Hm.

We agree on something, Rick Santorum! ;)

Politics attracts power hungry egomaniacs. So the politician who isn't in it for the power and fame but in it for the people is rare and usually gets chewed up and spit out by the machine. As a result, only the most greedy get to the top and the "skills" they bring with them are compassion or common sense, but cutthroat backstabbing and character assassination.

Are not compassion...

I think both Reagan and Clinton were both excellent during their presidencies. I still wish that Clinton had tried to help the people that didn't make it into his middle class jump (you know, those people who live in their 1981 Dodge Dart behind the local Ihop working three jobs a day at minimum wage) but it's not like he could have really done much. Romney has good policies for certain areas of the nation, but his policies are really assholish to people like me who can't afford college as it is and will have nothing t build on coming out of school anyway. Everyone should realize that the youth is the future and the only way this country will be here in a hundred years, and while you might not care for you, you don't want your kids to watch it collapse either. Not saying it will. Not saying it won't either..

Its amazing how he basically says that they'll never have intelligence or expertise on their side, and its met with cheering and applause. I can't believe how stupid and ignorant these people are, and more importantly, how they revel in it.

"We will never have the media on our side"
-'Kay good. Because media is plural for medium and having the media on your side would mean every word that's going to be written will be favorable to the regime: only North Korea's media are on the North Korean government's side.

"We Will Never Have The Elite, Smart People On Our Side"

(...)

Yeah there's a reason for that as well. :-)

You're being a little pedantic, redhouse. There are many words in the English language that are losing their true plurals or singulars because they don't fit the paradigm. A medium is a means of doing something, and media is the appropriate plural, but /the/ media is a singular. "The media is against us." Not an uncommon sentence in American English (I know the Brits hate that we make the construct though). His constructed sentence has no grammatical flaws based on current language norms, although you would be correct to assert that he is diachronically incorrect in his construction.

I half expected your criticism to be that he is ignored Fox News when he says the media is against them, but interestingly, Fox News doesn't seem to count as part of the media for Republican conservatives.

I am aware of your fascination with language dubmdell, but I wasn't commenting on whether or not Rick Santorum was aware of the original meaning of the word "media" (I actually think that he is), but that he thinks of it as something that should, or could, be on his side. The media are supposed to give objective analyses on what's happening and the less they are on any side, the better.

So I'm not, as you put it, asserting that he is diachronically incorrect in his construction and frankly don't know what that assertion would entail :-)

That being said, I believe I have every right to be pedantic about Rick Santorum, who took Holland as an example of bad treatment of the elderly because, as he put it, "some elderly wear bracelets that say that when they lose the capacity to express themselves, they choose that their lives not be ended." When the spokesperson of his campaign was confronted with a journalist who told her that - and this is what a single phone call to any Dutch person would have informed him about - that was not true, she said that "these things come from his heart."

I also love how Santorum says dems "want to tell you what to do," in that speech and then immediately segues into the necessity of the interventionalist policies of the religious right as the last bastion of morality in the USA.

I suppose if they were naturally self-reflective, they would be rabid right-wingers, but don't you think that hearing, "Smart people will never be on our side" would make some reflect and doubt for, like, a second? I'm just constantly amazed by the inability of people to judge themselves.

As I said to my mother the other day, after you've already voted for Bush twice, and then Palin for VP, wouldn't you sit down and think, "Wow, I really, really suck at voting for president. I should just stay at home. I am a cancer upon this country."

Honestly, I think a big reason most intellectual elites aren't conservative is because they are arrogant and desire control, overestimating their own abilities. Since one of the major strains of modern conservatism is libertarianism, they therefore oppose it, as it suggests (contra their opinions) that they should not have the right to decide how people's lives are run.

That's just my personal impression from knowing and observing people, though.

I don't understand, Semck, how you can support the notion that intellectual elites desire control. Can you explain more?

Modern conservatives are only libertarians so far as it concerns economics. They are quite the opposite when it comes to any social or religious issue. And really they aren't very good economic libertarians, although I think that has more to do with a lack of familiarity with economic theory. Running a business does not give one an understanding of Macroeconomics, nor microeconomics really.

I also disagree that libertarianism is any longer a huge part of modern conservatism vis-a-vis the Republican party (if that is indeed what you mean). They sure aren't socially libertarian, since the prevailing social policies of the right are as a whole (barring gun control) far more in favor of regulating the social sector, and they aren't economically libertarian either - considering all the incentives and subsidies they currently support.

lol Ninja'd by Puddle. Well stated, sir.

@ Puddle - Although it doesn't give one an understanding of Macro or Micro it sure as hell does make people think they understand it . . .

Well, YJ, if by "support" you mean "cite external evidence," I can't especially (other than general evidence about human nature, and perhaps literature and history, both of which certainly offer plenty of examples of intellectual elites jockeying for control). The last line was in fact supposed to imply that. I do think such evidence exists, but I just don't have it at my fingertips, and don't care enough to find it. (If you wish to take that as the evidence not existing, that's reasonable).

But if you just mean to ask what I _mean_ by the belief -- I think that intellectuals, who all their lives have been good at solving problems, often quite naturally believe that they would be good at solving the problems of both society and individuals (both they as individual intellectuals, and the class of intellectuals broadly). They therefore tend to desire a fairly strong government in which the intellectual elite and experts would play a strong role in determining policy and controlling behaviors. This is not to say they often run for office themselves, but they support candidates who would create governmental structures that would unelectedly empower academics in this way. This, I think, is driven by the normal human drive for power (albeit through different channels than usual) and also the natural arrogance of the elite.

