The problem with intellectuals

August 8, 2023 By Matthew G. Andersson

Economist Thomas Sowell, one of America’s finest thinkers, wrote an excellent book called Intellectuals and Society that I would encourage anyone to read. Its main argument is that “elitists” who have been inflated with academic ideas and theories, think of themselves as morally superior, and entitled to advance their idealisms by any means possible, including breaking the law, out of a sense of “justice” and especially if their causes can be characterized as urgent, or an emergency. Pretext is the fuel that powers its ideology.

This is a fascinating issue because the so-called intellectual class -- embodied by the current political Left and the “Biden” administration -- is, in reality, living an illusion, both in their person, and socially. Sowell distinguishes intellectuals by their life “which begins and ends with ideas.” This explains all the Biden administration’s negative policy from imaginary “green” energy systems, to onerous carbon taxes, invasive biosecurity, illegal immigration, discriminatory affirmative action, hostile agricultural policy, deliberate war instigation, lack of U.S. military preparedness, and more...........

This is also why “intellectuals” as a group, are generally attracted to government (as they perceive it): government is a top-down institutional opportunity to bypass practical work. Actual work comes from the ground up, in cooperation (and compromise) with others. Intellectuals, on the other hand, don’t like that, because they don’t like to actually work, or cooperate, compromise, or do: they prefer to talk, divide, take, and imagine. Conservatism defends the rule of law, and consent. The radical Left’s social psychology is the rule of rule, and executive decree. Trump instinctively knew this as a businessman, and this created an instant clash of cultures: one pragmatic, practical, and experienced; the other, idealistic, theoretical, and naive................to both understand and then competitively counter, the misguided and destructive impulses of the political Left. American pragmatism may be that concept. It defends what the Left hates most: Americanism, Americans, and America itself..........To Read More.....

Leftist hypocrisy at the Idaho Statesman,  By Trevor Thomas  August 8, 2023 -The editorial board of the Idaho Statesman -- Scott McIntosh, Bryan Clark, Chadd Cripe, Dana Oland, Jim Keyser and Mary Rohlfing -- recently published an opinion piece condemning the actions of Christian organizations Hold the Line and Turning Point USA Faith. The Statesman editorial board doesn’t like the fact that the “Kingdom to the Capitol” tour has made its way to Boise, Idaho. The Kingdom to the Capitol is a Christian “revival tour” that holds prayer and worship events across the U.S. Their goal is to bring praise and worship music and prayer to every state capitol in the U.S. By my count, they’ve reached 23 so far. Kingdom to the Capitol is the result of a partnership between Turning Point USA Faith and Let Us Worship (a sister organization to Hold the Line). The title of the Statesman’s foolish opinion piece begins with the old and overused leftist edict, “Keep your religion out of our government.” The title concludes with the “scary” conclusion that “Dangerous activists [are] coming to [the] Idaho Capitol.”.......

Government bureaucrats vs. the Rule of Law August 8, 2023 By Jay Davidson - The power to regulate and to tax is wisely bestowed on only those who are elected by the people, who are thereby held accountable to the citizens who elected them.  There is genius in the simplicity of this feedback loop. However, when the power to regulate is subsumed by bureaucrats, employees of the government, we no longer have the Rule of Law.  The Constitution is thereby subverted, and we are forced to endure rule by regulation; the clawing power of whim by federal, state, or local government employees; and subversion of our inalienable rights.  The 1984 Chevron Deference codified rule by bureaucrat.  It became a powerful tool for control of private business by bureaucracy and the Administrative State.  Justices in the Supreme Court are going to look into Chevron.  Justice Gorsuch is a scholar on the topic.

