Posted on 12/11/2004 5:07:25 PM PST by shrinkermd
Public intellectuals now claim intelligence is higher in the blue states than in the red states. To some extent they have empirical evidence since Democrats overwhelmingly win two educational groups—those with postgraduate degrees and high school drop outs. Seemingly the public intellectuals focus on the first rather than the latter, but it does raise the question what does distinguish the red “stater” from the blue “stater?”
Attorney David Lebedoff answers this question in The Uncivil War: How a New Elite Is Destroying Our Democracy. Lebedoff believes the divide is between those who believe in rule by the “New Elite” (liberals) and those who believe in rule by the majority (conservatives). Actually, Lebedoff calls all those who are not New Elites “Left Behinds.”
Lebedoff began speaking on this topic in 1978, but he has not garnered great credit for his efforts. The author points out that the New Elite has no coherent, positive program. Simply put, the New Elite’s only clear policy is that policy be made by members of the New Elite.
Recent elections are less to do with policy differences and more to do with candidate identification differences. With a few exceptions professional pundits have been flummoxed by the actual nature of the majoritarian backlash. What they view as being differences in values is actually differences of identification. Those who want to be ruled by the New Elite are in the minority. Professional politicians who fail to understand this are doomed. This book was published before the last Presidential election; if Senator Kerry had read this perhaps he might have avoided some of the majority backlash.
To prove the point about identification the author points out that in the year 2000 both candidates had WASP credentials including famous fathers and Ivy League educations. Lebedoff believes the essential difference between the two was Al Gore identified with the New Elite and President Bush with “Left Behinds.” Lebedoff sees intelligence testing as the major discriminating test with the New Elites believing that “... now that we know who the smartest people there is no reason to seek the opinions of anyone else...”
Even though President Bush had a higher SAT Score and educational accomplishment, he was seen by the New Elite as not only an intellectual inferior but out and out dumb. The New Elites further cited polls that showed that on many issues the public favored their positions. Notwithstanding having a smarter, New Elite candidate and favorable political positions they lost the election.
President Bush appealed to the “Left Behinds” by having straight forward speech interspaced with solecisms. Al Gore spoke like a social science professor who wrote books. President Bush even had the audacity to answer a query as to his favorite philosopher with “...Jesus Christ...” Clearly the candidates epitomized their respective classes—Gore the New Elite and President Bush the Left Behind.
Lebedoff, after defining the two identifications, also defines how one becomes a member of the New Elite. This is not strictly on intelligence even though the New Elites may believe otherwise. No, quite the contrary, it is a process of self-selection that permits one to enter the New Elite. In a word, you become a member of the New Elite by defining yourself as a member.
Chapter two of this book, “The Birth of a New Class” purports to trace the genesis and development of the New Elite to the agglutination of the high SAT scores into our colleges and universities. Of course this is right out of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve and has been replicated as a new social class by Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise as well as Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. In any case this is one of the weaker chapters of the book and a true understanding of contemporary class structure must begin with the Herrnstein and Murray book.
While we can amuse ourselves with thoughts of a “new class” it is important to remember this has all been discussed many times before. For example the following is a quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero : “The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.”
According to Lebedoff, this emergent New Elite class is closely associated with educational attainment (post graduate degrees are common) but can include those self selected persons who are privileged college dropouts. The whole idea is how these people see themselves. If one identifies with a religion, an area or identifies with the common culture, intelligence per se does not determine your identification but your attachments do and you are more likely than not to be a Left Behind. On the other hand, if you self identify as being intelligent and preferring intelligence to be the guide for your political choices then you will self select as a New Elite.
Lebedoff sees the characteristics of the New Elite to include rejection of roots, class and faith. Many times these meritocrats have risen from humble beginnings and, of course, this requires them to minimize their previous attachments. Further, the real significance of the New Elite is political—members are frequently managers of society such as teachers, commentators, planners, officials, executives, lawyers, physicians and so forth. Just making a lot of money does not make you a New Elite. Indeed, the New Elite believes in a certain amount of financial success but not too much.
Like most political movements the New Elites give lip service to rule by the majority but really are claiming to identify with this majority and speak and act for it. When they are denied majority support (as they often are) they resort to moral superiority stratagems to justify their rule. In any case the New Elite denies the importance of tradition and will chuck it for the most trivial reason. Most importantly, denial of traditional values is the unspoken ideal.
As Rush always says the New Elite are all about style over substance. This includes the New Elite conviction that the personal qualities of who rules are far more important than what they believe or plan to do.
To sum it all up, the New Elite claims authority on their intelligence, the jobs and skills such that in the modern world they are destined to rule.
To rule the New Elite frequently has to undermine existing majoritarian institutions. The author traces the capture of the Democratic Party by the New Elites in some detail. He also discusses at length the New Elite dominance of the courts.
Lebbedoff describes and discusses many other issues including that many of New Elite know very little of anything except their profession. For forty years I attended many successful people and can attest to the above observation. The New Elite are hardworking meritocrats who have no servants; hence, if married with children they are short of time and patience. I was always shocked to discover how many successful professionals knew little or nothing about society and how it functioned. What was worse, many of these successful people resented anyone who would try to inform them; they made deliberate and conscious effort to avoid any information contrary to their underlying belief in their superiority. Skilled craftsmen and ordinary people often surpassed many in the professions in their knowledge of the everyday workings of the economy, society and their personal relationships.
