printThe NEW COLUMN, “Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables,” exposes populism-bashing elites like Kevin D. Williamson, formerly of National Review, who said this about about Deplorables: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die”:
An excerpt:
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.
“The number of countries that can plausibly be described as democracies is shrinking,” laments Mounk (“Populism and the Elites,” The Economist, March 17, 2018):
“Strongmen are in power in several countries that once looked as if they were democratizing … The United States—the engine room of democratization for most of the post-war period—has a president who taunted his opponent with chants of ‘lock her up’ and refused to say if he would accept the result of the election if it went against him.”
Elites ensconced in the academy are likely selected into these mummified institutions for a certain kind of ignorance about political theory or philosophy.
Plainly put, a chant, “lock her up,” is speech, nothing more. This Trump-rally chant might be impolite and impolitic, but on the facts, it’s not evidence of a “strongman.”
Notice how, deconstructed, nearly every utterance emitted by the technocratic and academic elites turns out to be empty assertion?
Even the subtitle of the book under discussion is sloppy political theory: “Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It” implies that democracy is the be-all and end-all of liberty. Quite the opposite.
America’s Constitution-makers did everything in their power (except, sadly, heed the Anti-Federalists) to thwart a dispensation wherein everything is up for grabs by government, in the name of the people. …
… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables.” It’s available also on WND.com, Constitution.com, the Unz Review, and others.