A Cancer on the Party

If Sarah Palin is a fatal cancer on the Republican Party, then I need to change my position on euthanasia. David Brooks is reported to have commented:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Those prejudices indeed! On what evidence does Brooks conclude that Palin scorns all ideas? I, like Brooks, prefer the idea of a leader with a solid education, but one who has also accumulated some relevant experience and suffered a few disappointments, who has reflected on what works and what doesn’t – in short, someone who has obtained a measure of wisdom. Sadly, Brooks seems to have missed a few of those steps himself and is now spouting nonsense.

It is a good thing to understand Reinhold Niebuhr. It is a bad thing not to understand ordinary people.

(It is interesting that Palin, who majored in journalism, is deemed by so many journalists to be fatally lacking in education.)

Brooks, who so is impressed with the people surrounding Obama – people with whom he disagrees, falls into the same trap as Sebastian Mallaby – whose column inspired my post “False But Justified” a couple of days ago. What is impressive about intellectuals preening and swooning over themselves when it produces bad policy?

Being thoughtful is a wonderful thing, but it is far better to be useful, and better still to be prudent. A mere fascination with ideas takes you nowhere. And I know of no one, contrary to Brooks’ fatuous assertion, who scorns ideas entirely. Rejecting imprudent ideas is not anti-intellectualism.

If Brooks is right and Palin is a cancer on the GOP, then the party should be euthanized now. No political party, of any persuasion, can survive without vibrant leadership from people with first-hand experience in real life. Our founders may have been aristocrats, but they were not just aristocrats; they were also farmers, entrepreneurs, military officers, and tradesmen. Had they been philosophers, we could study their thought. Fortunately they were doers, and we live in the country they created.

It seems that the real cancer infecting this campaign is elitism. (Reagan would put no faith in the power of that idea.) Obama is a smart man educated at our top universities. Good for him. But in this context Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that wisdom is something different entirely. And Spengler warns us of candidates “whose education has made no improvement on their character.”

The GOP has plenty of people who celebrate learning and ideas. Palin, win or lose, will not change that. Let’s hope that both our major political parties can also celebrate loyalty, courage, prudence, thrift, and a host of other virtues that seem to have fallen from favor recently – thanks in large part to opinion leaders who subscribe to the funny idea that ideas trump everything else.

UPDATE: Paco also takes on David Brooks in “Babbling Brooks.” I wonder if Niebuhr’s “very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you” applies to conservative columnists who go to work at the New York Times.