CFE: The Triumph of Liberal Branding

Andrew Stuttaford has a post on The Corner entitled "Elites and Their Choices" which observes:

Assuming the worst (but, of course, hoping for the best) for today, as one must, one of the fascinating questions to come revolves around what's next for Sarah Palin, both as a political figure in her own right, and for what her future role will say about the evolution of the GOP. We've already had a few skirmishes here on the direction the GOP might take (and there will be more elsewhere), but when I read this comment by David Brooks in an article running in this week's New York magazine, I don't feel very optimistic about the tone of what lies ahead:

Others maintain that the damage to her image has been so enormous that it is essentially irreparable. And still others contend that she is simply too dim to be a major figure in our national life. When I asked Times columnist David Brooks if he thought that Palin could be the Republican nominee in 2012, he said, “I don’t.” When I asked why, he answered with a chuckle, “I just don’t think the human capital is there, to put it politely.”

Politely? Meanwhile, on a not entirely unrelated topic, I saw this interesting piece by Christopher Caldwell in the London Spectator:

The Democrats are now the partisan home of the upper crust of the American meritocracy, of the credentialled classes, the classes that believe every endeavour is some variety of IQ test. USA Today did a review of fund-raising data and discovered that Obama dominates fundraising among the leaders of ‘finance, insurance, real estate, health, communications and law’. The Democratic party is the vehicle through which, after a populist interlude, the governing classes are proposing to take their country back. Obama is a restoration candidate but that doesn’t mean he has a plan.

Food for thought.

So much for that "Party of the Little Guy" crap they've been peddling, too.

I wrote Stuttaford a note:

Regarding the execrable David Brooks sneering at Gov. Palin - that "Gov." meaning "GOVERNOR", not "lick-spittle brown-nosing NY Times lackey" - as being too stupid for his lofty perch: What the jeering elitists never explain is how this dim-witted, Jesus-freak, redneck, breeder cow managed to take down her own party's old boy network (in a place where old boy networks are surely tighter than most) and become the most popular governor in the Republic. That she was able to climb the ladder from the school board to the state house without benefit of money, connections, or celebrity should be testament to some sort of intellectual acumen. That supposed "conservatives" like Brooks can't resist defecating on her and her unlettered ilk while liberal Democrat Obama-supporter Camile Paglia recognizes her strengths shows how pitiful the "pseudo-cons" (or CINOs) are these days as they try to curry favor with those on the Left whom they assume will be their masters.

The reason the "elites" and "intellectuals" are liberals is because liberalism has succeeded in branding itself as the "Smart Folks' Ideology." Liberals are smarter. Liberals are nicer. Liberals are more diverse. Liberals are more tolerant. Unlike those backward superstitious racist sexist bigoted homophobes (i.e. conservatives), liberals are inherently better than the rest. Look at all the pretty celebrities and rich people; they're liberals. Join us! It's the same thing that makes people pay a premium price for Apple products - they're perceived to be better, cooler, the choice of the Eloi, not the Morlocks. Forget "Pepsi: The Choice of the New Generation"; it's "Liberalism: Because You're Smarter Than Them!"

I stumbled into this insight while debatng with a friend and she threw the argument at me that since most college graduates are liberals, then clearly liberals are smarter. (She's an artist who probably doesn't know another non-liberal outside of me. If we weren't old family friends, she'd probably never associate with my kind.) Looking around, I realized that most liberals can't articulate their superiority without using that in the definition (e.g. "Liberals are smarter because they are smarter.") or denigrating conservatives (e.g. "I'm liberal because you stupid people think Jesus rode dinosaurs 2000 years ago.") That they lack the intellectual and epistemological curiosity to notice that there is no actual diversity or tolerance in their ranks is a sign of irony-deficiency that no multi-vitamin can compensate for.

Hypocrisy is the coin of the liberal realm, but they envision themselves to be more highly-evolved and thus entitled to reign over the benighted proletariat.

Damn straight!