June 13, 2004

Your professors where the stupid ones. "Ronald Reagan was always dismissed by the academic left and its legion of pundits and public mouthpieces because they deemed him simple, ideological, not sufficiently in tune with the complexities of contemporary politics. As usual, the academic left had it wrong: Reagan was never simple, nor an ideologue in the sense in which the left uses that term - meaning by it someone who invents and simplifies ideas to serve ulterior motives. He was, instead, a skilled communicator of complicated ideas in terms that nearly everyone who paid attention could understand .. To appreciate why the sophisticated class got Reagan so wrong, one needs to understand the intellectual framework within which most of these folks operate. Any claim to know something about ethics, political principles or comparative government is deemed by these people to be too judgmental, Eurocentric and otherwise fraught with hubris - the only exception being all of their own pronouncements, which are, of course, gems of human wisdom as they see it. To think that one's society has it over another in, say, its legal constitution, its public priorities and its institutions is to be nothing but blindly boastful, and never correct based on evidence and argument. So someone who unabashedly proclaims the opposite isn't merely in disagreement with others but must be a simpleton, intellectually defective. That way no one needs to argue with such a person and those who dismiss him can proclaim victory by sheer default. Ronald Reagan was never fooled by such sophistry and knew his purpose well enough to pay very little attention to these essentially ad-hominem attacks. He was all the wiser for this, and his detractors found that nearly intolerable, retaining a disdain for and opposition to him to this day .. ". More TIBOR MACHAN -- A great friend of liberty is lost. UPDATE: Steyn on Reagan & the Professors raises the question, What is an Intelligent" person anyway? Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack