Well, perhaps many do, but I don’t really have any such investment. There is an assumption that I see many people make that I must be a Republican because I talk about its political fortunes as much as I do, but this is not the case. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of that party. I talk about recognizing that most conservatives still identify themselves with the party, but this the result of the Cold War and the cultural revolution. What conservatives must always remember is that their alliance with this party has been historically contingent and it derived to a large extent from the fact that it was not the party of FDR and became the refuge of cultural conservatives later on.

Right.

My own view is that we are in for (and I hope for) a fundamental realignment in American politics, in which the rational adults in the two current parties realize that there is more that unites them than divides them, and come together, leaving the dead husks of the Democratic and Republican Parties to the left and right extremists, respectively.

Definitely post-Palin, it would be exceedingly rich for this faction of the conservative punditry to be criticizing Obama’s academic career path.

On the other hand, I don’t know if I believe that “the only reason I’m not making 100k+ right now, or working at some exalted institution, is because my family doesn’t get invitations to the right soirées.” (I mean as a general principle; I mean no slur against you personally. Some people do just have bad luck.) The Ivies (and my undergraduate degree is not from an Ivy League university, so I am not speaking from self-interest) have probably been more self-consciously meritocratic over the last several decades or so than ever before. That is not to say that they always (or even frequently) succeed in actually picking the best students, but that an attempt to do so (plus affirmative action) is the major determinant behind who gets in. Class background no longer has the main role, for the most part. I believe Ross Douthat himself, for example, comes from a middle-class background. Among those who have caused “every debacle of the last 8 years,” many do have Ivy League degrees, but their pre-Ivy-League backgrounds are various. Bush himself (or perhaps also Paul Wolfowitz, a professor’s son) is the only one who was clearly a legacy admission. Ben Bernanke, if his Wikipedia bio can be believed, had a 1590 on his SATs!

So, if you went to a “great” school, facing a degree of bigotry and resentment from the common folk is a small price to pay for the huge advantages of simply interacting with the upper echelons of society. Everybody knows that any dumb schmoozer can get ahead if they got “connections”—we got a bunch of ‘em running this country into the ground as we speak. Frankly, I’m envious, because I was a good student, a good worker, and I can schmooze with the best of them, and the only reason I’m not making 100k+ right now, or working at some exalted institution, is because my family doesn’t get invitations to the right soirées.

I know this is just the way of the world, but especially in light of the recent performance by the “products” of these elite breeding grounds, graduation from a prestigious school does not justify automatic respect. In fact, these fortunate bastards should have much more to prove than the rest of us, in demonstrating their worthiness of the privilege.

Palin is just a symptom of how twisted it is being an ideologue these days.

Never let the facts get into the way of a good rant, I guess.

“I think I read on one of your last posts before you moved the web-log here that you’d just returned from Washington, and assumed that you’d been living here, rather than visiting.”

Ah, no. That was my CPAC adventure, which was just a two-day jaunt there and back. However, I have been in the city to visit Dumbarton Oaks and went annually to philosophy talks at Georgetown when I was in college, so I am dangerously well-acquainted with the area.

My mistake about your not having lived in DC; I think I read on one of your last posts before you moved the web-log here that you’d just returned from Washington, and assumed that you’d been living here, rather than visiting.

Actually, I did not “do time” in Washington (my undergraduate school was in Southside Virginia), but I have on several occasions visited Washington, which may be just as bad.

Surely the problem many of us would have with at least some of these people is not, to put it mildly, that they are “super-bright” or “right out of elite universities.” On the whole, whatever has gone wrong with NR in the last 10-20 years from our perspective is not principally a function of the “youth and inexperience” of its leading contributors. In the last eight years, the trouble has come more from a combination of bad ideas and excessive support for this administration and its policies. To say that “nothing has corrupted…more” than recruiting young graduates of elite universities is to ignore all of these other factors.

You’re probably even worse, Daniel, having done time in Washington before heading to that Midwest Ivy in Barack Obama’s neighborhood.

Give. Me. A. Break.