Elitism is the very core of liberalism.
Only a small percentage of Americans go to school at one of the eight Ivy League universities such as Yale, Harvard or Columbia. All eight are private institutions. All have comparatively small enrollments.
The Ivys are the oldest colleges in the country. They are regarded – sometimes correctly but sometimes not – as the best; and it is very difficult to gain admission to them. As a consequence, an Ivy League degree admits one to a small, elite circle.
Ivy Leaguers (not all but many) tend to consider themselves superior, particularly Ivy Leaguers who go on to careers in government. And right now our government is awash in Ivy Leaguers.
The president himself went to Columbia and Harvard. Attorney General Eric Holder went to Columbia. OMB Director Shaun Donovan is a Harvard man – as is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker is also an alumnus of Harvard.
Fully four out of ten high-ranking officials in the Obama administration have Ivy League degrees.
A degree from an elite university is not an indictment but neither is it prima facie evidence of superior wisdom or experience. I have heard it said that a route driver for Frito-Lay, who has personal financial responsibility for a perishing inventory that is in constant motion and is flung out across dozens or even hundreds of locations, has a better practical understanding of applied economics than many lettered economists.
As an example of this, I submit the now infamous Jonathan Gruber, who earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. Gruber has established himself as the poster child for a cabal of elite liberal snobs – people who believe that you and I, by virtue of our pedestrian education and our residency in a backwater such as Texas, are simply not capable of managing our own lives and making our own decisions.
Gruber to my knowledge has never made anything, fixed anything or sold anything. He and his ilk live in a cloistered world of academic theory. By virtue of being paid many multiples of what most middle class Americans earn, people like Gruber are seldom seriously impacted by the policies that they promote.
Unaffected by real world consequences, they are free to imagine that they have a superior understanding of how things should work if only we rubes would stop resisting their prescriptions.
“The stupidity of the American voter,” was not a slip of the tongue by Gruber. He believes it.
Gruber, by virtue of his candor, has made clear that liberals believe that self governance can’t possibly work. There must be an elite ruling class with superior intellectual firepower to order every aspect of our lives. To the extent that the Constitution is at pains to avoid just such a thing, it must be gotten out of the way.
Libs who once freely quoted Gruber are right now running for the tall grass. But that won’t last. Elite, highly-degreed liberals won’t dare leave us to our own devices for long.
“A man who dugs a pit will fall into it”
When I was a Senior in High school, my dad read the poem ” IF” by Rudyard Kipling.
“if you can not talk too well nor be too wise..”
It seems to me that the lack of humility among other things certainly is missing in our leaders.
I would surely have been hated by the Eastern clan, I am glad went to a Big Ten University.
These people embody the “Ugly American”.
Those who think they know it all (Gruber), upset those of us that do!
What is the biblical quote about pride…”Pride goeth before a fall”? It isn’t just liberalism that is awash in our places of “higher” learning, it is communism. This has been infiltrating our institutes of higher learning since the 1940’s and perhaps even before that, but just not in such an open and condensed version as we have now. We are now reaping what was sown. We allowed a varity of weed to germinate and grow in the very places we should have made a more concerned effort to see that they were plucked out a very long time ago. Now, we have those weeds gone wild and unmanagable. This is the result of our indifference.