Republican denouement?

There has been a lot of talk lately, along with a healthy dollop of schadenfreude, about how the Republican Party has finally gotten its comeuppance. Although it is clearly too soon to tell if the apex of the 40-year conservative movement is behind us of if this is simply just a setback, it should be important to note that there is one trend, marked with the rhetoric of Governor Sarah Palin, that I find particularly disturbing - the WSJ coined it 'Populist Chic' or anti-intellectualism.

I'm no pointy-headed educated elitist and I don't want a bunch of Ivy league professors running the country, but there is something wrong when we champion the common-sense know-how of Joe the Plumber as a framework to solve our country's very complicated problems. That's not to say that we should embrace the wisdom of academia (needling intellectuals is always fun), but as Mickey Edwards said in his interview on Fresh Air, "we say something bad about ourselves when we are dismissive of somebody having a good education."

That is why I hope that the Republican party, in retreat, does not choose to go down that path. There is nothing wrong with the Conservative ideology - I appreciate its role as a counterpoint to a Liberal ideology (and vice-versa). A healthy democracy needs different points of view and, as someone who has voted both sides, I tend to believe the country oscillates between the two as we find our more centrist baseline. However, there is something wrong with pandering to anti-intellectualism (for example, we've seen its destructive power in the Cultural Revolution); in the short term - it proves to be effective for circling the wagons and rallying your base, in the long term, we, as a people, all suffer.

Worth the read / listen:
WSJ: The Perils of 'Populist Chic'
NPR: The Future of the Conservative Movement

This entry was posted by Mike, on Saturday, November 8, 2008. You can leave your response.