Claremont Institute: The Roots of Liberal Condescension

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William Voegeli has composed an excellent essay for the Claremont Institute. Here are the opening stanzas:

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved the Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."

The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Palin's campaigning as a devout, plain-spoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists, and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Buckley's identification of the political fault-line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:

We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.

Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.

This one simply must be read in its entirety, which you can do here.

- JP