Some People, like Steel, Get Tougher in the Fire

The reaction of the intellectual elite to Sarah Palin was far more provincial than Palin herself ever has been, and those who reacted so viscerally against her evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance. _Commentary

America's effete elite got exactly who they wanted in the White House. Someone who talks and thinks like themselves. Someone as equally untouched and untempered by real life, with the proper degrees, friends, and attitude toward centralised control from "the top".

Meanwhile, America's schools and culture continues growing a large crop of perpetual adolescent incompetents, who take their cues from the effete elite via the entertainment and news media. The zombies of Obamby-land. Quite useful one day every two years, and particularly useful one day every four years. Otherwise, brain-dead zombies to be "managed."

If you learned the hard lessons of self-reliance, personal competencies, and working within the rules of society, you may not know how to talk the talk and walk the walk of the effete elite. If so, too bad for you if you want to break into national politics.

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.

“Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them,” said Gloria Steinem, “who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”

...In the end, Palin had a modest impact on the race. About 60 percent of those interviewed in the exit polls said McCain’s choice of Palin had been a factor in their vote. Of these, 56 percent voted for McCain while only 43 percent voted for Obama. In other words, she appears to have helped McCain more than she hurt him, but not by much, which is as it should be; we were voting for a President, after all. In the face of unprecedented attack, Palin succeeded where almost no vice-presidential candidate ever has before in winning sustained support for the ticket. _Commentary

Palin had real problems as a candidate. The news and entertainment media locked onto those weaknesses, and magnified them out of all reason and proportion. With Obama, they took exactly the opposite tack, and ignored any hint of weakness or deficiency.

They got what they wanted. And they continue to cover-up and obfuscate the huge problems of their Messiah. Zombies walk the land, oblivious. But real people, tough people, are tempered in the fire of real life. They keep living, keep growing, and keep getting tougher, because they face life full-on.

A society that grows top-heavy with a scummy faux elite, such as current American society, will eventually undergo significant changes. These changes will leave the unprepared, largely incompetent elite at a loss. The generations of zombies, psychological neotenates, are already lost -- beyond everything except technological revolutions that can remake their minds into those of real people. It's possible.

Previously published at Al Fin