Liberal Condensension
WILLIAM VOEGELI's article in
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123492175917805451.html titled
The Roots of Liberal Condescension
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.
Buckley’s position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God’s laws and tradition’s wisdom, Buckley’s argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
Professors are firstly people always and citizens generally. They are as qualified to serve on a jury as a plumber. Buckley wasn't deriding the ivory tower elites. To the contrary, his career was dedicated to the proposition that elites of which he was one have a significant and leading place in society. His conservatism stood in stark contrast to the know-nothing conservatism of the John Birch Society, for example. And Buckley influenced the creation of conservative thought tanks, journals, publishing houses, and university organizations. He wasn't claiming that Joe the Plumber had the same depth of wisdom as Justice Antonin Scalia. But he was affirming the core principle of democracy-- that decisions of American policy must represent the broadest range of the values of its citizens, and that without this kind of representation mistakes are more likely than not.
In the first year of Bush's second term, Bush went on a fifty city tour to press his Social Security plan. I noticed that without exception he excluded from these meetings dissenters. He did the same when he was deciding to invade Iraq. This kind of decision-making is a pervsion of what Buckley was suggesting and leads as sure as night follows day to bad decisions.
Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense.
True.
For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.
But that doesn't follow at all. If this is what you believe, then you haven't read enough Buckley. No one was more democratic in his liking for the broadest range of people while subjecting himself to the highest levels of intellectual rigor from the best universities in the nation. The idea that Buckley would prefer to rely on a stewardess from Idaho than a professor from Yale on policy questions is strange, funny, and false.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123492175917805451.html titled
The Roots of Liberal Condescension
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.
Buckley’s position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God’s laws and tradition’s wisdom, Buckley’s argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
Professors are firstly people always and citizens generally. They are as qualified to serve on a jury as a plumber. Buckley wasn't deriding the ivory tower elites. To the contrary, his career was dedicated to the proposition that elites of which he was one have a significant and leading place in society. His conservatism stood in stark contrast to the know-nothing conservatism of the John Birch Society, for example. And Buckley influenced the creation of conservative thought tanks, journals, publishing houses, and university organizations. He wasn't claiming that Joe the Plumber had the same depth of wisdom as Justice Antonin Scalia. But he was affirming the core principle of democracy-- that decisions of American policy must represent the broadest range of the values of its citizens, and that without this kind of representation mistakes are more likely than not.
In the first year of Bush's second term, Bush went on a fifty city tour to press his Social Security plan. I noticed that without exception he excluded from these meetings dissenters. He did the same when he was deciding to invade Iraq. This kind of decision-making is a pervsion of what Buckley was suggesting and leads as sure as night follows day to bad decisions.
Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense.
True.
For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.
But that doesn't follow at all. If this is what you believe, then you haven't read enough Buckley. No one was more democratic in his liking for the broadest range of people while subjecting himself to the highest levels of intellectual rigor from the best universities in the nation. The idea that Buckley would prefer to rely on a stewardess from Idaho than a professor from Yale on policy questions is strange, funny, and false.
Labels: Buckley, liberalism
posted by My Mall and News at
9:30 PM
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