Crane Brinton, in his wonderful, but dense, book,
Anatomy of Revolution, noted that one of the recurring historical signs of a revolutionary atmosphere, is what he called "the desertion of the intellectuals". That is, the intellectual class no longer accepts the legitimacy of the current regime; they withdraw from political life entirely, or support the regime's opposition, up to and including violent resistance to it.
You might wonder if this is happening in this country. It isn't, chiefly because our intellectual class's affinity is for statism. They want to overthrow liberty as you and I understand it, and not The State.
For all of my adult life, a large class of self-described intellectuals has opposed any regime which isn't staffed by people like themselves, meaning Progressives, socialists, liberals or whatever euphemism for authoritarianism they use at the moment. This isn't exactly desertion
, it's a temporary stroll outside the gates, but they race back inside to their seats when their bleating hearts are fluttering, and one of their own is at the controls. They never desert, they just take an excused absence and scrawl obscenities on the sidewalks.
One way to comprehend the power of their selective loyalties is to notice what happens when they lose, or expect to lose. My first experience with this confusion and rage happened in college, after JFK was murdered. Somehow, Jackie and Theodore White contrived to immediately mainline the ideological narcotic that Jack was killed by a right-wing cabal rather than a slow-witted, comm-symp, Cuba-loving loser like Oswald.
The academic orgy of mass lectures and memorial speeches devoted to Kennedy went on for weeks, with some teaching drones in the Soc Sci Dept appearing to lose their senses entirely. Clearly, something was going on other than a normal response to the lunatic murder of a charismatic, young, promising, bull-thrower like John Kennedy.
The thinkers had to blame someone else, someone they already held in contempt. When the thoughts and sympathies of the perp are disturbingly like some of their own, the thinkers adjust the facts. They did the same thing with RFK. Do you ever hear that Sirhan Sirhan was a nutjob Palestinian?
Anyway, to steal a sneer from Glen Reynolds, there is nothing verifiably elite [or intellectual] about the American elite [or intellectuals]. There is too much they don't know, and consider unworthy of knowing or even investigating. They're also nasty. This will pass, because reality proceeds in spite of the intellectuals' distortion of it. However, never underestimate or turn your back on these hyenas.
Some of them got together in a moonbat sweat-lodge (The Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements -
seriously) at Berkeley. Read about it
HERE. They're pooling their jellied intellects to comprehend the Tea Party Movement; to understand why the Right knows more about the clown Saul Alinsky than the Left, and even more yet - how to arrest Tea Partiers for being Tea Partiers. Mussolini would recognize them at once.
.jpg)
