One can surely make a reasonable argument that Sarah Palin was underqualified to be the next Vice President. Nevertheless, I argue here that the hyperventilated contempt shown for her by our cosmopolitan elites reveals a caricatured and ugly dismissal of the lives of ordinary Americans. It’s not just the breathtaking sense of cultural superiority that’s so discomfiting or the superficial conflation of a general urbanity with real philosophical gravitas. It’s also the thoughtless dismissal of prudence as a political virtue, an inflated sense of the value of political philosophy to political practice, and the overall view that a true populism results in the technocratic few beneficiently managing the benighted many.
