Beat The Elites

I would much rather have an every(wo) man like Sarah Palin than an arrogant elitist like Barack Obama running this country.


The elitist mentality breeds both selfish and closed-minded people. This notion has spread rampantly through four year colleges and universities, and even to community colleges across this country. Elitism does not allow for free thought. It calls for a communistic fall in lockstep behind one another mentality that does a huge disservice to the students trying to gain a good, well-rounded college education. This has become prevalent within Catholic colleges today. I attended Franciscan University in Steubenville, OH and even though overall it is better than most Catholic liberal-arts colleges the philosophy of elitism, and specifically liberal elitism has infiltrated it from within to some degree.

Some professors there, as an enormous amount of other colleges call for “social justice” and call for compromise. But, in the elitist version of compromise it is crystal clear that they sacrifice their ideals, principles, and values for the sake of appearing neutral, nice, persuasive, or compromising with others.

This elitist mentality has branched out to jobs all over the world. A bunch of selfish owners, managers, and leaders have been bred all over this country. While in some professions it is self-evident that certain types of training are necessary, there are many jobs or professions where many people, like myself, are more than willing to learn a different computer program or a different line of work but because of office politics or elitist selfishness people are unwilling to help a person learn a new computer program or a different line of work. These owners or managers want a ready-made perfect individual instead of helping to give a person a step up.

Yet, These same selfish owners and managers would rather the government take care of individuals instead of helping them in a much more productive manner that could benefit the company, employee, and this country.

We need to return to being more community-oriented like in the early 20th Century. We must bring our societyback to promoting a sense of values, morality, and Godly principles instead of accepting the elitist mentality of selfishness, arrogance, and moral compromise.



Palin Populism by Michael Knox Beran:
Sarah Palin takes on the pathology of the elites.


BILL O’REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?


SARAH PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of spinelessness, that perhaps is made up for with some kind of elite Ivy League education . . .


— The O’Reilly Factor, Nov. 21, 2009


No sooner had I lighted on this exchange than the familiar words of Faust — familiar, at any rate, to us Ivy Leaguers, for whom he is something of a patron saint — were on my tongue:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,

Juristerei und Medizin . . .

I have, alas, studied philosophy,

Jurisprudence and medicine, too,

And worst of all theology

With keen endeavor, through and through —

And here I am, for all my lore,

The wretched fool I was before.

I was, as I say, trilling Goethe when it occurred to me that Governor Palin had a point. Perhaps the Ivy League business has been a little overrated.



Everyone knows that many stupid people possess degrees from fancy schools. Many smart people don’t have them. But in a big country, it isn’t easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. We are obliged to rely on things like academic degrees — and on the relative prestige of the institutions that grant them — to a much greater degree than was the case in the past.


This was evident in the comparisons that were drawn between President Obama and Governor Palin in the summer of 2008. His intelligence was never questioned. Hers was, repeatedly. Undoubtedly his two Ivy League degrees (from Columbia and Harvard) helped him. Her want of prestigious education hurt her: It made it easier for those who didn’t like her to say she was stupid. This presumption of stupidity was in the air before the interviews with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. Those interviews resembled ambushes, orchestrated by people who were already convinced that she was a moron. Had Obama — who cherishes his teleprompter — been ambushed in this way, his intelligence would have been questioned too.


Degree fetish might be a necessary evil in a big country where there are lots of candidates for jobs and no easy way to rank them. But if in the future the only means of obtaining intellectual credibility in America should be through an accumulation of degrees, the country will almost certainly become stupider.


Degree fetish fosters a standardization of the intellect: Everyone is obliged to jump over the same hurdles to get their intellectual passports. If standardization has its virtues, particularly in the hard sciences, its promise in the humanities is much less obvious; Edmund Wilson was probably right when he said that literae humaniores have suffered from the Ph.D. fetish.

But the greatest evil of degree fetish is the arrogance it nourishes, an intellectual snobbishness that stifles nonconformity and homespun intelligence. Whitman suffered this condescension. So did Lincoln, and so did Reagan. Emerson, the Harvard man, said that Lincoln was a “clown.” Clark Clifford, speaking ex cathedra for the Washington establishment, called Reagan an “amiable dunce.”  CONTINUED

H/T goes to NRO