David Brooks had an interesting little article in the NY Times the other day about the “tea party movement” and what it means. Brooks thinks that it reflects a growing public exasperation with “the educated class”.
Brooks has a valid point, even though the whole “tea party” thing probably goes beyond this. In order to be exasperated with the educated class, you first have to BE educated (i.e., takes one to know one). Sara Palin, their heroine, is not exactly noted for her intellectual brilliance. Her upcoming speech before the Tea Party convention in Nashville should be a hoot.
But the tea party folk certainly are exasperated, and much of what they are exasperated about was put into place by very highly educated people, both in government and business (e.g., the collateralized debt obligations and government homeownership programs that made sub-prime mortgages so popular). There certainly is an anti-intellectualist wind blowing in American politics these days, perhaps part of the expected backlash against Barack Obama (and the ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial institutions, and the PhD experts who confuse people e.g. regarding mammogram necessity).
Aside from his good looks and his oratorical skills, Mr. Obama’s main calling card is his education and intellectual achievement. He’s the first president in a while who taught at a university (and not just any university; Harvard, of course). A lot of Americans voted for Mr. Obama on the rationale that he is more intellectual than both his predecessor and his 2008 opponent, and thus could better get us out of the various calamities (recession, unemployment, the real estate collapse, Iraq, Afghanistan, rising gasoline prices, the growing deficit) that happened on Mr. Bush’s watch. Most of those messes have not yet been resolved. But despite this, Mr. Obama decided to involve the nation in two more complex and contentious issues, i.e. health care reform and greenhouse gas controls (i.e., cap and trade). The nation thus seems to be in political overload right now.
I myself have no use for Palin and the tea party thing. Their reactionary response against intellectual leadership is quite pernicious. But I do have to wonder about Mr. Obama’s unspoken premise, i.e. that intelligent, well-educated people like him know best what to do for the masses, and will change things for the better if left alone. (Regarding education, Mr. Obama is unlike the 2/3 of the country who don’t have a college degree; or much higher if you limit Mr. Obama to the elite who graduated from America’s top schools. Ironically that would include G.W. Bush, although he didn’t act like it, which Mr. Obama and his team do).
Over the past 300 years or so, the notion has arisen in various places that power should be given over to “the best and the brightest”. Actually, you can trace this theory back to Plato in The Republic, i.e. his ideal of the “philosopher-king”. And of course the ancient Chinese created a class of educated bureaucrats in the tradition of Confucius; even in the Dark Ages, Charlemagne pushed the ideal of education onto his lackeys. But it was during the Enlightenment that the notion of the leadership of the intellectually elite really gained traction.
Just how well has this notion fared in the real world? Well, there was the French Revolution; that didn’t turn out so good. But then again, the leaders of the American Revolution also drank from the wells of Enlightenment thought. And they gave the world a practical blueprint for a better form of government, one that balanced the ancient ideals of democracy, constitution, human rights and freedoms, limited collective powers and ‘checks and balances’ – i.e., balances between elitism and mob democracy. Karl Marx took the Enlightenment ideal to its limit, saying that Utopia was just a matter of science, along with the strong will to force that science on an unruly world. This didn’t work out too well in practice. But in China, a hybrid, Confucian post-Marxism is having some success in raising the living standards of millions, perhaps billions of people (while continuing to deny them political rights, in the Marxist tradition).
In the USA, the public has occasionally given blank checks to its “best and brightest”, again with varying results. There was Woodrow Wilson back in the early years of the 20th Century; his Presidency didn’t fare so well. But FDR was quite the intellectual elitist, and yet the public was ultimately grateful for his leadership. Then came John F. Kennedy, but his experiment with “Camelot” ended too abruptly to judge whether he was ultimately successful (e.g., could he have avoided the tar pit that the Vietnam War became, given that he started us on the road down into that pit?). Jimmy Carter seemed like the intelligent alternative to Richard Nixon’s cynicism, but in the end he failed to inspire the nation to better things. And now we have Barack Obama quickly spending his blank checks from a near-landslide election. Is he using those “checks” wisely? The tea party folk obviously don’t think so.
I myself don’t have an Ivy League background, but I do highly value intelligence, rationality and study. However, as to whether those things can be the sine qua non for successful political leadership, things get murky. We certainly do want a basic level of brightness and education and general worldliness in our leaders. Sarah Palin exhibits the dangers of appointing a leader not having this. But book smarts are not enough. Our best and most successful leaders have blended a strong if not terribly sophisticated sense of historical right and wrong, together with a practical common sense about politics and public perception. They certainly weren’t angels, they certainly made moral compromises; but yet they did get good things done. I’m thinking here about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, maybe even Dwight Eisenhower (he started the Interstate Highways; too bad we don’t take care of them these days). I’ll even give the Gipper (Ronald Reagan) a tip of the hat, even though I disagreed with much of what he believed in. Reagan could have used more education and intelligence to balance off his righteous populism.
So we definitely do want more than intelligence and education in a leader. We certainly should look into a candidate’s character, into her or his moral quality and vision for the nation (expecting some stain and compromise; you can’t be a politician without some bloodshed). We also must consider his or her basic common sense, along with their appreciation for the perceptions and concerns of the public. Even if the public is not always right, even if a highly educated man like Barack Obama sees more than most others do, a leader ultimately has to keep the crowds happy in order to get anything done. The whole tea party thing indicates that Mr. Obama is having some trouble in this regard.
(I also wonder about Mr. Obama’s moral vision for the nation; I think he’s an honorable man, more so than Bill Clinton was. But he seems to apologize too much for America’s past. Apologies are certainly in order, but Mr. Obama fails to cite our flaws as a lapse from a still-living American ideal, a human ideal that certainly is better than most of what the rest of the world offers.)
and if combustion of carbon-based fuels is inherent to human life itself, then the only real remedy would be to stop or significantly slow down population growth. Under this viewpoint, it almost looks like “Mother Nature” is saying “stop putting so many new members of your greedy species on my turf so quickly, or I will get rid of the excess myself”.