Mrs. Palin and the Chattering Classes

The visceral hatred so many of my peers from elite universities feel for Sarah Palin does not come from mere snobbish revulsion at her association with backwoods culture, with mooseburgers and ATVs. Many of us who exulted over last night’s electrifying speech have little in common with her, and, despite her manifest intelligence and good humor, might well feel more comfortable having dinner with the Obamas than with the Palins. The hatred comes from the threat she poses to their idea of what the American order should be and what place in it they are owed.

Even though intellectual elites have largely abandoned socialism, most continue to believe that politics is about operating a complex machine called society . The people best equipped to operate this machine are those with big brains who have studied this machine most intently and at the highest level. That is to say, political power (or at least decisive political influence) should go to people like them , who majored in International Relations, follow the details of G8 meetings, parse statistics and read legislation for fun, campaign door to door, trawl the blogs and read Foreign Affairs obsessively. In short, they wish to equate competence with wonkishness. One of the reasons they so love Sen. Obama is that they think that, with their wonkish devotion to the study of issues, they could well be among his three hundred foreign-policy advisers.

Enter Sarah Palin from Wasilla, Alaska. By wonkish criteria she is barely more equipped to run this country than any other adult chosen at random. Intellectual elites cannot bear to think that, politics being a practical affair, practical knowledge is more important than knowledge of facts and facility with complex analyses.They do not want to believe that having done comparatively small things well equips one better for the use of power than having encyclopedic knowledge of large things. But so it is.

Knowledge of essential facts is, of course, essential to good political leadership, but such facts are relatively few and are usually well within the grasp of someone with normal intelligence and decent secondary education. In picking their leaders, the average voter rightly cares less whether candidates have scholar’s expertise than whether they have manifested tenacity, courage, good judgment of people and affairs, moral integrity under pressure, and the ability to wield influence effectively. These characteristics can be displayed at least as well in Wasilla as in Bryn Mawr and are honed far better by vigorous participation in ordinary life (indeed, from things as banal as family crises, PTA meetings and small-town controversies) than by seminars and policy debates.

As Thomas Sowell has said, most higher education is just expensive insulation from reality. It’s no surprise if the insulated are afraid that, in Sarah Palin, an uninvited visitor from the real world has come to undermine their credentials and usurp their privileges.