Elite Guilt Begat Obamacare (Enlightening Interview with Author Michael Knox Beran)

Michael Knox Beran, a frequent contributor to National Review and National Review Online, is the author of... the new book Pathology of the Elites which he discusses with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez here.

MICHAEL KNOX BERAN: Elites become pathological when they mask their will to power with a philosophy of social pity. Lionel Trilling said of a character in Henry James’s novel The Princess Casamassima — an American-born woman who marries into the European nobility and becomes a social reformer — that she “is the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself in virtue, making itself appear harmless, the will that hates itself and finds its manifestations guilty and is able to exist only if it operates in the name of virtue.” What Trilling is saying is that the ostensibly beneficent policies of the elite reformer very often conceal an instinct to coerce. “Some paradox of our nature leads us,” Trilling says, “when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”

I do believe the Suntrade Institute has been saying this (on FR) for years. It is the reason that, once elected and installed, so many federal politicians, no matter what they say beforehand, become "liberal," i.e. ready to confiscate and give away other people's money.

By the nature of guilt it is likely to happen to any of us. That is exactly why the politicians must be routinely scrutinized and replaced. It is synonymous with "power corrupts;" once the power is enjoined the ego to brandish it prevails, the humility that empathizes with the constituent position once held is gone.

Again this is the deep psychological reason for term limits. There are many contrary arguments but this is the overriding one, the humility or empathy of it all.

It is explicitly opposite the nature of Machiavellianism.

It is also the reason that GWB strayed. By all accounts a good guy, his privileged (elitist) background excluded the strong articulation of conservatism, i.e. individuals of the constituency must assume responsibility for their own decisions and behavior, for freedom to prevail.

Johnny Suntrade

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