Populism’s negative affect on politics
Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest, wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about “What the rise of Sarah Palin and populism means for the conservative intellectual tradition.”
To summarize, Lilla laments the apparent rejection of intellectualism that initially attracted him, a self-described liberal, to the world of conservative political thought.
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.
But as a response to what many conservatives saw as a uniformly hostile environment in the media and on university campuses (“campii”?), the tide began to turn:
They [then began to] 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.
The issue is not that “regular folk” are bad. Lilla’s concern with populism is that, in this manifestation, it has become less about the people and more about pandering to the people. The thinkers and the politicians leading the Republican Party — or, of course, any political party or movement — are supposed to be leaders, not panderers. They’re supposed to raise the level of thought, the level of discourse, not play to the lowest common denominator.
There’s a rather fine line between being elite (which has similarly been twisted into a slur) and being exclusive. One certainly can be elite — which, I’ll remind you, simply refers to being of the cream of the crop, not favoring those who are the cream of the crop at the expense of others — without being exclusive, and that an important distinction in a functioning democracy.
A great thinker of our time, Jon Stewart, summed up well the case for elitism: “If you don’t actually think you’re better than us, what the ____ are you doing? … Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”
Thanks to my partner in blogging crime Gary Hornseth, one of several contributors to The Same Rowdy Crowd, for bringing this WSJ article to my attention. Great find.
Photo courtesy of Gaetan Lee on Flickr
One could argue that the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan had long ago run out of ideas, and had settled into sloganeering.
When you’re so convinced your idea is correct, you quit holding it out for scrutiny. And when you bust it down to a bumper sticker, you create a legion of believers who might or might not really understand the philosophical implications.
Great find, Mike (and Crowd).
Right on. The one-sentence take on this post could very well be: Bumper stickers can reinforce your philosophy, but don’t let your philosophy become little more than a series of bumper stickers.