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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Egghead Obama love |
| 2008-10-22 |
| Michael Knox beran, National Review Intellectuals on the Right are routinely accused of selling their souls to the devil and sacrificing their independent judgment in order to give conservative leaders cover. But which province of egghead-land is suspending disbelief now in order to indulge a high-brow hysteria not seen since Harvard decamped to the Potomac under Good King Jack? Camelot-fever is raging out of control among the high-minded dilettantes of the Republic. . . . Like many conservatives, I continue to be puzzled by the mandarin classes’ “thing about Barack.” True, he can give a good speech. So can Sarah Palin. He was a community organizer and a state legislator. She was a mayor and has experience in business. He inspires his base. She inspires hers. Why do so many intellectuals pronounce him supremely qualified, her not at all? It must come down to the books. She hasn’t written any. He has written two. And intellectuals, who are all too easily seduced by certain kinds of poetry, reflexively adore literary style. One of the books can be dismissed. The Audacity of Hope recites, in a manner calculated to give as little offense as possible to the tender-minded, a history of the policy debates of recent years. A lot of people bought the book, but how many read it cover to cover, no skipping? What is interesting in it is lost in deserts of tedious prose; you sense that a bunch of research memos prepared by the staff were reworked by the author into a book. As a specimen of assisted authorship (take a look at the acknowledgements page) it falls considerably short of the pièce de résistance of the genre, Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Dreams from My Father is another matter. It is a good book, distinguished by the excellence of its style, the vividness of its characters, and the clarity of its portraiture. It is the work of a cultivated, curious, and introspective man seeking to understand himself . . . the youthful quest-book of an intellectual, and as such it helps explain the infatuation with Obama so conspicuously on display in the salons of nerd-dom. Many intellectuals who support him see their own qualities reflected in him; he gives a little boost to their amour-propre. But intellectuals should be wary of anointing philosopher-kings. They have a poor record when it comes to judging character. Plato’s heart was broken by Dionysius of Syracuse. George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Wilson, and the New York Times’s Walter Duranty carried water for Stalin; Lincoln Steffens did the same for Lenin. Voltaire’s transactions with Frederick, Diderot’s with Catherine, Swift’s with Bolingbroke, were not wholly creditable to them. Alas, too few of Camelot’s courtiers are left to remind a younger generation of brain workers of the dangers of intellectual whoredom. Palin is the perfect foil for the mandarin classes because she is not an intellectual. That makes her, in egghead world, less qualified than Barack. Yet very few presidents have been intellectuals. The Adamses to some extent; Jefferson of course; Madison maybe; Theodore Roosevelt certainly; Wilson possibly. (John Maynard Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, raises grave doubts about the quality of Woodrow’s intellect.) Wilson was also a white supremacist who segregated the federal government and one of those megalomaniacs who wanted to re-engineer human society and the closest thing to a fascist we've ever had in the Oval Office so far. Some things are so absurdly wrong that it takes a true intellectual believe in them. A tendency to worship uncritically the stylish and more intellectualized forms of power is one of the vices of the intellectual caste. A tendency to overlook the virtues of leaders who have not written books or attended special finishing schools is another. Whenever he is tempted to dismiss a candidate like Sarah Palin, the conscientious egghead should first consult an entry in Emerson’s journal of June 1863: Lincoln. We must accept the results of universal suffrage . . . . We shall have coarse men . . . . You cannot refine Mr Lincoln’s taste, or extend his horizon . . . . But this we must be ready for, and let the clown appear. Five months later the clown composed the Gettysburg Address. Memo to the intoxicated intelligentsia: It’s time to sober up. It’s also time to put the qualification debate aside. Given what we know now, both Obama and Palin are qualified to lead. The question for the voter is: in which direction do you want to be led? |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 When I got accepted to law school, I was very impressed by all the professors who had Harvard degrees. Then I actually met them. Most of my profs were good teachers and likeable people. Some of the ones with the flashiest credentials were the worst--both as teachers and as human beings. On the other hand, the two older profs who had the least impressive credentials were the coolest people and the best teachers. Needless to say, I no longer overvalue Harvard law degrees. |
| Posted by: Mike 2008-10-22 17:09 |
| #1 I think if we were all honest, we would stop calling them "elites" and start calling them "egg-heads". That's what they are little awkward Humpty Dumpty egg-heads. |
| Posted by: Betty 2008-10-22 15:00 |