What are Elites Good For?

While conservatives face a daunting election, a lovely little sideshow is going on that I’d like to call “Pundit Wars.” The right side of punditry is engaged in an ultimate fighting cage match:  Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Rush and David Limbaugh v. the likes of  David Frum, Kathleen Parker, George Will, and David Brooks. Sarah Palin, lacking a Harvard Education, a stint at Yale, or a passport prior to 2007 has incited the ire of pundits considered to be the elites.

The Conservative grassroots loves Sarah Palin, and anti-Palin right wing pundits are finding that pundits are expendable, admired leaders are not. Angry e-mails hit their inbox, leaving conservative elites shell-shocked. They’ve been more used to getting no e-mails at all or intellectual quibbles, as well as an occassional intellectual ego trip. Instead they’re deluged by angry and betrayed grassroots conservatives.

Over the past few days, these conservative pundits have been posting complaints. David Frum posted a particularly whiny post on Monday, and Rob Dreher has been in the throes of defending anti-Palin elitism for some time. Now comes Ross Douthat to explain why the grassroots needs elites:

Here’s the thing: The Republican Party will be a populist party going forward, or it won’t be a party at all. But the more populist it becomes – the more figures like Palin and Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty replace the blue-blazer Republicans of yore – the more it needs an elite capable of preventing it from spinning away into anti-intellectualism, hidebound dogmatism, and pure folly.

It’s good to know that we’ve got Ross Douthat around to save us from ourselves. By the way, George W. Bush has had quite a few elites, in and around his administration. How well has this worked out in the “Elites save the world” view?

Yes, sometimes these elites are snobbish and insidery, overly impressed with credentials, overly concerned about what their liberal pals think, overly willing to treat their party’s base as an embarrassment. Sometimes the base is right and the elites are wrong. Sometimes you need a better class of elite entirely. But you still need them, and you need candidates who listen to them.

So you might think that David Brooks is too taken with Barack Obama’s facility for Reinhold Niebuhr-related jaw-jaw, and too quick to attack conservatives who don’t share his views on immigration, say, or the bailout. But if you want Sarah Palin as your standard-bearer, you need a Brooks, or someone like him, at the table when her speeches are being written and her policy positions are being hashed out.

But do you need to read Brooks, particularly as one of the New York Times’ token conservatives? Yes, you need advisers, and from a wide variety of sources. Just because Sarah Palin needs advisers, doesn’t obligate conservatives to eagerly read every word written by columnists who are full of themselves.

You need elites, and you especially need elites who work and live outside the conservative cocoon, and who have a sense of how to talk to people who aren’t already persuaded that a vote for Obama is a vote for socialism and surrender. The more populist your party, in fact, the smarter it needs to get – at wooing swing voters, and talking intelligently about policy questions, and yes, even at charming the liberal media – because you know the elites on the other side won’t cut it any slack.

And now the most hilarious part of this piece where Douthat argues for op-ed columnists as the evangelist of conservatism. Has anyone became a Republican or a Conservative as a result of reading David Brooks? Brooks has figured out how to earn his keep and acclaim: attacking conservatives, lionizing liberals.

In praising the piece, Rob Dreher adds:

 You cannot have a healthy conservative movement, or a healthy conservative party, when the only thing its members read are the collected works of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity et alia, and they are only conversant in the talk-radio vernacular.

Thank you, it’s good to have some as edu-nacated as Mr. Dreher to help us poor ignorant folks read. Though, for my part, I’ve read through the Federalist Papers, the diaries of John Quincy Adams, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and a lot of other intellectual fluff. While I’ve listened to Hannity a few times, I’ve read more of George Washington that I ever have Sean Hannity.

Of course, Douthat and Dreher’s larger argument is somewhat of a straw man (I know, as a non-elite, I’m not supposed to know what that is.) If the argument being made were somehow Maoist, “Kill all the right-wing intellectuals.” Then, perhaps, they’d have a point. However, there are many conservatives who are thrilled with Palin: educated folks who are well-spoken and well-read such as Newt Gingrich, who used to be a history professor. Thomas Sowell has been positive on Palin. I’d not consider Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, or most of the columnists and pundits on the right to be of lesser caliber to those who have attacked Palin.

The pretention of the anti-Palin elites is that they speak from a position of exalted intellectual purity, when their self-importance has become their prime principle.