America’s Decadent Leadership Class: Putin doesn’t respect them, and they don’t like half the American people, by Peggy Noonan.
Mr. Putin and perhaps other world leaders have come to have diminished respect for the morality, patriotism and large-mindedness of our leaders. Nikita Khrushchev had a rough respect for JFK and his men and that respect, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, helped avert nuclear war. Mikhail Gorbachev was in the end half-awed by Ronald Reagan’s goodness and idealism; the world knew George H.W. Bush and respected his integrity, and so he was able to build coalitions that were real coalitions, not just names. Now, whoever wins, we are in a different place, a lesser and more dangerous one.
The new elite don’t like us.
The Democrats, progressives and left-liberals who have been embarrassed by the latest WikiLeaks dump really hate conservatives, or nonleftists. They don’t like half the people of the country they seek to control! They look at that half with disdain and disrespect. Their disdain is not new — “bitter clingers,” “basket of deplorables.” But here it’s so unashamed and eager to express itself.
A stupid man from a leftist think tank claimed the most “powerful elements” in the conservative movement are Catholic. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations,” he wrote. Mrs. Clinton’s press aide Jennifer Palmieri responded: “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they become evangelicals.” …
Here’s what you see in the emails: the writers are the worst kind of snobs, snobs with nothing to recommend them. In their expression and thoughts they are common, banal, dumb, uninformed, parochial.
I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way — towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie!
It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.
I often wonder if the new left is a coalition of bright but not-too-bright types, who have learned that by ganging up and chanting names they can win political power to makes their lives more comfortable at the expense of the common good. Like a secret brotherhood in a football team that resolutely promotes only its own members, regardless of talent. Maybe political correctness is just a union of the mediocre using their numbers against the more able — hence the war on rationality, IQ (what they really mean by “privilege,” I suspect), merit, and so on.
Because they have captured the institutions, the left have us fooled into thinking they are on top of their game, that they have merit and talent. But in reality I keep finding the smarter and more thoughtful thinkers, and certainly those with enough integrity to force them to be more independent of the mob, are systematically excluded from those institutions and are largely ignored by society. That wasn’t the case forty and even twenty years ago. Our institutions are consequently dumbed down, and keep making stupid mistakes (the South Australian blackout is the latest local blunder, the census in August, and so on).
