Who's The Fighter?

Academics and government employees like Barack Obama for president, writes Michael Barone, because they are peacable souls who don’t like conflict.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war.

Of course there is more than sentiment here. War competes for public-sector dollars with education and domestic government programs.

But Clinton and McCain are fighters. They appeal to the Scotch Irish types in America, the kind of people who supported Andrew Jackson went he ran against John Quincy Adams for president in 1828.

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you."

In other words, if Obama gets to be the Democratic nominee for president we really will have a choice not an echo.

In my view, the idea that academics prefer the arts of peace is a little overdrawn. Academics have been ruthless in their purging of conservative voices in the academy and in their general marginalization of conservative ideas. And when it comes to opposing reform of the welfare state they stop at nothing.

But academics like to have someone else do the dirty work for them: policemen, tax collectors, and human rights commissions.

But I get the point.