Excellent WSJ article trashing Palin and explaining why the right is so anti-intellectual

[Hamlette]

Many things ended on Tuesday evening when Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, and depending on how you voted you are either celebrating or mourning this weekend. But no matter what our political affiliations, we should all -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- be toasting the return of Governor Sarah Palin to Juneau, Alaska.

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

snip

What a strange turn of events. For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. snip

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against?

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122610558004810243.html?mod=article-outset-box

For years we've been saying the right has waged a war on science and every thing else intellectual. Most don't believe us but here it is, in the WSJ. Take that Mika (thinking of her being shocked when Larry O'Donnel told Pat Buchanan that the republican party is against science or whatever he said that caused her to laugh at LARRY, not Pat. Wish she'd read this.)

[ROh70]

1. Mika is taking the whole Palin thing personally. I like her otherwise.

[TxBlue]

3. She's neurotic

Is she abuser of something? She just seems like she's about to go off the edge. Feel sorry for her.

[TexasObserver]

50. Mika is an alcoholic who thinks and behaves like a middle school child.

Her entire support of Palin is based upon her delusion that she and Palin have both been held back by a society that doesn't understand them.

She's the intellectual runt in her family. You can imagine how her siblings and father roll their eyes at Thanksgiving or Christmas when she tries to offer meaningful opinions. She's a mindless news reader. How she got that job is the real question.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

2. k and r. nt

[Fluffdaddy]

6. Ditto

[TxBlue]

4. Thanks this article...wondering about the belligerent

anti-intellectualism of Palin's appeal.

Living in Tx close to Ok border, there's an embarrassing silence when I find out a friend or customer likes Palin. Realize not everyone, while congenial, may not have same number of light bulbs in the ole chandelier.

[livetohike]

5. I think Larry O'Donnell said that the conservatives celebrate

stupidity :-) (or something like that).

[carnie_sf]

7. ignorance nt

[livetohike]

11. Thanks

:hi:

[Hamlette]

13. yes, thanks, I went back and listened he said celebrates ignorance and Mika laughed at him

that is what this article says though, so I sent it to her.

[Hokie]

33. Interesting article

She really nails the modern anti intellectual, anti science conservative movement. I work with a bunch of these types. They throw away reason and embraced religious and political fundamentalism. Many of them are well educated but lost the grasp of rational thought somewhere along the way.

[BrklynLiberal]

8. I would guess that at some point, some RW politicians had an epiphany.

They came to the conclusion that the ignorant are easier to manipulate. If they could make ignorance a source of pride, then they could gather all the ignorant, narrow-minded together and create a force to be reckoned with. They could maintain control endlessly over these "subjects".
A few of these ignorant ones even rose within the ranks of the party...e.g. Tom Delay.
But it would seem that they underestimated the forces of economics. The pocketbook seems to be able to overcome all.
Add to that the deaths of many of the finest young people in the country due to a pointless war...

Once people started to feel the sting of these policies, there was an awakening...like that of a sleeping giant.
The "ignorant masses" were not all so pliable any more. Those intellectuals and others who were not so easily manipulated banded together with those that had recently seen the light.

The arrogance and incompetence of those in charge started to take its toll.

The result has been a symbolic uprising and takeover by the masses.
It is almost poetic, and has the elements of a Greek tragedy.

[Hamlette]

15. I'm not sure that's the author's point. I think he argues the right was just reacting to the

intellectuals on the left and drank their own Kool aid

As he quotes at the end of the article:

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

[BrklynLiberal]

16. Do you think it died with Wm F. Buckley Jr???

[Hamlette]

17. I think his explanation is better

it was on its way out before Buckley died. It is a short article and makes tons of sense to me. I think he would say the beginning of the end was Irving Kristol, Bill's dad.

[BrklynLiberal]

21. Thanks. There were so many one-time liberals that become ultra conservatives....

It seems so ironic that the roots of the neo-conservative movement was in the liberal movement...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States from the rejection of the social liberalism, moral relativism, and New Left counterculture of the 1960s. In the United States, neoconservatives align themselves with mainstream conservative values, such as the free market, limited welfare, and traditional cultural values. Their key distinction is in international affairs, where they prefer an interventionist approach that seeks to defend national interests.

