Today, the tale becomes an epic, as Walter Russell Mead weighs in, explaining it all to Stanley Greenberg, who is one baffled leftist pollster. It seems that he can push-poll American adults to tell him what he wants to hear, but the votes don't ever tally the same, never minding the fact that polls of adults don't square with polls of registered or likely or actual voters.
Mead is one of my favorite Democrat commentators because he really gets that progressivism is dead issue. I hope you'll read Mead's whole nine yards, but I'll pull some points for you.
In the early part of the last century, says he,
- The progressive, administrative regulatory state and more broadly the technocratic and professional intelligentsia who operate it sold themselves to the public as an honest umpire in charge of American life.
- Honest professionals would administer fair laws without fear or favor, putting the general interest first, and keeping the special interests at arm's length. The government would serve the middle class, and the middle class would thrive.
But now, something completely outside their ken is happening, and this really is the heart of Mead's argument:
- Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren't progressive enough. But it's impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators.
- They don't just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology.
- The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role.
- The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.
- At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about. A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.
- The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn't a reaction against the abuses and failures of government. It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent and hard work to a greater say in the nation's affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap colleges rather than political science in expensive ones.
They work so hard to strap us all into their idealist machinery, and we ignoramuses keep throwing off the shackles, donning buckskin and war paint, and carrying their infernal machines down to the harbor and pitching them into the waters of economic freedom.
