What’s wrong with the intelligentsia? I thought that conservatives value upbringing, intelligence and education. My grand-father did and my dad certain does.
Do conservatives really want to put the right-wing peasants in charge? We know that happened in Russia, China and other Communist countries when they put the left-wing peasants in charge.
I know that peasant is strong word, but the likes of Christine O’Donnell can rightly be called intellectual peasants.[/quote]
Brian: You need to bone up on your history, especially your Russian and, later, Soviet history.
I don’t think you’re familiar with the term, or the contextual background. You’re reading it as “intellectual”, when its far more nuanced (and you like nuance, right?) than that.
Russian/Soviet history is instructive, especially as it relates to the intelligentsia and their co-optation under the Soviet regime. A similar regime exists in the US, but its influence, knowledge and legitimacy are fading fast. The Left, like the Right, has been subsumed, and by semioticians rather than actual thinkers. So, rather than having a working knowledge or a sense of history, we’re confronted with an intellectually and morally bankrupt Left that is reduced to iconography and symbology and tautology, instead of an actual philosophy undergirded by thinking and critical analysis.
That’s what’s wrong with the intelligentsia and why the Dems grasp, but cannot hold, power. That’s the cultural disconnect I referenced. An increasingly irrelevant cadre of navel gazing, self-involved apparatchiks. Think Maureen Dowd, who is now reduced to harping shrilly at the great unwashed as she fades from importance and, hopefully, view.
