I am so over Andrew Sullivan. His incessant Palin rants remind me of nothing so much as the crazed Obama COLB people. Conspiracy theories can be great fun, but like their close cousins, they’re pretty terrible ways of making electoral decisions.
Of course, that’s what happens in a democracy (see also: here). Populism wins out every time in a numbers game. The only way out is to have a real elite that commands real respect, because it speaks to real people.
Bobby Kennedy quoted Aeschylus from memory, but the truly remarkable part of his speech was that people responded. Here were admittedly unoriginal ideas, but they were framed in the language of a cultural elite, and they still worked. There were no riots in Indianapolis. It wasn’t just his Boston Brahmin accent or his clothes that marked him out: he was talking about Aeschylus, whose name many of my Yale classmates wouldn’t recognized. It wasn’t a prepared speech. It wasn’t a calculated ploy. It was just the way he thought and talked — and it worked, because erudition was respectable.
We don’t have that natural, intellectual elite any more. We sneak it in from time to time: when Obama gave his Call to Renewal keynote, he used Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. He didn’t say so, and indeed he couldn’t have — forget about Honest Tea and arugula rocket, just imagine the pundits’ response to name-dropping a Danish existentialist!
On one of his wild oscillations, Sullivan swings close to this:
The good is a society where genuine talent and expertise and education are valued, and regarded as virtues in a public official. Conservatives - until they turned into religious populists - believed it was a good thing that our leaders have advanced education, for example. This is a good elite, and we need it. The bad sort of elite is when the educated class starts looking down their noses at the wisdom and common sense of ordinary people, insulate themselves from where they came from and their families and have contempt for the mores of many less educated Americans.
(Unfortunately, he jumps right back into the attack-dog politics, sans lipstick, in detailing Palin’s educational inadequacies.)
So sure, Sarah Palin isn’t an intellectual. But that’s not the problem, or at least not the root: America, and the West as a whole, no longer see intellectualism as an aspect of the good life. It is, at best, a career for disconnected eggheads. The rise of Kronman’s “research ideal,” or Foucault’s “specific intellectual,” has severed our belief in universality of truth. The modern intellectual is a specialist, concerned with a “local” truth. He doesn’t claim to find meaning or define a telos, and the tradition he engages with is only the literature of his own field. He has a speciality, and he accumulates facts for the storehouse of the ages. It doesn’t tell him, or anyone else, how to live.
No wonder the politics of ressentiment have frightened us away from elitism. When we define an elite simply by its irrelevance to everyone else, of course populism is the only answer. It isn’t enough to have joined in the argument of an intellectual tradition, or even to have come to an answer: if we leave the cave, it’s only so we can go back better prepared.
So study Aeschylus. Study Shakespeare, and Eliot, and the best things thought and said by men — but don’t hole yourself up in the ivory tower. Come back down. Use it. Show Indianapolis that it matters, that it makes you a better leader, that you understand. Stop engaging in the phony populism of an entitled elite. You don’t just deserve respect. Do something to earn it.
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