Great editorial by Mike Rosen in which he points out that the pretentions of those on the Left are divorced from reality,
When it suits their purposes and advances their political agenda, liberals are unabashedly elitist. Nonetheless, they recoil from that term when conservatives label them as such. Their reasoning is positively schizophrenic, confusing private behavior with public policy.
A true elite is one whose talents place him, objectively, at or among the top in his field. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer, in fact, the best in the world. Albert Einstein was an elite scientist, a genius. Michelangelo, an elite artist. An “elitist,” on the other hand, is one who is not necessarily talented or brilliant but who simply regards himself as such, and who would subordinate others to his will.
Al Gore, for example, is certainly not an elite scientist. In fact, he’s not a scientist at all. He’s not a physicist, climatologist or meteorologist. He’s a politician, and when it comes to the highly debatable subject of climate change, he’s just a guy with an opinion. As an advocate for a doomsday version of the theory of human-induced global warming, he selectively and misleadingly brokers the work of actual scientists and other polemicists in this field. To the extent that Gore would dictate how people, businesses and governments behave in the course of imposing environmental and economic policies, he’s a pretentious elitist in the worst sense of that term.
[snip]
One liberal pontificated that he wants only the “best and the brightest” in government to “run our country.” I suspect he and I would disagree about who the best and brightest are and what qualities earn them that distinction. My list certainly wouldn’t include Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, to whom I don’t defer as my intellectual superiors. His list probably wouldn’t include Ronald Reagan. Moreover, I don’t want government or politicians to “run our country.” That’s a statist view. The state is not society; it’s a subset of society. It’s the height of pretentious elitism to believe that any panel of bureaucrats is smart enough to “run” our intricate market economy. The Soviets tried that.
Exactly. One thing that always strikes me about the so-called elite is how singularly and uniformly incompetent they tend to be. This is especially true with respect to the issue of climate change. Indeed, it can be taken as a truism that the more sure a person is about the “truth” of anthropogenic global warming, the less that person actually knows about the science involved.
There are two main reasons why people are leftists: they want somebody to take care of them (if they are in the vast mass of useful idiots propping up the ideology) or they want to control other people. It is those in the latter group who generally tend to think of themselves as “elite,” though the vast mass generally tends to be conned into thinking the same thing about those few at the top. I’ve literally had people tell me at great length about how intelligent and wise Obama is. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there wondering if they’re referring to the same Obama that I’m thinking of?
After all, the real Obama can’t even say more than two sentences in public without the aid of a teleprompter. The real Obama can’t even make a decision about Afghanistan while our troops are dying from the idiotic rules of engagement that his administration has saddled them with. The real Obama can’t even write his own book, but had to have another leftist write it for him (and that was poorly done too, I might add. I mean, I’m not an elite, but at least I wrote my own book all by my little ol’ self, and did all my own research, too.
Elitism is uniquely a product of collectivist thinking. Elitism presupposes the existence of hierarchy within group interactions, and the top of that hierarchy is filled by those who have managed to impose themselves upon those below them, though usually not for objectively meritorious reasons. Typically, advancement in a collective setting involves reward for conformity to the group ideals. If those ideals are bad, or make no sense, then the result is that those who advance the furthest because they are the most zealous or effective at promoting those ideals tend to be people who are not, in the wider sense, as foresighted, wise, or munificent in their dealings outside the particular group setting. This is why tone-deaf party hacks tend to be the ones who rise to the top in political parties. This is why top bureaucrats tend to be those most effective at stonewalling and protecting the interests of the bureaucracy as a body, even if efficient service to the customer is lacking (and this is true in both the public and private sectors, by the way). This is why dictatorial systems inevitably end up being so vicious and cruel – those who are best at punishing non-conformists end up reaching the highest offices.
Ironically, individuals who don’t feel the need to impose themselves onto others generally tend to be more individually meritorious than those who prosper within collectivist, leftist systems.
This explains the sea change in American governance that has occurred over the last 60 years. When our nation was founded, it was founded by men who had individually excelled in their fields, and who did not require government intervention to prop them up, nor did they desire to intervene in the lives of others so as to induce their dependence. Starting with the Great Depression, however, the shift in attitude on the part of those in political power was that the common man was too incapable to provide for himself, so the government would provide for him. Of course, the first failure of the outflowing of efforts on that part was the prolonging of the Great Depression by several years, to be ended only by the artificial economic injection provided by World War II. Since then, the elitist attitude has given us a failed War on Poverty, and any number of “deals” which have fallen through. In turn, our government has largely been filled by those who cannot think for themselves, and who are primarily interested in maintaining and advancing the bureaucratic systems in place. “Intelligence” and “capability” are no longer measured in terms of individual merit, but in terms of “a willingness to perpetuate the welfare state,” which makes a mockery out of what those terms really mean.
Hence, the drive to socialise our health care system, even though there are any number of market-based reforms that could be put into place instead, and that have the added advantage that they would actually work. But they wouldn’t increase the power of an elite that needs to validate itself by inducing dependence in the expanding underclass.
The “elite” in this country are afraid of individual initiative. This is because individual initiative refutes the “need” for an elite, and would bring to the fore individuals whose talents and capacities far exceed the “elite” like Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Gore, Frank, and the rest.
