But it does more than obfuscate; it also flatters ignorance. After all, Brooks would seem to be saying both that “the masses” have a different view of Islam than the country’s “intellectual elites” and that the uninformed (unintellectual) views of the former are more sensible than the views of those who actually know what they’re talking about — who know something about the Middle East, its cultures, its languages, its history. But is this true? And has the country benefited over the past five years from the leadership of elites who take their cue from the masses, bragging about their lack of intellectual curiosity and expressing contempt for the “reality-based community” of journalists and scholars? ~Damon Linker

The basic point–that it is probably unwise to prefer the uninformed and unintelligent to the better informed and more intelligent–is sound.  The Bush administration has played to the crowd and picked up on their sort of rhetoric, mixing it with its own noxious brew of ideological certainty and shocking ignorance of the Near East. 

But in relation to Brooks’ original claim, Linker’s point may not hold up quite as well, since one of the important points that Brooks made (and one where he is probably more right than wrong) was that the non-elite Americans may not be well-informed about the history or culture of the Islamic world (obviously they are not, since a great many of them bought Bush’s “freedom agenda” baloney hook, line and sinker–then again, so did many “intellectuals”!) but they also know what they see in the Islamic world and it aint a “religion of peace.”  It is this sort of common sense and a refusal to engage in PC cant about the virtues of Islam, while also pretending that jihadism is some sort of mutant strain that has nothing to do with Islam per se, that I believe Brooks was praising in the ordinary American.  It is something that the elite–be they journalists, academics or politicians–typically refuse to do, because they do not want to denigrate a “great world religion” or because they think it is strategically advantageous to say nice, flattering things about Islam, even if they happen to be untrue. 

On the other hand, the non-elites gave us such intellectual garbage as “Islamofascist,” which the GOP and movement leadership has embraced in a sure sign of intellectual degradation.  We are caught in something of a bind: we have a population that knows next to nothing about the region the government seems intent on “remaking” in one way or another and the elite currently in power that does not seem particularly more knowledgeable.  When Brooks was referring to elite attitudes, I suspect he was almost entirely referring to academia and the non-GOP media.