I’ve been interested by the odd disconnect in popular perception of high school graduates and college graduates. In high school, parents push their kids to excel in school, enrolling them in rigorous and pricey SAT tutoring sessions and signing them up for tiresome extracurricular activities. Many high school students work arduously to participate in their varsity sport and perform at least adequately academically, whether or not they’ll admit it. But once college comes around, the academic performance we once applauded seems to evaporate.
In a society with no formal social classes, it seems that a diploma from an elite institution is our most valid membership card. But for the majority of Americans who don’t believe the Ivy League is the crowned jewel of our prized meritocracy, the Joe SixPack who graduated with a mediocre GPA from a state university is much preferred over a graduate from Columbia. [For more, check out this article.] Conservatives haven’t always disdained the liberal elite; in fact they respected those who could articulate coherent opinions. But this respect dissolved when conservative politicians found political success in criticizing liberal ideas as being nebulous and unrealistic. When Democratic politicians, often the liberal elite, ran for office, their opposition tried to brand them as out of touch, arguing that while they may offer numerous answers to Locke’s Questions Concerning the Laws of Nature, they had little idea of the true nature of daily life. This tactic transformed into warfare concerning social class, with stereotypes not only applied to the liberal intellectual, but rather to the educated as a whole. Urbanites, those who most commonly vote Democrat, are derisively labeled overeducated, hyper-progressive, and contemptuously secular.
Instead of being pursuing ideal policies, it seems that the Republican party has concerned itself more with politics. Its policies are reactionary and entirely retrograde. Its tactical political teams focus on offering the opposite of liberal policies, instead of spending time pioneering better ones. I’m not saying that liberals haven’t been involved in their own forms of political scheming, or that only conservatives propagate partisanship, but rather that social class warfare, most often promulgated by Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin, is at the heart of our nation’s troubles. This warfare underlies most political discussions, including the important 2008 topics like global warming, taxes, the economy, and foreign policy philosophy (parochial isolationism versus perspicacious involvement/leadership). If liberals want policies dictated by esoteric rumination, then conservatives will gosh darn legislate by their gut.
David Brooks, a traditionally conservative writer at the NYT points out in his most recent article how conservatives really have alienated much of America’s educated population.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
The people who most greatly benefit from conservative tax policy vote overwhelmingly Democrat. And of course, it’s no coincidence that Republicans are scarce at Swarthmore.
It seemed that in 2008 we were at the dawn of a new era for conservative leadership. The GWB drinking buddy in whom conservatives had placed so much faith failed miserably, and brought conservatives to a fork in the road. They could have given us a smart and perceptive candidate (I’m thinking University of Chicago Economics professor material) who, like Sarah Palin, was unwilling deny their true identity, or, as we’ve seen, given us more of the same. Unfortunately, and again, not so surprisingly, parochialism reigned as both Guiliani AND… AND Mitt Romney attempted to estrange the “eastern elites.“
Progressivism doesn’t offer the answer to everything, and there are some things, like cultivating meritocratic values and egalitarianism, that we as Americans have been doing right for a long time. But most things in this world are mercurial, and policies must change with the status quo. The deregulation for which Mr. Greenspan fought so diligently is patently deleterious in a time of excessive capital moving from one market to another. When unimaginable wealth sits in the performance of a few derivatives, Ayn Rand’s “Voice of Reason,” is chilling when she says “the pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.” Unfortunately for Alan Greenspan, moral superiority in the eyes of his mentor have become equivalent to financial crisis.
Conservatives cannot continue to be a foil to liberal ideas just to pander to voters. America needs leaders who look not to old ideas but politicians who embrace old successes and forge new policy solutions. We became an exalted nation not through parochialism and anti-intellectualism but rather through building a hard working and highly educated workforce. Now, more than ever, we need to dismiss our preconceptions of ‘elite’ and remember that the majority of us as Americans were elite, and exceptional, before we were told otherwise by the GOP. It’s true that globalization has devalued the work of some industrious Americans, but their unemployment is ephemeral and unfortunately necessary as the economy readjusts itself. The unemployed must not scorn those who have maintained their jobs because of education; rather they must hail the employed as valuable products of American education. Hopefully this financial crisis will remind Americans that our power stems fundamentally from a productive, entirely educated, and exceptional workforce.
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