The Great Awakening

"It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old, and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new."

Who said that? Why, it was one of those "stupid" Republicans: Calvin Coolidge. Rather insightful for someone whom the pseudo-intellectual poseur H.L. Mencken once mocked as being "dumb as a cast-iron lawn dog." Oddly enough, Coolidge was once the governor of the state of Massachusetts, whose citizens may just end up electing another Republican, Scott Brown, to the U.S. Senate this coming Tuesday. Should Brown win, it would be a landmark victory for the Republican Party, for the last Republican to occupy a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts was the venerable Edward Brooke, who served two terms in the Senate before losing a re-election bid to Paul Tsongas in 1978.

Scott Brown's insurgent campaign has the left rattled, and the desperation of the so-called "educated class" was evident in this column (h/t Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom) by some Boston Globe hack named Brian McGrory, who could not help proclaiming:

Scott Brown may not share the political values of most of the state and may lack the experience for the US Senate. And, let’s be honest, his nights probably aren’t tied up with Mensa meetings. But he’s out there hustling, meeting, asking, and convincing. People respect that, a lot.

Never mind that Scott Brown has impressive academic credentials, holding two university degrees. No, he is a Republican, and therefore "stupid" in the eyes of self-appointed geniuses like McGrory and the legions of left-elitists who think just as he does. In the comments to the above-linked blog post at Protein Wisdom, someone named Abe Froman posted this brilliant rejoinder:

Seriously? Has it really come to the point where a journalist – the sweaty gym teachers of the, cough, “intellectual” class – has the temerity to refer to a man with degrees from Tufts and Boston College as not being a member of MENSA? People on the left flatter themselves so. For a party so utterly dependent on harnessing the naive stupidity of youth and the ignorance of the slums to win political battles, lefties sure love to suggest at every turn that anyone who fails to agree with their asinine world-view is lacking intelligence.

Having been slogging through the professional academic world for a decade, the attitude expressed by McGrory is a familiar one - an attitude of utter contempt for anyone who lives their life outside of the left-elite realms of academia, government, and media - a seething hatred for those who earn their livings in the business world, the military, or other professions and trades deemed gauche by bien-pensant transnational progressives.

For all of their pretensions to intellectual sophistication, McGrory and his ilk have offered little more to Americans during the past year than warmed-over European-style socialism - an ideology of failure that leads to desperation and ruin for the vast majority of people unfortunate enough to be living in any society in which it is implemented. Many doctrinaire, true-believer socialists will claim that such failure arises because the true form of that ideology has never been tried. But they're wrong, because the impoverishment of the many for the benefit of the few is the desired result of those conducting socialism's implementation.

The socialists who own the Democratic Party lock, stock, and barrel (and more than a few of their enablers on the Republican side) think most Americans aren't smart enough to recognize their pernicious agenda for what it really is. Those who do, like Scott Brown or Sarah Palin, are quickly and repeatedly demonized as stupid, evil, or mentally ill - just as Mencken characterized Coolidge in the 1920s and how many left-intellectuals libeled Barry Goldwater some forty years later. It is the same old song - and those doing the singing don't hate Brown or Palin nearly as much as they hate you, the average American existing outside the left-elite power structure. More and more Americans are awakening to this realization, and the Brian McGrorys of the world are frightened of what this may portend as the new year unfolds.

In Notes on the Next War, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Not this August, nor this September; you have this year to do what you like. Not next August, nor next September; that is still too soon... But the year after that or the year after that they fight."

August is here.