Posted on 01/15/2010 5:52:33 AM PST by mdittmar
In his New York Times[NYT] column last week, David Brooks contrasted “the educated class,” which supports Barack Obama and his liberal worldview, with the tea party movement, “a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against . . . the concentrated power of the educated class.”
Many conservatives read Brooks as putting down the tea partiers. I think he was indicating distaste for both sides. “I’m not a fan” of the tea party movement, he wrote, but he also noted, “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the year.”
But when you look back over the surges of enthusiasm in the politics of the last two years, you see something like this: The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance.
Remember those rapturous crowds that swooned at Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “We are the change we are seeking,” he proclaimed. “We will be able to look back and tell our children” that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
A lot of style there, but not very much substance.
In retrospect, the Obama enthusiasts seem to have been motivated by a yearning for a rapturous, nuanced leader. Send that terrible tyrant with his tortured sentences and moral certitude back to Texas and install The One in the White House, and all would be well.
The Obama enthusiasts have achieved that goal, and perhaps it’s not surprising that, as polls show, they’re not much engaged in the details of the health care bills or cap-and-trade legislation or looming tax increases and the like.
In contrast, the tea party protesters, many of them as fractious and loudmouthed as Brooks thinks, are interested in substantive political issues. They decry the dangers of expanding the national debt, increasing government spending and putting government in command of the health care sector.
Agree with the tea party folk or not, these are substantive public policy issues of fundamental importance.
Or look at other issues on which Brooks notes, correctly, that Americans have been moving away from positions “associated with the educated class.”
“The educated class believes in global warming,” Brooks notes. But ordinary Americans have been noticing that temperatures have not been rising in the last decade as climate scientists’ models predicted, and they may have noticed those Climategate e-mails that show how climate scientists have been jiggering the statistics and suppressing opposing views.
On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance.
As the educated class bitterly clings to its contempt for the increasing numbers not enlightened enough to share its views, other Americans have noticed, even in the liberal heartland of Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown seems on the brink of an upset victory in the special Senate election next Tuesday. That would have reverberations for the educated class a lot like that tea party back in 1773.
Yeah, we tee-partyers is just a bunch of dumm yahoos.
Its better for evrybody if the ee-leets just do all are thinkin fer us.
Oh, not only are "tea-baggers" racists, there stupid and uneducated. Thanks, I get it now.
While I enjoy and like many columnists, Barone is the only one I think is truly objective. So when he says this, I feel my icy pessimism start to melt. I mean, he doesn't say things like this lightly.
I’m really trying not to take offense at being labeled the UN-educated class. To me it is just the reverse. Isnt there there a huge number of under-educated voters who support Obama, arent THOSE the voters who put him in office? Isn’t that why he is a fan of entitlement programs? It certainly isn’t for the over-educateds as they are a small percentage of his supporters.
People with science or math oriented degrees have the ability to analyze the lies the liberals dish out daily.
signed,
xtinct
BS Computer Systems Engineering '99
MS Computer Systems Engineering '01
Those to which you refer are what the “educated class” sees ALL of us as.
Incapable of making our own decisions.
The “educated class” sees opposition to their agenda as proof of their superiority.
Educated class? More like the indoctrinated class, unable to think for themselves beyond the prescribed leftist worldview.
It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have.
If you weren’t educated at the “right” university,
and more importantly, if you don’t espouse the “correct” worldview,
you are not smart.
On the flipside, merely espousing the “correct” worldview is enough in most liberal circles to be deemed “brilliant”. Ref 0bama, for example.
Brooks is just showing the world that the “educated” class is educated way beyond their intellegence.
We are for lower taxes, we are for less regulation, we are for more individual liberty, we are for less powerful government, we are for national and individual soveriegnty....
how are we “defined” by what we are against?
Who is doing this defining?
“The peasants are revolting!”
This time it has a double meaning!
psst... I have the right degrees ... trust me... the moonbats in MA get me caufee... but I do have to bite my tongue alot... lol
Jokes aside,
the “elite” ARE attempting to reinstate a feudalist system,
where they are empowered and control all resources,
and the serfs exist at their mercy to serve them.
This is why their policies are destructive to the middle class.
Obama’s support has always been a mile wide and an inch deep.
Oh, and Brooks is one of a long line of RINOs with buyers remorse.
It’s backwards.
ANYONE who supported this muslim for President is stupid and/or gullible.
There is NOTHING in his past that would make a reasonable human being think he was even REMOTELY qualified for the job of President.
hussein might as well have been traveling from town to town with a copper pot affixed to a wagon, telling people he could make it rain, as THAT would be more believable than to think he was ready to be President.
Sir, WE WHO DIDN’T FALL FOR THE BULLZHIT are the “educated ones”.
Too much projection from the Left.
Eventually the peasants rose up and stormed the Bastille!
I think we are getting dangerously close to that. We the people will never roll over, never. It seems to me they are just supplying us with the reasons to overthrow them. And I think we will. It may be a peaceful revolution we are about to witness, but it is a revolution.
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