Republican Elitism

For more than a generation, the most popular maneuver in the conservative playbook has been to denounce academic and cultural elites. In the 1960's, William F. Buckley Jr. quipped that he'd rather "be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty." In 2003, David Frum, a conservative columnist and former Bush speechwriter, denounced the "American elite" for its "combination of guilt and self-doubt." "With his 'axis of evil' speech," he continued, "President Bush served notice to the world: he felt no guilt and no self-doubt."

But this year, many conservatives put the elite-baiting aside and began trafficking in their own elitist pronouncements. Even in the relatively rarefied world of appellate judges and academic economists, John Roberts (Harvard College, Harvard Law School), Samuel A. Alito Jr. (Princeton, Yale Law School) and Ben Bernanke (Harvard and M.I.T., Princeton professor) stand out for their impressive credentials. When George Bush nominated them to important offices, Frum and his fellow conservative commentators saluted their impeccable qualifications even as they denounced the nomination of the relatively uncredentialed Harriet Miers (Southern Methodist University, S.M.U. School of Law).

Of course, for all their insistence that businessmen and ordinary citizens understand the realities of American life better than highly credentialed professionals, conservatives have spent decades building a credentialed professional elite of their own. Ambitious conservatives have attended top graduate schools, taken positions at prestigious research groups and law firms, written important books and papers. They've waited patiently for the day when they could take their places at the highest levels of government - when, say, a second-term Republican president would enjoy majorities in both houses of Congress.

Now that the day has finally come, conservatives don't want the opportunity fumbled - and certainly not in favor of a few presidential cronies. For Bush "to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence," Frum wrote in the aftermath of the Miers nomination, would be "simply reckless." Responding to Bush's request that conservatives trust his assessment of Harriet Miers, George F. Will thundered: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections." So much for the idea that what Bush knows in his heart is more important than what intellectuals know in their heads.




http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section3-10.html?ex=1291957200&en=1e6dc04f660b7c10&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss