Read this, OK, just read it!

What a bossy-boots I am this morning!  The reason is that I'm a bit grumpy having spent some time yesterday writing my post on intellectuals only to have my reader, Ortega, pop up in the comments and refer me to this:

http://kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-class-palin-and-obama-note-to-peter.html

My injunction above, of course, applies to this essay by Kenneth Anderson, a writer hitherto unknown to me - many thanks to Ortega for the link. It puts my less than modest effort to shame with a very much more penetrative assessment of the intellectual class than I could aspire to.  The first two paragraphs were enough to catch my attention:

"Peter Berkowitzonce asked me how I made the transition from a fairly radical (if mostly intellectually radical) leftism to a center-right position, rooted in the defense of American democratic sovereignty abroad and a modestly libertarian conservatism at home.

The answer is that sometime during the course of the 80s and 90s, I looked at the left, my friends and confreres in America, and concluded that we were promoting a ‘left authoritarianism’, under the conjoined banner of rights and therapy: which is to say, what certain people think is good for you, promulgated in the essentially unanswerable language of ‘rights talk’."

And this is spot on:

"But unlike me or my confreres in the academy, Palin has an organic, extra-political connection to the people she proposes to govern, whether in Alaska or the United States as a whole. Everything about her says, I’m one of you. Not the whole citizen of the planet thing that Obama’s New Class persona uses as a way to elide the question of his relationship to America and Americans, except as Redeemer, but a representative of the people of whom she is indeed representative, but among whom she must be, in virtue of the office she seeks, also an unapologetic elite. The question for contemporary elites is no longer whether they have, but instead whether they believe they actually need, a rootedness in and among the people whose lives they intend so thoroughly to govern. This is the question that Lasch posed ironically in The Revolt of the Elites (playing on Ortega y Gasset’s Revolucion de las Masas). Lasch answered, ‘not any more’; in classic New Class fashion, they aver their expertise instead and say that it is enough. "

Excellent stuff and I urge you all to read it.

 

Comments

[Hank]

David

He has been on my bloglist for a long time. All his stuff is excellent if a little specilized.

[Sister Wolf]

I wish he would write in English, though!

[David Duff]

What did you fail to understand?