Palin Populism vs. the Pathology of the Elites

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Michael Knox Beran, author of The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, writes at National Review that Sarah Palin is right to question the "degree fetish" that leads to elitism:

Those who come forth from the most prestigious seminaries eager to follow President Obama’s advice and go into government are conscious only of a magnificent generosity of intention. This is the pathology of the elites.

It is characteristic of the more ardent champions of the social imagination that they seek to use the state to dominate not merely the economy of a nation but its culture as well. Where they succeed in dominating the economy, the result is fewer material goods. Where they succeed in dominating the culture, the result is fewer cultural goods.

The culture wars that have lifted Sarah Palin to prominence are best understood as an expression of popular frustration with a dwindling supply of cultural goods. The social state has banished a variety of these goods from places (such as schools) where they once traded briskly. Education in the West has traditionally been the process by which grown-ups civilize the young by introducing them to their moral and cultural heritage. America’s public schools have abdicated this role; traditional methods of cultural initiation have been replaced by vapid forms of “social” study. Social education, Paul Goodman said, is founded on the belief that children are “human social animals” who must be “socialized” and “adjusted to the social group.” The Faustian disavowal of the moral imagination, together with an embrace of a barren philosophy of acultural socialization, has resulted in ever more culturally vacuous public schools.

Ordinary people resent the elite classes not simply because they associate these classes with the development and imposition of these new social techniques, but also because they know that these classes are much less likely to suffer from the resulting cultural privations. The elite classes avoid the cultural problem by sending their children to private schools where humane traditions of culture (with roots in the old grammar and Latin schools) are carried on much more faithfully than in the universities. Ordinary people can’t afford to do that; they must either put up with the social curriculum or home-school their children.

Governor Palin, in contrasting “American values” with the aspirations of “elite education,” warns us of the arrogance — and the moral “spinelessness” — that today’s higher learning too often fosters. Knowledge divorced from what Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb (following Burke) call the “moral imagination” is a dangerous thing.

Beran's unabridged essay is well worth the read here.

- JP