Further, I believe the real problem here is failing to understand the nature of knowledge. Nietzsche summed this up nicely by identifying two different kinds of knowledge. There are the things you know from personal experience and observation, which he called "erfahrung." There are also the abstractions you think you know - the kind of thing that is reported in the paper and discussed on the editorial pages - which he called "wissen." Belief in abstractions necessary means you trust and believe in the abstracter. Majoritarians, or those Left Behind, also think abstractly but they also base a good deal of their conclusions about life on the basis of their personal experience. William James, an outstanding psychologist of the last century, noted that what many people called thinking was actually an act of faith in another’s judgment. Mark Twain said much the same thing when he described what most people called “thinking” was really “emoting” and the aggregation of this “emoting” was public opinion. Of course public opinion is considered the word of God and once determined supposedly answers all questions.
This failure to understand the nature of knowledge plus the real lack of education among some of our New Elites leads to ridiculous over-the-top campaigns for frivolous changes to the common culture. Perhaps more than any other reason this failure to understand makes defeating them in the public forum not only desired but required.
This book contains many wonderful features and is a must buy for those who wish to understand the current political scene. President Bush and Karl Rove may not ever read this book: they proved their mastery of the subject.
The basic shortcomings of the book besides what has been described are no literature citations and no index. Hopefully, future editions will remedy this. Anyone wanting to read an interesting, well written book should buy it ASAP.
If you hit Book Review by shrinkermd you will be taken to Amazon for the particulars on the book and a brief description of the book.
This is a fine book and well worth the time and money spent.
I wish I had a dime for every time I've uttered that observation in the past 15 years. Strange.
Enjoyed your summation and thanks for bring it forward.
My late Mother never had an opportunity to go to college, but when it came to understanding people and life itself, she was brilliant. She had incredible commonsense. Needless to say, she was a rock-solid Conservative.
>>"Democrats overwhelmingly win two educational groups—those
>>with postgraduate degrees and high school drop outs."
>I wish I had a dime for every time I've uttered that
>observation in the past 15 years. Strange.
Collectively, they are the amazingly arrogant, but divided into two groups:
1) the disciplined (with postgraduate degrees)
2) the un-disciplined (the high-school dropouts)
The defining characteristic of the elite is arrogance.
ping - redneck roots won't help you with these elites. They want to invent their own rules. We're their lab specimens.
Boy, my list of christmas books for my father is growing every day. Great review. I had narrowed my original list down from 10 books to Natan Sharansky's latest, now I see I might need to flip a coin.....
and ignorance/
and self deception.
Remember the tune from The King and I? "...whenever I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well..."
Thank you. Nice read.
Sounds like a follow up to Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed". That was one of the first political book I read and it left a powerful impression.
1. An enormous ability for self deception.
2. An amazing obsession with image over substance.
Good review, well written. Thanks.
Your comments are akin to the concept that there is a difference between intelligence and reason. Intelligence is the means one uses to operate within his or her environment, even in the form of "street intelligence". Reason is the ability to understand your environment. A liberal is not intelligent enough to fathom that a club might be about to fall on his head, and lacks the will to "reason" why, if he indeed did fathom it.
There are very few Renaissance men/or women out there.
Thomas Jefferson the primary author of many of our founding documents was also an architect, and a farmer. Our governing population was well rounded.
Now the Democrats elect lawyers and the Republicans largely elect people from the business world. It seems perfectly appropriate. Democrats have always looked to tap the deep pockets of the taxpayers.
I have said many times that the "Elites" know the same truth (which is absolute)that a conservative knows. The difference is the elites do like the truth. They want something else to be true, so they fight like hell against what they know is true. It's a constant battle they will always lose.
They know what I am saying is the truth, but they repeat the same mistakes and lose the same battles over and over again. I say, in the real sense, that makes "elites" pretty damn stupid.
I am sick of this too. I have a Ph.D. and worked in Europe for a few years. I have never voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate.
I think the 2 main groups that make up the Democratic Party. One is the arrogant elite who want to be the slave owners in their socialist utopia. The others are people so dumb they believe that this socialist utopia will be more pleasant to live in than where they are today.
Not too sure I want to read the book, but your review is outstanding.
Sounds like Lebedoff is trying to couch things in "Animal Farm"-like speak, and trying (with lemmingesque glee) to paint us as the bad guys...
thanks.
i read his earlier book "the new elite" more than a decade ago. i found it at a crown books on a discount table, in an unassuming blue paper cover.
he argued the test scores then, but another argument that i found interesting:
that new elite women tend to marry across or up, but not down, as men in previous generations did, impeding social mobility, and thus, creating a new elite. when men marry down, they increase social mobility.
i would add that many who join the new elite are less educated in rigorous fields of study than professionals across society. the media are an obvious example. journalists take no difficult college courses--no math, no science, no classical languages, no economics, not even history. "j-schools" are an island unto themselves in higher learning. by comparison with physicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists, etc. they are not educated
Intellectuals and ignorants: no great mystery.
Bear in mind I use the term "intellectual" in the same sense Judge Bork used it in "Slouching Towards Gommorah." It's not that these people are very smart; it's that they make their livings with ideas and symbols. That is, they never venture very far from abstractions.
Reagan knew *exactly* what he was talking about when he said "It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant. It's that they know so much that isn't so."
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