Joe Carter discusses the divide between “Joe Sixpacks” and “elites.”  He made this observation, which I think does get at the heart of the problem:

Consider foreign policy. For the JSPs, the opinion of a twenty-something Army Sergeant who just got back from patrolling the streets of Baghdad carries more weight than the twenty-something Harvard grad who writes for The American Prospect or The Weekly Standard.

That’s right, which doesn’t say much for the “JSP” perspective in this case.  The “elites” in this case are trying to have broader perspective and are attempting to think strategically and not tactically.  That is, they are attempting to make arguments about policy.  They may be good arguments, they may be terrible, but they are arguments that are necessarily more abstract and also wider in focus.  The danger of abstraction is that it can lead to utopian programs or theoretical constructs that bear no relationship to the real world, which result in destructive and coercive policies (see Iraq, war in).  Abstraction is unavoidable, however, if we are going to be able to think about large-scale problems in a coherent way.  

Unless we’re discussing the tactical situation in Baghdad or Iraq as a whole, it’s not at all clear that the opinion of the sergeant is necessarily more useful or valid when determining what our Iraq policy ought to be.  The two don’t have to be in opposition, and ought to be complementary.  There’s no question that people with first-hand experience of a war zone have extensive practical knowledge and understand the way things really are, at least in the areas where they’ve been, so they have knowledge that others do not have and cannot readily acquire.  There is no guarantee, however, that this perspective is a better basis for setting policy.  Policymakers, journalists and pundits cannot and must not be oblivious to that first-hand experience, but that experience cannot be the only or main basis for policymaking and debate. 

Ideally, “elites” are supposed to have some historical perspective and understanding of geopolitical realities concerning the place in question.  One of the great problems with most of our “elites” is that they are often scarcely better acquainted with history or international politics than the average American, and often what they do know comes from cookie-cutter progressive interpretations that celebrate freedom’s triumphal march through time.  So they are reduced to relying on oversimplified interpretations of the history of a conflict and what Kennan correctly diagnosed as the moralistic-legalistic impulse.  These simplified, moralistic interpretations are the bane of sound foreign policy, but our “elites” have them in abundance. 

The war in Georgia stands out as a good example of how “elite” foreign policy consensus relied on such an interpretation when it determined that Russia was the “aggressor” or, if there was some recognition of the Georgian role in escalating the conflict, there was at least the certainty that U.S. policy towards Georgia should not change in the slightest.  Common sense would come in very handy as a check on “elite” pretensions in this case (common sense would make us ask why it matters to us whether Russia wields influence in the north Caucasus), but, of course, the public is even more readily misled about conflicts in obscure parts of the world about which they know little or nothing.  If we have bad “elites,” we don’t seem to have enough citizens capable of recognizing and articulating why they are bad, and so instead we get generalized rhetoric against any and all “elites.”  The “JSPs” would have a point if they were to say that many “elites” don’t know nearly as much about the rest of the world as they claim to know, but for them to make this critique they would need to know enough about the rest of the world to recognize how paltry “elite” knowledge often can be.    

Honestly, it seems to me that “JSPs” would be even more inclined to regard someone who went to a Great Books liberal arts college such as St. John’s, several of whose graduates I have known over the years, as having received an utterly impractical and “useless” education, even if it is one more grounded in classics of the Western canon than the education offered at certain elite universities.  In a strict sense, as a way to train for a job a St. John’s education is rather impractical, but then those who go to St. John’s assume that education is a matter of cultivating and enriching the mind and honing the ability to think and make arguments rather than providing job training.  If we were to include St. John’s alumni among the Joe Sixpacks of the world, I think that we are defining “elite” extremely narrowly, but perhaps Mr. Carter does not mean to imply this.

Carter continues:

The JSPs don’t believe that the guy from Harvard is any smarter — or, for that matter, better educated — than someone who went to State U.

This is a healthy skeptical view, but it can be taken too far.  It is really the question of the quality of the education that matters most.  On average, as these things are measured, students who attend elite universities do tend to be smarter, but that does not necessarily tell you anything about the quality of education or the quality of the graduates.  Neither does it guarantee at all that the ideas held by these graduates are good ones.  Capable students can come away from public universities or less-prestigious colleges with a better education, and university prestige can be used to exaggerate the quality of education on offer, but to some extent if JSPs believe that there are no qualitative differences between all of the students of different kinds of universities they are indulging a sentimental egalitarianism.