The term neoconservative was originally used as a criticism against liberals who had "moved to the right".<1><2> Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the usage of neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy.<3> According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by "the notion that liberalism" had failed and "no longer knew what it was talking about."<4>

The first major neoconservative to embrace the term and considered its founder is Irving Kristol, father of William Kristol, who would become the founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, and wrote of his neoconservative views in the 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative.'"<1> Kristol's ideas had been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine.<5> Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was calling himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".<6><7> The Reagan Doctrine was considered anti-Communist and in opposition to Soviet Union global influence and considered central to American foreign policy until the end of the Cold War, shortly before Bill Clinton became president of the United States. Neoconservative influence on American foreign policy later became central with the Bush Doctrine.

Prominent neoconservative periodicals are Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Neoconservatives are associated with foreign policy initiatives of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), The Heritage Foundation, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

<snip>

Many supported Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, derisively known as the Senator from Boeing, during his 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were future neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Felix Rohatyn. In the late 1970s neoconservative support moved to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.

Michael Lind, a self-described former neoconservative, explained:<8>

Neoconservatism... originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' ... many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center... Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists.

In his semi-autobiographical book, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol cites a number of influences on his own thought, including not only Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss but also the skeptical liberal literary critic Lionel Trilling. The influence of Leo Strauss and his disciples on neoconservatism has generated some controversy, with Lind asserting:<14>

For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a noble lie. It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical elite in order to ensure social order... In being a kind of secretive elitist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it.

[Hamlette]

31. well yes, but there are not that many conservatives or even republicans who identify as neocons

they are a subset of the party and I do not think neoconservativism is the reason for the GOP celebrating ignorance.

You can see why they do it, Joe the Plumber is exhibit one. He is not educated, informed or very bright. He exists at the margins of the economy, going on welfare a couple of times, being a plumbers helper without union affiliation or license, a pretty bottom rung blue collar job economically at least. Yet he believes the GOP has the right tax policy.

The GOP has tricked him into thinking that he too will earn $250,000 one day and when he does, the dirty democrats will take it all away along with his guns. The GOP has told him the democrats are a bunch of snobby, over educated, elites who know nothing but who look down their noses at him and think he is inferior. All the while the GOP is using him as it used Palin.

A certain percentage of any population is smart to very smart. Call them intellectual elites if you will but they exist on both sides. They have an uneasy relationship with the rest of us (them if you will). The smarties dare not appear smart so as to seem like they are putting down the unwashed masses so we talk about populist movements and stuff but in reality none of us want Palin or Joe the plumber in control. We have to convince them to vote for us while keeping their paws of the levers of power.

As he explains in the article, the left has done it too but with the radical chic instead of the populist chic. Both are wrong but I have no idea what the answer is.

This time the right did it thinking Palin was smart but could appeal to JTP because she seemed so dumb. Joke seems to be on them, they just don't know it yet.

[Alcibiades]

45. This brand of conservative

is unabashedly intellectual. The party that the Republican Party has become is the opposite.

I'm not sure, though, that most Straussians are ex-liberals. The story of strauss' influence on modern conservatism is a bit overblown--how is it to reconcile a theorist of philosophical kingship with a political party that prides itself on its inability to read? :shrug:

[onefreespiritedchick]

9. An excellent piece indeed! n/t

[myrna minx]

10. K&R n/t

[pinto]

12. Great snip. Bookmarked for a read later. Thanks.

[footinmouth]

14. Thanks for the link

I'm sending it off to my fundie brother who just loved Sarah. I tried to explain to him that I didn't want her anywhere near the red button but he didn't get it. Maybe an article from the WSJ will help convince him.

[Hamlette]

18. note that at the end of the article the author reveals he's a liberal so maybe not?

[Alcibiades]

46. Probably way over his head

Too long, literary references--not for fundies.

[Stand and Fight]

19. Good, good stuff. n/t

[yellowcanine]

20. Bill Maher called the Palin Republicans the "know nothing party."

Great historical reference. Interestingly, the original Know Nothings were anti-immigrant, anti Catholics and many of them found their home in the Republican Party by 1860. So one way to look at is that the Palinites are just returning home.

