Creating a Monster

My first college political science class was taught by a one of those iconoclasts who are absolutely mesmerizing to a room full of 19 year-olds. At the time it was like watching pure truth every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9 am. Looking back, I suspect that if I sat in on a lecture of his now, he might come across as a bullying demagogue, but I have to admit that this professor has had a lasting impact on my thinking.

Among many things he said that jolted my thinking was a proclamation that, despite being a good progressive, he was an unapologetic elitist. "Of course I'm an elitist," he said. "I'm a college professor, and besides, have you looked at who we're trying to govern? Do you really want Bubba in charge of our schools? Our roads and bridges? Our armies?!"

It seemed so wrong to say something like that, but so irrefutably true. Having had what amounts to an elite education, I'd was always told I could be anything I wanted to be, and people really meant it. But the one thing I could never allow myself was to think I was better than anyone else. This is mostly a good value, and it's mostly right in practice. But not always. Sometimes being more educated or qualified means that it's your duty to take on leadership roles. There's no need to be polite about it. We need talent in charge, not Bubba.

Too often, people who are gifted by accident of birth as rich, intelligent, or an heir to power would rather come off as just like everyone else, and everyone else expects them to do just that. It's considered a condescending courtesy or a necessary formality to indulge every bad idea for the sake of equity, while quietly assuming your position is unequivocally rational and just. But false humility is an uglier thing than owning one's talents, and certainty of one's own virtue is one of the most smug, repugnant characteristics a person can possess.

So what about elitism? Back to the poli-sci lecture. During the late renaissance, when democracies were first coming online, most of the argument was over how much power to give the common man. After all, most people were illiterate, and had spent most of their energy trying to feed their families and keep a thatched roof over their heads. The vote was restricted to white, male landowners-- people who it was believed had an interest in the common good, beyond themselves or their own families. It was noblesse oblige to do the right thing. With industrialization, public education, and a hundredfold increase in living standards, the right to vote has expanded to anyone who is both an adult and a citizen. And it was the right thing to do.

We no longer restrict who can vote, and we shouldn't. Maybe we never should have restricted it, but those were the judgment calls of generations before us; they were already making bold moves when considering how things worked before them.

It would do us some good to recognize the thinking behind how our system of government was established. It's supposed to be simultaneously responsive to citizen's needs and desires, while isolating and empowering elected decisionmakers to make hard decisions in the public interest. If we gave people what they wanted every time, we'd be no better off than the Romans under Caesar, placated by gladiators killing one another in the coliseum, and scraps of bread tossed from the back of a wagon. When people are told to expect everything they want, they are much more likely to act in their own self interest. There can be no society when leaders indulge our most atavistic instincts.

There is a disturbing trend in today's political discourse. America's right has had some successes in appealing to the basest instincts of certain people. The Republican party enjoyed considerable success by giving the people what they want. Tax cuts, guns, freedom without responsibility. It's one thing to be conservative, and to believe in limited government and incremental progress. It's quite another to call for the destruction of a system that has served us reasonably well, or to call for a theocratic approach to lawmaking that conforms to the beliefs of one segment of the demographic. That's not conservative.

I really hope that conservatives can attract a cadre of rational, competent leaders, instead of those who choose to arouse our leanings towards hatred and idolatry. More generally, I wish that people would look for qualified leaders who talk sober sense instead of populist yes men.

In the end, I place a lot of the blame on the profit motive in journalism. Media outlets are rewarded for covering trainwrecks, not floor debates. Trainwrecks please the base, and this system of reward has gone on to reward the trainwrecks in public office, to embolden those who would be seduced by them. This is a self-fulfilling phenomenon-- the more coverage, the more reward.

The more reward, the more coverage. I don't think there's any policy that could change this and I reject any censorship or regulation of the media as both unwise and unamerican. I have to believe that most people will reject the "trainwreck effect" on their own. Left or right, we need an elite in charge. A little nobility ennobles all of us.