Brain Freeze

David Brooks has a fascinating piece in today’s New York Times. Titled “The Class War Before Palin,” the columnist attempts to give a bird’s eye, snapshot view of how conservatism came to be so anti-intellectual.

It wasn’t always thus. Modern conservatism, Brooks contends, began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. The urbane and sophisticated William F. Buckley, hardly an intellectual slouch by anyone’s definition, was once conservatism’s cerebral standard bearer.

“Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking,” says Brooks. “Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.”

Brooks believes that conservatives, driven by a need to engage elite opinion, tried to build an intellectual counter-establishment. “They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.”

However, Brooks reports, over the past several decades, the Republican Party has driven away the highly educated and those people who live in cities or along the coasts. This was due in large part to the fact that “Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare.” As Democrats nominated “coastal pointy-heads,” Republicans swung equally as far in the opposite direction to find their representatives.

Remember the Republican convention just a month and a half ago? Giuliani, the former mayor of the most cosmopolitan city in the world, repeatedly disdained cosmopolitans.
Mitt Romney, of all people, gave a speech attacking “rich eastern elites.” If that isn’t the most obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is.

And then came Sarah Palin. Though “smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable,” Palin has made playing the class-warfare card her daily mantra. Sarah Palin has out-Bushed Bush. She can’t make a speech without drawing a line between the heartland and the “oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.” She celebrates ignorance and has made being inexperienced a cause célèbre.

The ramifications are becoming increasingly clear — entire alienated sections of the country from Silicon Valley to the Northeast Corridor have migrated to the Democrats. Elite professions from lawyers to doctors and now even bankers have walked away from the Republican Party.

“What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole,” Brooks says. It’s a delineation obvious to anyone. It is “Joe Sixpack” versus the “East Coast liberal elites.” Since Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, Republicans decided to “govern from the gut.”

Intellectualism is now something to be mocked and distrusted. Elite, meaning someone who is at the paradigm of their chosen profession or pursuit, is now been transformed into a smear word. Worse, the heartland has bought into it. The more education you achieve, the more many conservatives look upon you with suspicion. Pursuing such education for themselves is largely out of the question.

“Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago,” says Brooks. “The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.” It has long been shown that the more educated one is, the more liberal one is. Is this because there are so few conservative voices in American universities or simply that education leads one to the conclusion that the liberal mindset is vastly superior?

Modern conservatives has chosen a strategy with a built-in self destruct mechanism. Sure, this tactic will work for a few decades, a generation or two perhaps. It may even garner millions of votes. But it won’t be long until it starts breaking down, before it is seen as the straw man that it is, before the movement becomes so dumbed-down that it loses any and all semblance of power much less academic rigor. And when that happens, conservatives will have unwittingly set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy — a class-segregated society with the most educated and therefore most wealthy on the top and the mass of poorer, less educated relegated to the bottom.

In that scenario, everyone loses.