[jsmirman]

25. That is an absurdly simplistic and twisted rendering of the relationship between

the Know Nothing Party and the Republican Party of 1860. The Republican Party of 1860 represented so many things that- even if the Know Nothings ended up joining it in bulk - had nothing to do with Know Nothingism.

The Republican Party of 1860 had flaws, but FAR, far more virtues.

And Palinites sure as shit aren't finding their way home to that type of party.

They would ne much more at home with the Breckinridge Democrats, who were all about whipping the masses into a frenzy of hate.

[yellowcanine]

34. Well you need to read my post again. I said, "many of the KNs found their home in the Republican

Party by 1860". That is a true statement. In no way did I suggest that the Republicans were the successors of the KNs which you seem to suggest I am saying. As for the part about Palin - a bit of hyperbole, yes, but I happen to think that yes, the Palinistas have more in common with the KNs than with the Republican Party now or then (1860). I do think you did not read my post very carefully.

[jsmirman]

39. Your idea of any sort of historical narrative that involved them in Palin people coming home

is just something that doesn't wash for me. And that necessitated the other points that you weren't painting a full enough picture of the connection between the Know Nothings and the Republican Party. Not interested in any extended back and forth on this, so I expect this will be my last post on the subject.

[jsmirman]

22. Article kind of goes hand in hand with my post on Palin, although

this line:

"They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it."

I hate and call bullshit on.

But yes, she is the culmination of this dangerous and pathetic sickness in their movement. And I still find her scary, because as the article suggests, they're no longer even in control of it. See, Jon Stewart, McCain and Frankenstein and "Help!"

[lunatica]

23. The Rush's are intelligent sociopaths who know their audience well

Palin is like Rush Limpaugh. She knows her audience and we saw her whip them into a frenzy in the exact same way Rush does. She could easily get a strong following just like he has if she went into radio or tv. She knows the language of hatred and the sarcastic tone (Rush uses sarcasm the same way) that feeds into their envy and anger at people who are better educated and smarter than they are. Rush and Palin demonize the good works of people like Obama by belittling their 'community organizing' knowing full well that they would be the people in those communities and not the people helping them.

There really is a deep angry envy, and in many cases it's probably subconscious. So many ignorant people would rather continue to be ignorant and just hate people who are smarter for 'having it easy', as if anyone who uses their intelligence to get ahead has it all just handed to them.

[BrklynLiberal]

26. The technique is scapegoating..used very effectively by "politicians"

to rile up their constituency and gain or retain power.

[lunatica]

28. Yeah, but I think there's a difference because the audience is willfully ignorant

And proud of it. They like to wear their ignorance and use anger to keep it. So in this case the audience is allowing itself to be manipulated because it give them a fix to keep them pumped up with rage. My point is that there's no reason to be ignorant in our country. It's a deliberate choice for people like Joe the Plumber. They would rather be angry and resent the people who use their intelligence than make the effort to educate themselves.

We all have the exact same access to libraries, schools, tv, news, newspapers, etc. In our country one must be willfully ignorant to be ignorant.

[bettyellen]

49. "We all have the exact same access to libraries, schools, tv, news, newspapers, etc." WRONG!!

although i agree w the rest of your post, that part is nonsense. it's insulting,

[gravity]

24. Very well written

There used to be sound reasoning on some of the conservative ideas, but now the party has fallen into mindless culture wars and anti-intellectualism.

There needs to be an intelligent check on the left, that is open to pragmatic solutions and reform, instead of an ideology war. The ironic thing is that many in the Democratic party already serve that purpose in the DLC, and that the republicans are finding it harder and harder to find a place in American politics.

[kitkat65]

27. For giggles

It's not the best Photoshop job and probably not very original, but I had fun.

[Blue For You]

40. LOL!

[eridani]

29. Conservatives think there is such a thing as the public interest?

Coulda fooled me. Looks to me like they want to privatize everything and fuck the public. Wasn't it Thatcher that said there isn't any such thing as "society?"

