There are a couple of maddening phrases that arise in every election cycle, buzzwords that lodge in the zeitgeist and get repeated ad nauseam by the punditocracy. In 2008, there are two concepts/phrases that have arisen that are related and equally fallacious. They are not new, but are old saws freshly framed in this go-round.
You will hear about "taking power back for the people." The flip side, and equally as dangerous, is the commentary about the evils of the "elite".
Let's explore this a little deeper. When these statements are casually tossed around, what we're meant to think is "Washington is bad, politicians are bad, they're different from us. If only they were regular people instead of the elites, we'd be fine. After all, the founders wanted government by regular people, not a governing class."
BZZZZT! Wrong, but thanks for playing anyway. First of all, the founders were elites. Oh, we romantically refer to the southern members of the Continental Congress of 1776 and the Constitutional Convention of 1987 as "farmers". Yeah, right. You think there guys were pulling weeds from the rows of corn in floppy hats? These were landed aristocracy, owning huge plantations of cotton, tobacco, and other cash crops tended by slave labor. Equally, the northern representatives were attorneys or wealthy merchants, often times transporting and selling the slaves working those southern plantations. What they were able to get together around is that they could all make more money if the Brits wouldn't tax them so much. It was like a Mafia cell deciding they could do better breaking away from the parent family and going into business for themselves.
So they weren't "common men". They were elites. Not just from a financial or status perspective, but intellectually. These men were educated. The Declaration and the Constitution didn't spring from the native American wisdom hard-earned from moose hunting and hardscrabble frontier life, or the beauty of the New England town meeting. Jefferson, Madison, and others were steeped in (gasp!) European political theory, from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Voltaire, Smith and Diderot. These documents were the product of highly academic minds, likely the best of their generation, expert in political science and philosophy.
If a similar group today produced similar documents using similar source material, they'd be flamed on FOX and talk radio as liberal elitists, pointy-headed academic liberals out of touch with the common man. And yet, their work continues to be the be the seminal work in history on fashioning a working, dynamic republic. By they way, these founders had no intention of seeing their life's work subsequently shredded by the uneducated masses. The checks and balances of the Constitution were as much to protect the government from the people as the other way around. The celebrated compromise of the bicameral legisltaure was to satisfy large and small states, but it also allowed the mob a place to express the political momentum of the moment while being restricted by the aristocratic Senate, chosen by the state legislatures.
In any event, to decry "elites" while extolling the "common man" is to defy the basic precepts of our secular gospels, and to miss to point. It's important to have elites. When I go to the doctor I want the best one, the one who's built a house in the Hamptons working on the disease I suffer from. I don't want the mechanic who we pulled yesterday from the farm and handed a wrench working on myy car. Give me trained experts, thanks, people who have read widely and been tested by the campaign trail and the legislative chamber.
Some will read the above paragraph and claim it clearly endorses John McCain as opposed to Barack Obama. Nonsense. Yes, McCain's been in government longer. But look at their academic backgrounds, their training. More importantly to me is how their respective experiences have informed their political philosophies. McCain's lifetime of officeholding have led him to faulty conclusions, while Obama's relatively brief life in the public sphere have led him to the correct conclusions. This matters; experience has a qualitative as well as quantitative measure.
The next time somebody calls you elite, say thanks. And the next time somebody claims this politician or the other is "like everybody else" run in the other direction. Think about your neighbor or your Uncle Bill. Do you want them with the nuclear codes in a briefcase?
You will hear about "taking power back for the people." The flip side, and equally as dangerous, is the commentary about the evils of the "elite".
Let's explore this a little deeper. When these statements are casually tossed around, what we're meant to think is "Washington is bad, politicians are bad, they're different from us. If only they were regular people instead of the elites, we'd be fine. After all, the founders wanted government by regular people, not a governing class."
BZZZZT! Wrong, but thanks for playing anyway. First of all, the founders were elites. Oh, we romantically refer to the southern members of the Continental Congress of 1776 and the Constitutional Convention of 1987 as "farmers". Yeah, right. You think there guys were pulling weeds from the rows of corn in floppy hats? These were landed aristocracy, owning huge plantations of cotton, tobacco, and other cash crops tended by slave labor. Equally, the northern representatives were attorneys or wealthy merchants, often times transporting and selling the slaves working those southern plantations. What they were able to get together around is that they could all make more money if the Brits wouldn't tax them so much. It was like a Mafia cell deciding they could do better breaking away from the parent family and going into business for themselves.
So they weren't "common men". They were elites. Not just from a financial or status perspective, but intellectually. These men were educated. The Declaration and the Constitution didn't spring from the native American wisdom hard-earned from moose hunting and hardscrabble frontier life, or the beauty of the New England town meeting. Jefferson, Madison, and others were steeped in (gasp!) European political theory, from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Voltaire, Smith and Diderot. These documents were the product of highly academic minds, likely the best of their generation, expert in political science and philosophy.
If a similar group today produced similar documents using similar source material, they'd be flamed on FOX and talk radio as liberal elitists, pointy-headed academic liberals out of touch with the common man. And yet, their work continues to be the be the seminal work in history on fashioning a working, dynamic republic. By they way, these founders had no intention of seeing their life's work subsequently shredded by the uneducated masses. The checks and balances of the Constitution were as much to protect the government from the people as the other way around. The celebrated compromise of the bicameral legisltaure was to satisfy large and small states, but it also allowed the mob a place to express the political momentum of the moment while being restricted by the aristocratic Senate, chosen by the state legislatures.
In any event, to decry "elites" while extolling the "common man" is to defy the basic precepts of our secular gospels, and to miss to point. It's important to have elites. When I go to the doctor I want the best one, the one who's built a house in the Hamptons working on the disease I suffer from. I don't want the mechanic who we pulled yesterday from the farm and handed a wrench working on myy car. Give me trained experts, thanks, people who have read widely and been tested by the campaign trail and the legislative chamber.
Some will read the above paragraph and claim it clearly endorses John McCain as opposed to Barack Obama. Nonsense. Yes, McCain's been in government longer. But look at their academic backgrounds, their training. More importantly to me is how their respective experiences have informed their political philosophies. McCain's lifetime of officeholding have led him to faulty conclusions, while Obama's relatively brief life in the public sphere have led him to the correct conclusions. This matters; experience has a qualitative as well as quantitative measure.
The next time somebody calls you elite, say thanks. And the next time somebody claims this politician or the other is "like everybody else" run in the other direction. Think about your neighbor or your Uncle Bill. Do you want them with the nuclear codes in a briefcase?
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