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Maine Voices: Elitists disdain ordinary people, but history refutes their view

Scorn for people like Sarah Palin reflects an attitude of highly unjustified superiority.

OLOF ANDERSON

THOMASTON — I found Leonard Pitts' Feb. 17 column (encouraging former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to run for president so she would fail, something that was inevitable in his view) so objectionable that I felt compelled to defend the Tea Party movement and those, like Gov. Palin, who reject his liberal worldview.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Olof Anderson is a resident of Thomaston.

There is nothing new in the intellectuals' disdain for ordinary people. In fact, if you go back a century or so, you would have heard the same complaints by intellectuals in Europe and even by many American intellectuals who called themselves "progressives" and admired European political movements.

There is nothing new in the ideas that our own left-leaning intellectuals are trying to implement with the present administration. They were all tried years ago, and they not only failed but also brought untold misery to the world.

So let us examine some of the "isms" that are taught by some professors in our universities and advanced by our left-leaning political class in the Obama administration. We start with the oldest:

Statists believe that they have the knowledge, wisdom and perspicacity to rule simply because they have a Harvard education. This is not much different than the kings of England believing that they had a right to rule because of the "divine right of kings."

Solipsism is the strange notion that there is no reality except what exists in the mind. That is why so many intellectuals are detached from reality.

Hedonism was a recognized strain of Greek philosophy, but now is used only to mean extreme self-indulgence. Thus we have the ridiculous laws that ban "incorrect" political speech but not pornography.

Historicism, so beloved by the left, comes in two forms best expressed as a joke by the average Russian before the demise of the Soviet Empire: "The future is fixed – only the past changes!"

The first is the notion that given an initial state of society, its progress toward a utopian society is known and inevitable.

The second is the notion that we cannot learn from history, so that we have the right to ignore its lessons to fit our present needs. That is why the left feels free to change our history textbooks to leave out things they don't like.

The 20th century came up with more "isms" than you can count – all embraced by the left:

Postmodernists believe that historical or scientific facts are indeterminate and that all "cultural norms" are equivalent.

Deconstructionists believe that an author's intent has no bearing on the meaning of his work.

Feminists believe that there is no difference between the male and female animal that is not a learned behavior.

Multiculturalists believe that all cultures are equal, therefore one cannot state that democratic rule is any better than tyrannical rule.

Multilateralists want to cede our sovereign right to defend ourselves to the United Nations and give up our right to make our own laws to international norms.

And "global warming" alarmists believe that you can determine the temperature over the Pacific Ocean in the year 1453 by counting the rings on some trees found in Russia.

Finally we have the really large political philosophies: communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, syndicalism, Marxism, Leninism and Maoism.

I bundle them all together because they all stem from the same mindset of the left and are a rejection of the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

All the left does is trot out the same stale ideas that did not work at any time in history and give them different names.

Therefore, in 1910 we had state capitalism and now in 2010 we have crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and earmark corruption-ism. Syndicalism has become union payoffs.

Sarah Palin and many of the people supporting the Tea Party movement have college educations but, more importantly, they have learned from history and experience, things the left either ignores or does not understand.

And they see through the destructive ideas being put forth by the Obama administration.

They believe in the wisdom of one of our Founding Fathers, James Madison, who wrote, "The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."