Academic Elitists and Pseudo Intellectuals – Arrogance Ad Nauseam

An Open Letter in Defense of Governor Sarah Palin: 

Professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University is one of the more recent individuals to come out to insult Governor Sarah Palin. Nothing like using your “intellectual” time to pile on to not only Mrs. Palin, but Conservatives as an entire group and average Americans as a whole.

A little background music first if you don’t mind. It’s to make a point not pat myself on the back so please stay with me on this. This little article will be long so engage me. I hope you read this full article and comment.

I graduated from two Big Ten schools, one considered a top five school in business with higher rankings than the so-called elite schools of the Ivy League. I know many people with these “high-end” degrees who can’t tie their shoes and carry on a conversation at the same time. Everyone who graduates from college or university doesn’t become a huge success financially, I hope that’s not all we measure success by.

I also raised two boys, now men, ran around leading up to 18 Cub Scouts for several years, coached soccer spring, fall and winter while volunteering in other activities that supported ventures my sons participated in. I also managed to fit in a couple of marathons, oodles of 10K races and championship racquetball.

I taught children how to property handle and shoot firearms, I taught children how to fish and shoot a bow and arrow. I taught children how to hike, camp and build a campfire. I taught children how to tie knots and to make friendships. I taught children respect and how to compete and to realize that winning isn’t the soul purpose of competition but that preparation and character building were part of the paradigm.

Back in the day of much younger years I also dabbled in some elite (pardon the expression) military training that was and is not for the faint of heart or elitist intellectuals. They turn their noses up at the military and Columbia University is a school with a pronounced history of being anti-military. In case of attack we’ll take pity on them and save their weak carcasses while they cry for their mommy while blaming America.

The point is I did these things by choice and I don’t expect a badge of honor for accomplishments nor do I expect a position on the pedestal of ego shared by elitists and intellectuals. I’m not tooting my horn but laying my premise that most Americans have a little bit of me and Sarah Palin within themselves. None of us look into a mirror and see perfect.

In the business world I consulted or worked for Fortune 50-1000 companies, built and sold three businesses in the worlds of accounting and technology. I was very busy to say the least and didn’t have time for cocktail parties and hanging out with folks who love to stroke each other’s egos. Everyone has an ego, I was taught to park mine at the door.

During the endless election cycle we have heard the insults and I would say the Left is much better at attacking and when Republicans decide to defend a position or point out something about the opponent it suddenly becomes racist, sexist, and an attack.

Attack is an overused word but Liberals really do attack on their way to slandering an individual, their family members, pets, and anyone else who disagrees with their position.
Bloggers on the right are deemed a joke while the lefties at DailyKos, who are as incendiary as possible, have their name sake doing TV shows and conventions with guest speakers all the way up to Barack Obama.

I’m not sure how the so-called elitists and intellectuals define these words (yes, I have a dictionary) other than it’s self-praise and my mother always told me that self-praise stinks. She also said ignorance is bliss so I suppose we’re on track for accurately defining this group of egomaniacs.

Some people have told me I sound more like a “street guy” than someone with a degree from a pedigree of higher learning on the North end of Chicago. If they can’t take a little frank discussion with a side of saltiness too bad, at least you’ll get honesty and directness. If you can’t handle the truth then don’t bother to engage me lest you get your thoughts handed to you on a silver platter, we wouldn’t hurt your feelings by using a paper plate.

Now, finally back to Professor Lilla. Thanks for hanging in there! The Professor writes: (Emphasis below is LCs)

Finita la commedia. 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.

This “intellectual” diatribe gets better or worse depending on your level of high intelligence even if you are from another planet.

And not just any intellectuals, it was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.

Do you need a barf bag yet, can you actually believe this guy? Professor Lilla has an ego for self-described intellectualism that even “attacks” the left. What is “sophisticated conservativism”?

Coming of age politically in the grim ’70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion. In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.

How Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army have anything to do with the sudden burst of discovery for Professor Lilla is beyond me. I suppose I’m not intellectual enough to understand how the kind professor would probably support abortion under the guise of pro-choice instead of calling it pro-murder while whining about removing Saddam Hussein from a country who tortured average citizens and even its Olympic team.

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? It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew.

Professor Lilla admits that “ordinary Americans” are not worthy people, but should trudge off to the factories, bakeries, small businesses, Wal-Mart, Ace Hardware and don’t ask for anything for they are not elitist or intellectual, therefore, they are not worthy.

But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

Sarah Palin is not elite, intellectual and is too “populist” for Professor Lilla and his band of arrogant groupies. This is the Liberal thought process so if you voted for Barack Obama and his gang of Leftists understand the term “caveat emptor.”

But now we get an idea of what Professor Lilla means by elites and intellectuals but why don’t I fit into his tight thinking criteria? Could it simply be these people are too wrapped up in self-aggrandizement? Professor Lilla also feels threatened.

The die was cast. 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.

Professor Lilla doesn’t tell us how someone with successful executive experience in government fails to qualify against a community organizer with failed executive experience outside of government and none within the realms of the government he wishes to build.

