The best posts I read during my time-off came from Kenneth Anderson who was one of my professors when I was in law school and whom I have to say always writes things, which forces me to think and usually gives me a better understanding of what is happening around me. The only shortcoming of Professor Anderson is that his understanding of French society is marred by his unwillingness to look at France through other prism that the ones of Mark Steyn. It is a shame, but hey, nobody is perfect. In August and September, Professor Anderson wrote two great posts on Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, which I think are required reading for those who want to understand American politics and in the stakes of the current presidential politics. Here are two sugary excerpts.
The first comes from a post titled “The New Class, Palin and Obama (Note to Peter Berkowitz).”
Obama is a classic New Class elitist, by education, outlook, everything. So is his wife. Their professional lives have consisted in - community organizing? please - the elite management of the poor and, of even greater importance today, management of, but also production of, communalist tensions through multiculturalism and identity politics. That’s what the New Class does; that’s what it exists to do. Along with, to be sure, extracting rents for managing social conflicts that it also has much interest in creating.
Palin represents not just another sort of America, but another sort of American elite. Not very elite, in her case, let’s be clear. She is not an intellectual, obviously: so what? It’s overrated, I can tell you. She doesn’t have an Ivy League education, or even a degree from one of the great public universities.
[…] But Palin obviously is not Fred Flintstone, either - as though Fred Flintstone were chosen by lot from the masses to lead the masses; she has political skills and smarts and a view on large issues that affect many lives. Let’s face it, I don’t think any of my intellectual colleagues in academia or me, for that matter, could get elected governor of anywhere, or dogcatcher, or anything else. We don’t dream of being elected; we dream of being appointed, and when we dream of ‘appointed what?’, it is usually Czar or maybe Grand Inquisitor.
But unlike me or my confreres in the academy, Palin has an organic, extra-political connection to the people she proposes to govern, whether in Alaska or the United States as a whole. Everything about her says, I’m one of you. Not the whole citizen of the planet thing that Obama’s New Class persona uses as a way to elide the question of his relationship to America and Americans, except as Redeemer, but a representative of the people of whom she is indeed representative, but among whom she must be, in virtue of the office she seeks, also an unapologetic elite. The question for contemporary elites is no longer whether they have, but instead whether they believe they actually need, a rootedness in and among the people whose lives they intend so thoroughly to govern.
The second from one titled “The line between feminist path-breaker and white trash ...”
Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day when pious leftwing women would start lecturing the world about the inappropriateness of a female politician breastfeeding an infant. I realize it’s an infant who, they believe (mostly on grounds of aesthetic and etiquette, grounds of good taste, class, and breeding, so far as I can tell), should have been aborted. If it was bad taste to bear Trig, it would be worse taste to feed him. If, on the other hand, Palin were a female Democrat, would we be hearing any of this? Please.
[…] The issue is finally about class, yes? But class defined in a peculiarly elastic way. If the Palins were Democrats, it would be pathbreaking stuff. Of course, it would have required at least one, preferably two, abortions along the way to prove themselves worthy of their social betters and show that they, like the Obamas, understand what Proper People do when their Daughters Make Mistakes. Could one imagine my daughter’s elite private schools, bastions of upper middle class progressivism - and what will be, certainly, the Obama’s schools if they come to DC - Sidwell Friends or National Cathedral School, making accommodations for a pregnant girl: all anyone would be asking, openly or not, is why are you putting us in this embarrassing position, why didn’t you do the decent thing and quietly have an abortion, Schools Like This don’t have Girls Like That. Anyway, doesn’t she have some brothers or male cousins to supervise her honor and haul her off to the abortionist? We’re feminists, after all, and while we don’t care about virginity, and are especially in favor of Unconventional Families and all, by golly we sure do care about inappropriate pregnancy.
But, that bits-of-tissue-down-the-memory-hole done, a Democrat version of the Palins would be great for the party, a bit of genuine working stiff, union family, small town - all good.
Professor Anderson is so cool, to use an old and passé hip word, that he makes conservatism scintillating.