Katha Pollitt’s latest, in The Nation (I swiped the above headline from The Guardian, which also ran the piece):
Ah, meritocracy! Not so long ago, conservatives had a lock on it: no affirmative action, no A’s for effort and no competitions where everyone gets a prize. People who complained that racism or sexism or any other -ism was holding them back were whiners looking for excuses. They either didn’t want to work hard or, as Charles Murray claimed in The Bell Curve, they weren’t smart enough to make the grade.
Well, never mind. Sarah Palin has done for meritocracy what she’s done for those other conservative obsessions: working mothers (you go, girl!), teen pregnancy (a challenge!), masculine authority (the first dude?) – to say nothing of gravitas, statesmanship, wisdom and all those other weighty abstract nouns George Will likes to talk about. “I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love,” Murray told the New York Times‘ Deborah Solomon. “The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.” …
There’s an upside, in that the old attack on Obama as a lightweight who is inexperienced and overreaching has all but vanished. Plus, there’s the fun of watching conservative pundits scramble to deny the obvious. “There are Republicans who are unhappy about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin,” acknowledged William Kristol in his September 1 column. “Many are insiders who highly value – who overly value – ‘experience.’”
Ah yes, experience. What is that, anyway? My people choose their leaders by inspecting the entrails of chickens, and the gods have always multiplied our herds! Besides, as Rush Limbaugh said recently: “She’ll be surrounded by a sea of advisers.” Hmmm, where did I hear that before? Was it not in 2000, when doubts were raised about whether George Bush could handle the job?
The stress on high-end conservative pundits is beginning to show. These are people, after all, who belong to the Ivy-educated, latte-drinking, Tuscan-vacationing urban elite they love to ridicule and who see themselves, however deludedly, as policy intellectuals and grown-ups. They’ve written endlessly about “excellence” and “standards”. McCain’s erratic flounderings, and Palin’s patent absurdity, have driven David Brooks and George Will to write columns so anguished I’d feel sorry for them had they not made their bed by spending the past eight years rationalising the obvious inadequacies of George Bush.
I want the people running the country to be smarter and wiser and more judicious and more knowledgeable than I am. If that’s elitism, count me in.
Read the entire piece here.
Another woman’s voice — Kathleen Parker’s — from the other end of the spectrum, at The National Review. And don’t miss her follow-up.
Speaking of George Will, I thought this column was quite good, and this article heartening. I don’t always agree with him on politics, more so on baseball, but we’re in the same ballpark this time.
Filed under: Current Events
