Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

highbrow culture vs. Main Street

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Elizabeth Warren’s Harvard elitism is in trouble and here’s why.

This article which I post recognizing it will be provocative still is informative in the way it outlines the anti-Main Street, anti-50’s ideas which are now bedrock for the approach advocated on global warming, equal rights, economic justice and so on. It shouldn’t be hard to recognize the entry of these ideas into orthodox thinking of the Democratic Party.

Elizabeth Warren would like to think of herself as a Main Street Democrat, but almost all of her policy positions come from an intellectual approach which in its genesis was viciously anti-Main Street. Most Democratic politicians are personally a long way from the avant-garde, but with intellectual roots in contempt for the middle class it will take more work for them to truly claim to be able to represent Main Street interests.

The concept of mass culture as a deadening danger took on a new power and coherence with the publication in 1932 of two major works, José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both books, which became required reading for a half century of college students in the wake of World War II, came to be seen as prophecies of 1950s American conformism. Their warnings about the dangers of a consumerist dystopia have long been integrated into the American liberal worldview….

In 1931, as Huxley was composing Brave New World, he wrote newspaper articles arguing that “we must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands.” It was Huxley’s view that “dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means of saving humanity from the misery of anarchy.”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-highbrows-killed-culture

(Of course I recognize that there is Republican Harvard elitism too of a baldly more disgusting sort, but in truth they both hate Main Street and for many of the same reasons.)

 

 

 

 

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Comments

  1. Throughout the opening decades of the 20th century, American liberals engaged in a spirited critique of Americanism, a condition they understood as the pursuit of mass prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them. In thrall to their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator in a nation of immigrants, Americans were supposedly incapable of recognizing the superiority of European culture as defined by its literary achievements.

    Frankly, this is just a collection of the author’s prejudices. I am surprised our diarist even takes it seriously.

    Confirmation bias, perhaps?

  2. Have you read anything she’s written? Heard any of her speeches? If your strategy is to paint her as anti-Main Street, good luck.

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