There are some striking instances of this in the 50s and 60s that come to mind. At least one university town I know of was virtually destroyed by having its planning policy taken over too completely by urban theorists at the university.

More generally, I've just seen the same general motif in academics of all fields: intellectuals place too much faith in the ability of other intellectuals (and themselves) to solve all problems, and thus instinctively oppose forms of government that lessen the control of such people over any aspect of life.

I hope that addressed your question.

YJ, you're right that most conservatives are not socially libertarian. But they don't think social policy should be driven by intellectuals, but by religious ideals. In fact, you might find something of an analogy between the attitude of religious leaders and their desire for control through conservative social policy and that of intellectual leaders and their desire for control through liberal fiscal policy.

As for conservative fiscal policy -- they're not all the way libertarian, it's true, but they're far more so than the left.

@semck, while I certainly agree that intellectuals are arrogant (I'm guilty of this myself on occasion), wouldn't such arrogance be justified? Also wouldn't experts be better at finding solutions than people largely ignorant on the subject?

As for your uncited (fairly so) anecdote regarding a university town being nearly ruined by urban theorists, this would be a case of bad theories (the proper term escapes me) being followed slavishly rather than a failure of the system which relies on expertise and intellectual elite.

Also modern conservatives are less libertarian (with the exception of regulation) than they are non-Keynesian. Trickle down and such, which is largely unsupported by any credible economic theory, and the times when it has been implemented has failed to achieve its intended goals, and on multiple occasions in multiple different economies, which would serve to discredit it as an economic theory that promotes economic growth among all sectors of the economy . Although it is a highly successful form of wealth redistribution from the larger poorer economic sectors to the smaller wealthy ones.

Semck:

The left (and intellectuals) doesn't want to drive social policy, they want to remove it. They want people to have the freedom to choose for themselves without government influence - they're socially libertarian, you might say (again, with the noted exception).

Agree with you re: conservative fiscal policy, no question that's true. Whether that's a good thing is more a point for debate :)

As to your longer post, yes it addresses my question. If for brevity's sake we're to keep it a philosophical discussion, then, I'd merely respond that intellectual elites damn well do like to be consulted on their fields of expertise - and we'd be fools to not consult them. But if we're to turn a watchdog eye on the "powers behind the government" I think its reasonable to assert that academic intellectuals are not the ones on whom we ought to be keeping the most careful tabs. There isn't a whole lot of money to be made by deregulation academia.

Puddle, the arrogance is and isn't justified. It's true that smart people are smart and can justifiably feel happy about their ability to solve tough problems, as they surely can in whatever field of endeavor they may happen to have studied.

However, the arrogance isn't justified when it extends beyond what their analytic abilities actually support, and this is a _frequent_ mistake of smart people. They get so used to being right because they have analyzed things well that they forget and just think they're right because they're smart.

Just as bad (if not worse), they see the enormous success of intellectual endeavors in the last few centuries and wrongly think that every problem is just as amenable to solution by intelligence on the same time frames. (Hopefully it's clear that I'm badly overgeneralizing and oversimplifying, but you can pick out the more complicated points I'd make from the narrative). The real world, though, is vastly more complex than the isolated and often artificial problems that have yielded so spectacularly to analysis in science; economics is absurdly more intricate than physics, and absurdly less predictive. If I had to bet my life on Maxwell's equations or a modern economic theory being essentially exactly correct, the choice would be easy. But when solving things by analysis is your way of life, it can be all too easy to forget this, and arrogance is no longer justified when you're blundering into problems far beyond your abilities to actually solve. (See Paul Dirac's bizarre Nobel acceptance remarks for a rather elementary and amusing example of this).

Similarly, I think the evidence is scant that intellectuals know a whit better than the average man how he should manage his life, so any belief to the contrary is simply misplaced arrogance. (For non-misplaced arrogance, I would probably use the word pride instead).

Your gentle complaint about my non-citation is fair. Feel free to PM me if you want more details of the town in question. I learned the history personally, viva voce, from current professors there. I'm sure there are written sources, but I couldn't direct you to them. You're quite right, anyway, that it was a case of bad theories. But at the time they thought the theories were good. That which led them to believe this over the din of common voices clamoring their anger is precisely the arrogance I am referring to, and I don't think it's justified in the least, then or now.

"But if we're to turn a watchdog eye on the "powers behind the government" I think its reasonable to assert that academic intellectuals are not the ones on whom we ought to be keeping the most careful tabs. There isn't a whole lot of money to be made by deregulation academia."

But money is only one form of power, YJ (and remember that it's because it's power that we care for it at all) -- the forms of government preferred by intellectuals are indeed precisely those in which their forms of power would be somewhat more important, and money somewhat less important. I don't see either as innately less dangerous, though dangerous in different ways, certainly.

I do of course agree that we should consult experts in fields. I just think we'd be crazy to ignore the fact that they're humans, and subject to all the same corrupting human influences as anybody else who gets close to politics.

But heck, I'm on course to spend my life in academia. I'm obviously not against it. :-)

I think we are at an understanding of each other, and while I still disagree, it is a small matter, and more likely a matter of omission than error, but I must get some sleep. I look forward to seeing what this has evolved into by the morning. If you are interested, take a look over in my "I Hate Democracy" thread.

Spoiler: I don't