 

 

 The power to regulate is supposed to be bestowed only on those who are elected by the people. And yet... More

Illiberal Liberals’ Letter to Harper’s To Live in Fatuity

By Conrad Black , Special to the Sun | July 15, 2020

The recent letter “on justice and open debate,” published in Harper’s magazine on July 7 and signed by some 150 self-nominated intellectuals, will stand as one of the conspicuous fatuities of this intense American election year. The intellectuals begin with the portentous assertion that “Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.” It is then explained that forces that have all long demanded “police reform and greater equality and inclusion across our society,” goals whose championship these signatories claim throughout for themselves, are now being threatened. They have “intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

Morons incapable of understanding a single sentence written by any of the signatories could heartily agree with that proposition, and a great many people who do not claim to be intellectual have been doing their best to express that concern for quite some time..........To Read More.....

Age of Amnesia

July 15, 2019 by Joel Kotkin

We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.

Google’s manipulation of algorithms, recently discussed in American Affairs, favors both their commercial interests and also their ideological predilections. Similarly, we see the systematic “de-platforming” of conservative and other groups who offend the mores of tech oligarchs and their media fellow travellers. Major companies are now distancing themselves from “offensive” reminders of American history, such as the Nike’s recent decision to withdraw a sneaker line featuring the Betsy Ross flag. In authoritarian societies, the situation is already far worse. State efforts to control the past in China are enhanced by America’s tech firms, who are helping to erase from history events like the Tiananmen massacre or the mass starvations produced by Maoist policies. Technology has provided those who wish to shape the past, and the future, tools of which the despots of yesterday could only dream.

Factories of  “Mass Amnesia” ............To Read More....

Why (Most) Right-Wing Intellectuals Hate Trump

By Deion Kathawa| December 25th, 2018

More than two years into President Trump’s historic presidency, it behooves us to think more deeply about a persistent sticking point in the political life of the nation: Why do (most) right-wing intellectuals loathe him? This kind of nearly unified opposition cries out for explanation. After all, it is not simply that all left-wing intellectuals oppose him; that is baked into the political cake, a totally banal reality. (Is water wet?) What is more interesting is why most right-wing intellectuals despise him, wish for his failure, derive such glee from “dunking” on him on social media and in their think pieces, and the like.

To understand this phenomenon, the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s essay, , “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” is a veritable treasure trove of insight. Nozick’s 1998 explanation of intellectuals’ opposition to capitalism is remarkably relevant and can be transplanted with only minor cosmetic changes to understand why the vast majority of right-wing intellectuals oppose Trump..........To Read More.....

Quote of the Day

"I use the term "intellectual" in the broad sense penetratingly described by F.A. Hayek: that is, not merely theorists and academicians, but also all manner of opinion-molders in society — writers, journalists, preachers, scientists, activists of all sort — what Hayek calls "secondhand dealers in ideas."  Murray N. Rothbard

Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables

Ilana Mercer, American Renaissance, April 13, 2018

“[W]orking-class “losers” are being labelled illiberal fascists for . . . wanting a local economy around which to center flesh-and-blood communities.”  To say that academic elites don’t like ordinary folks is to state the obvious.  To them, Lanford, Illinois—the fictional, archetypal, working-class town, made famous by Roseanne and Dan Conner—is not to be listened to, but tamed.   A well-functioning democracy depends on it.

Taming Fishtown—Charles Murray’s version of Landford—is the thread that seems to run through  a new book, “The People vs. Democracy,” by one Yascha Mounk.  You guessed it. Mr. Mounk is not an American from the prairies; he’s a German academic, ensconced at Harvard, and sitting in judgment of American and European populism.

If only he were capable of advancing a decent argument..........Your common, garden-variety academic is selected and elevated in academia precisely because of a pre-existing condition: a globalist, deracinated disposition......To Read More....

 

• deracinated; deracinating transitive verb 1 : uproot 2 : to remove or separate from a native environment or culture; especially : to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics or influences from

 

Why Intellectuals Fall for Socialism

Friedrich A. Hayek 02/01/2018

In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible. This is no doubt true of the power of intellectuals to make their peculiar opinions of the moment influence decisions, of the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.

In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.......To Read More...