Bill's Notes

Here's an interesting essay that I've been meaning to write. Funny thing about the Internet is, if you wait long enough, someone else will write the essay you were gonna do. And in many cases (like this one), much better.

The Intro:

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 Mrs. 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 Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken 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 Mrs. 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.

Buckley, it must be noted, was an improbable champion of conservative populism. By 1963, still in his 30s, he had already created a public persona "that may be unique in our cultural history," according to a recent Boston Review article by the journalist William Hogeland. "Buckley's perfectly phrased insults and languorous polysyllabery made him the pop-culture model of intellectual, cultural, and verbal advancement, an unflappable connoisseur, guardian of the best ever thought and said by man." Even when siding with the masses against the professoriate, Buckley formulated his preference with the sort of fusty grammatical precision ("I should sooner live") appreciated in faculty lounges but alien to VFW halls.

We can make sense of this incongruity by moving beyond his famous line about the telephone directory to the rarely quoted explanation for why he would oppose being governed by eminent scholars:

Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors—who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify; and, when they are paying homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, tend to do so with a kind of condescension toward those whose accomplishments we long since surpassed.

Read the whole thing. I've been thinking along these lines for years -- that intellectual liberalism is, in the end, a matter of taste, and at root has an intellectual totalitarian root based on concepts of what the right people think, and like, and believe.