The Intellectual Vanity of The Left

Hear of Dr Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary in the Obama administration who won the Nobel Prize in Physics? Nothing wrong with that at all, but this American Thinker article by James Lewis titled Put Some Harvard SmartCream on That, points out how the Obama administration confuses education with actual wisdom:

The weirdness is that during the months of oil gushing from the BP leak, Obama and his spokesnoid Robert Gibbs kept reminding the world that Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. That plus five bucks will buy you a Starbucks French Roast on the Gulf Coast, right where you can watch the sunset reflecting off the oil slick. It's really pretty, and as some Obamanoid was saying the other day, if Louisiasans were smart, they would turn it into a tourist attraction. Fortunately, it looks like the oil leak has been plugged, and all that oil will be metabolized by the ocean in due course.

But the Leftist superstition about Harvard SmartCream will keep haunting us for years. The reason is that no matter what the emergency may be, the instinct of this White House is to apply the same panacea. Put some SmartCream on that, and it'll be fixed. Or at least it will look as if we are Doing Something.

Obama's adoring fans seem to share the superstitious belief that intelligence is a kind of oil slick that you just discover in places like Harvard and Yale. Take a problem, any problem -- global warming,  the U.S. economy, race, and gender-baiting -- and smear it liberally with SmartCream from Larry Summers or Elena Kagan -- and behold! The answer pops out, just like that. It's amazing. For you, it's only $ 9.95, 'cause I like your face. Can't you see Obama selling that line on an informercial with his great photogenic smile? 

Janet Daley over at the Telegraph examines how this intellectual vanity has bred class resentment where the highly educated are aligned with the poor against the middle class.  She knows this because it's a depressingly familiar development in British politics:

America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".

The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.

But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life. 

So the Democrats, who once represented the interests of ferociously self-respecting blue-collar America, are now seen – under their highly educated president, who wholeheartedly embraces the orthodoxy of the liberal salon – as having abandoned their traditional following. Which is precisely what Labour did here when it turned its back on what used to be called "the respectable working class" because of its embarrassing resentments and "prejudices" against welfare claimants, immigrants, and anti-social youths. Bizarrely, among people who see themselves as profoundly empathetic, there was an utter failure to understand why the spirit of benevolent understanding and tolerance did not flourish among those whose daily lives were directly affected by a mass influx of foreign workers, or local delinquency, or a welfare system that rewarded inertia.

Conservatives know this social and intellectual snobbery well--they've borne the brunt of the condescension from the Left.  Reagan? They called him an amiable dunce.  President Bush 41? Remember that snarky comment, it's the economy stupid?  VP Quayle? He was harangued by the media and chattering classes for weeks when he suggested what many suspected was true: that perhaps we should not celebrate voluntary single motherhood where men are mere accessories to a women's self fulfillment and therefore disposal as fathers, despite what was portrayed by Murphy Brown.  President Bush 43? His Harvard degree was granted because of his family connections but as Jacob Weisberg from Slate declared, he was a dimwit.

There's even more vitriol hurled if one is conservative and from the working or middle class.  Joe the Plumber's personal life was investigated illegally by government officials to dig up any dirty laundry to immediately discredit him because he somehow got then candidate Obama to admit that yes, he wanted to spread your wealth. Witness the intellectual rape and wilding of Sarah Palin where she's turned into a bimbo and sexual object.  Somehow sympathetic to the Tea Party? One must be dubbed racist, because the NAACP says so.

It's an old tired tactic from the Left. It's easier to denigrate someone personally to discredit their ideas rather than debate the ideas themselves.  Not all Democrats are ensconced in their ideological cocoons from the electoral impact of their condescension.  VP Joe Biden, who Democrats constantly remind us rode the subway to Congress and is therefore, bona-fide working class, has swung into damage control. Here he is on ABCNEWS saying that he and President do not think the Tea Party is a racist organization.

A word of advice for the Left: someone once said, I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.  Those words were uttered by none other than Socrates.