just about everything off his property to accommodate their desires to make downtown visually pleasing to them.

Recently they sent a police officer because Bobby had his truck. which he is repairing sitting in his parking spot “turned the wrong way” and they didn’t like the looks of that truck so they wanted it gone. …

Kenny Clark is feeling the effects of their constant complaints as well and Clapp Brothers will be next on the hit list if something isn’t done to balance things out again. They have already complained about things such as shipping crates temporarily stored in Clapps lot.

I personally love arts n crafts. I enjoy learning new ways to be creative but not at anyone else’s expense. If I want to see pottery I go to Jug Town where it is done the right way. I may be wrong, but in my opinion anyone can learn to make a pot. Not everyone can fix a bull dozer, build engines or repair a truck that helps members of our community make an honest living. …

does it make sense to bully the small established businesses out just because you want to make pots? The Arts incubator could never draw the kind of money some of these business have and never will. People involved with the Arts Incubator may have millions but that money isn’t being spread around the community. I was all excited about the arts incubator coming to Siler City until I saw how it grew to push people aside and trample those that are established in the community just to add “culture” to Chatham. …

I went through town to see a naked blue lady on top of a building, a half a naked man and a naked anatomically correct statue of a man on a street corner and honestly was upset. I don’t want my children to see such things in what is supposed to be a public place. I find it offensive. Is it better to be offended by art or annoyed with an eyesore of machine parts that are supposed to be outside a garage anyway?