Religion & Law

Following up on our thread of a couple of weeks ago (here, here, here, and here) about whether the ascendancy of Governor Sarah Palin to the vice presidential nomination reflects an anti-intellectual trend in the Republican Party, readers might check out an editorial in the Boston Globe by Joan Chevalier. Although she writes from the political left, she nonetheless warns against the liberal bias and disdain for non-urban voters that are inherent in the anti-Palin rhetoric. Herewith an excerpt:

[I]n every one of my encounters with America?s rural communities, the diversity of my privileged experience was eclipsed by the depth of theirs. I had rhetoric; they had well-measured speech, punctuated by forbearing silences. I had easy answers; they knew there was no such thing.

It is not that the Republican base is anti-intellectual, as David Broder claims; they are anti-elitist. An Ivy League education is hardly a universal signal of competence in anything other than the liberal cultural canon.