The Way to Rise in America

Today America’s thoughtful Mom, Peggy Noonan, muses over the Obama setback, the end of the honeymoon and the revelation of Senator Obama as a normal politician.

The problem is his obvious inexperience, a problem for older voters. “They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.”

But then she writes a little about the charge of elitism, which is obviously particularly grating for Michelle Obama, child of a working-class home. How could she be possibly branded as elitist?

But America is full of people who started low, rose high and internalized what the right people think, which is another way of saying what the elites think. To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind.

She is right, of course. You can rise in the United States in the flyover country of business, but you don’t really “rise;” you don’t exist in the way that a rising star in politics, media, culture, or academia exists.

That’s because politics, media, culture, and the academy are all solidly liberal and solidly closed to people who “don’t think like us.” The female university administrator Jane Canney put it so well, according to Mike S. Adams. She didn’t want to invite black conservative Star Parker to speak at the university, she said, because she just didn’t feel “comfortable” with the sponsors, the Young America’s Foundation.

There you have the challenge for the next generation of conservatives. It’s not that the liberal go along to get along culture is corrupt, although it is. It is not that the liberal menu of political issues is stale and harmful to ordinary Americans, although it is. It is not that the liberal-staffed government sector is dysfunctional and wasting dollars by the trillion, though it is. It is not every time you turn around you are being bothered by a liberal health Nazi, a liberal safety Nazi, or a liberal climate-change Nazim, although you are.

The problem is that a conservative of good will has a terrible struggle developing and sustaining a career in the public square against the “disomcomfort” of the reigning liberal administrators.

That is something we must change.