The Professor isn’t through with his class warfare, he demonstrates his disgust for “ordinary Americans” or as ego-maniac Bill O’Reilly would say, “The Folks.”

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 the intellectual elite. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

Nobel-Prize winners in any field have proven to be a farce, to use a term Professor Lilla has held for Sarah Palin. Mr. Lilla respects Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Yassar Arafat and we only wonder how often Mr. Lilla has lunch with his colleague Rashid Khalidi.

I lived abroad and learned foreign languages but I still don’t qualify as elite or intellectual. Poor me!

Lilla’s disdain for Sarah Palin continues with his mention of plumbers and builders who fall into the class of “ordinary Americans” for Professor Lilla. We wonder if the Professor eats fish yet dislikes commercial fisherman or who he calls when he has a plumbing problem, not necessarily the one within his own random system of thought whatever his need for a mental roto-rooter.

Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life.

Professor Lilla doesn’t like the average Joe but believes a Democracy resides in the halls of elites and intellectuals. Is this why domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are given jobs at institutions of higher education and spokespersons for Yasser Arafat work at the University of Chicago and then move on to Columbia? Are these people part of the “respected” crowd of elitists Professor Lilla is so enamored with?

What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

Are Ayers, Dohrn and Khaldi “friends of Democracy”? Inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia is considered free thought, which should be encouraged in a Democracy, but banning the ROTC is considered what? Wasn’t it elitists who brought us the Vietnam War?

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.

It’s amazing how Professor Lilla has Democracy coming out of his mouth and his own “disdain” for the so-called “non-educated” while defining his “aristocracy” within the realms of the “intellectuals” and “elites”.

Furthermore, Brooks is a “neo-con”, which I define as a Liberal lost in the wilderness who wants to change Conservatism within the ranks of the Republican Party to allow a larger tent. How does that fit with Reagan Conservatism? Of course the “intellectuals” and “elites” would make fun of Ronald Reagan because he never fit into their definition of what is proper.

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.

I personally saw Sarah Palin and her husband Todd speak and there was no stuffiness, no arrogance, no “elitism” but plenty of genuine self-confidence, genuine positive talk and refrain from the doom and gloom incessantly talked about by Barack Obama and the “intellectual elite” on the Left.

It’s the average Joe or Sarah or Todd or me who make up the largest segment of America. It’s the self-appointed “intellectual elitists” who think they are America and only they know what’s good for the masses. These groups fit the mold of “Progressive” thinking, which fits inside the mold of Leninism and their neighborhood pal Barack Obama. Their ideas for real progress would fit inside a thimble, yet they call themselves “progressives”, the code for Lenin not Democracy as we know it.

We are the real leaders, producers, worker bees, self-sufficient clingers to our freedom and liberty not to some ideology that places one group over another. We are a community of self-reliant people who accept challenges in the face of adversity and are quite capable of making lemonade from lemons. We are the doers, the achievers, the people who willingly volunteer and give to charity without being asked.

We are like Sarah Palin and we like Sarah Palin. We stand up to the self-described intellectuals and elitists. We can drink single-malt scotch or a Miller-Lite. We will come to our neighbors defense but will not be forced to be someone else’s brother’s keeper. We prefer boned and buttered perch or smoked salmon that we caught ourselves over Iranian caviar. We are America, Professor Lilla!

Professor Lilla and his band of “intellectuals” and “elites” practice class warfare with their indignation for the average working class American. These are the same people who wish to grab young minds and turn their free thinking spirit into mindless mush only to draw them into the crowd of “intellectuals” and “elites” whose definition is mired in arrogance of the few and a product of low self-esteem.

I know these people because I have relatives who teach at these “elite” institutions and they look at me the same way Professor Lilla looks at Sarah Palin.

Populism has many definitions and some may be similar to the belief of Marx and Lenin. Sarah Palin is not a populist suggesting a struggle of the masses against the “elite“, that is what Barack Obama preaches while he is part of the crowd of pseudo-intellectuals and elites.

Sarah Palin talks about freedom, liberty, the rights of Americans as prescribed in the Bill of Rights, US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Sarah Palin talks like me and the “elitists” and “intellectuals” don’t like that “average” sounding tone as it speaks to truth and reality.

The “intellectuals” and “elitists” prefer the tone of Barack Obama who repeats the same line but doesn’t tell us much until you dig deep below the surface and discover that this group of self-appointed egotists don’t have much use for America and average Americans they only pretend to be Patriots. They are the enemy within, a ruling class mindset that is frightened by the prospects of Sarah Palin.

An academic would only spend the time to write an article deriding Sarah Palin for the Wall Street Journal because his arrogance is only surpassed by his inner fear.

Professor Lilla and his group of elites and intellectuals place themselves in a class of their own making but attacking Sarah Palin and Conservatives that don’t fit their mold is only of showing no class.

To paraphrase Yogi Bear….”We’re smarter than the average intellectual elitists.” Indeed!