[my2sense]

30. Great Article

[Miss Chybil]

32. "the truth is that their audience has now shaped them."

Yes, that is the truth. Republican Party = Rich, arrogant, self-centered, selfish, racist bastards and poor, ignorant, arrogant, self-centered, racist fools.

[RagAss]

35. "Let's hit them now, while we got the muscle !"

Let the media savage them. Don't ever let them back in the arena of credibility !.

[Jade Fox]

36. Good. But look at the responses to the article....

It's falling on deaf ears.

The GOP has fostered stupidity and mindless anti-intellectualism for at least 20 years through talk radio, and more recently Fox News. They have created a monster, and it won't be an easy monster to kill.

[NoodleyAppendage]

37. Mika defended Palin because it touched a nerve...as it does with all DUMBASSES. n/t

J

[Phredicles]

38. Posting to re-find when I have access to a printer...

[zulchzulu]

41. 9/11 is completely based on the anti-intellectualism principle

The fact that both twin towers fell down at zero gravity without the use of explosives DEFIES PHYSICS! There is no way to actually simulate the towers falling at zero gravity without detonation techniques used. Yet we are to believe that. And look what that brought us...

[calimary]

42. Kick!

What have they got against brain power, and powerful brains? Probably summed up in a quote I once saw attributed to kkkarl rove: "Too much education is not necessarily a good thing." Presumably because the better-educated one is, the more likely one is to think like a liberal and vote Democratic.

[curse of greyface]

43. Double Kick NT

[regnaD kciN]

44. If I may quarrel with the author's analysis...

He seems to think that this conservative anti-intellectualism began in the mid '80s, when some among the conservative elite decided to demonize the whole notion of elites, because they were supposedly controlled by liberals.

I'd say it came somewhat earlier, about the time the author was first getting excited by his discovery of the conservative intellectual movement. For it was then that the "Devil's Bargain" was struck between the Hunt Brothers and a number of mid-level evangelist leaders, promising them the financial backing they'd need to develop their own televangelism empires, on the understanding that their brand of fundamentalist Christianity would contain an equally-large dose of conservative politics. With that deal, the "religious right" was born. (It's ironic to me that the WSJ article doesn't even mention the role of fundamentalism, or anything relating to religion, in the conservative movement.) And it was that very religious right, particularly in the form of Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority," that would be so instrumental in 1980's "Reagan Revolution."

In essence, conservatism in the early '70s was merely an intellectual elite; a group of academics churning out ideas that may well have been worthy of discussion or debate, but with no way to get those ideas implemented. Union with the religious right gave them that power, but cost them their soul. For that very religious right was fiercely anti-intellectual in both theory and practice. (After all, when you believe that everything humanity needs was directly dictated by God in the Bible, what need have you of secular intellectualism? And that goes double when your movement already has cause, thanks to the "science versus religion" controversies of the last few centuries, to view secular intellectualism itself as deeply hostile to your faith.) It was inevitable that the resulting political marriage would have its fissures, which appeared almost as soon as Reagan ascended to the presidency. Conservative intellectuals may have dreamed that they would be able to harness the power of the fundamentalist movement and steer it to their ideas, but, in truth, the very anti-intellectualism at the heart of fundamentalism wound up eating away at their own reasons for existence, until they became just as much wanderers in the wilderness in the conservative era of the 2000s as they were during the liberal era of the 1960s and 1970s.

[crispini]

52. Good points. nt

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

47. "Ok, they don't believe in evolution. How about gravity? How about photo-synthesis?" Paul Begala

on Real Time with Bill Maher.

[mtnester]

48. The explanation is so simple IMO

when you keep the masses ignorant and poor, you can control them better

The downside? When they rise up, it is amazing to behold i.e. the French Revolution.

[crispini]

51. EXCELLENT article.

:kick:

[ogneopasno]

53. They had me until the snipe at "plumbers and builders." I know it's a reference to Joe the Scab,

but the truth is anyone can be intellectually curious and rigorous, no matter what their profession is. But then, here's me almost agreeing with a WSJ editorial. That's saying something.

[Lisa0825]

54. I've been reading the comments, and

so far, it's all Republicans bitching about how wrong the article is.