In today’s Washington Post, Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute ponders whether conservatism is brain-dead. He maintains that the conservative movement “has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas.”
He fears that talk radio hosts have supplanted the scholarly types on the right, although he nods approvingly at Michael Medved, a Yale man, and William Bennett, a Harvard man with a PhD.
While I give due deference to Hayward and his PhD, I suggest that he is asking the wrong question. The question is not whether conservatism is brain-dead; it is whether conservative elitists are brain dead.
I’ve been in meetings where conservative elitists bemoan the fact that they must tolerate the “regular folks” like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
They look down their noses at principled, articulate job applicants because they don’t have the correct pedigree—an Ivy League education or the family or money connections to make up for the lack of one.
By behaving in this manner and, frankly, by writing editorials insulting average Americans not fond of reading Hayek on weekends, the elitists in the conservative ranks may entertain themselves splendidly at cocktail parties, but they are doing little to bring liberty to people thirsty for it.
There is a difference between being an elitist and being an intellectual. Of course, the movement can always use more intellectuals. We need fewer elitists. Milton Friedman is a perfect example of an intellectual who was not an elitist.
The most effective intellectual is one able to absorb the complexities of economics, ethics and political science and create understandable and appealing fare for all citizens.
Conservative elitists will be clutching their chests when I dare list these names together, but Milton Friedman (Free to Choose), Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson), Friedrich Hayek (Road to Serfdom), and Thomas Paine (Common Sense) have a lot in common with Limbaugh and Beck.
They made complex issues easy to understand in order to promote the concepts of liberty to the greatest number of people. I introduced Dr. Friedman in what I believe was his last televised speech. His brilliance was brighter because of his plain-spoken manner.
I also marched on Washington a few weeks ago with more than one million people who don’t read white papers from think tanks, but they know when elitists are demeaning their values, diminishing their freedoms and stealing their money.
Hayward says that the tea party movement is “unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics.”
Splendid! This movement is not relying on intellectuals with new ideas. It is relying on regular freedom-loving Americans with some old ideas–hard work, individualism, faith, private charity, liberty, limited government and that stodgy old thing that elitists sometimes forget to mention—the Constitution.
Conservative “intellectuals” should be careful not to sound like then-presidential candidate Barack Obama when he criticized folks in small towns. Perhaps they should spend more time trying to sound like Ronald Reagan, who gave us these words in 1976:
“I’m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it.”
Lori Roman is founder of RegularFolksUnited.com, the bully pulpit for regular folks.
