President Obama "is right on principle, but he will get slaughtered on the politics."
Those were the quoted words, printed yesterday in the Washington Post, of an anonymous Republican consultant about the NYC mosque controversy. They neatly if not brazenly framed the scurrility of GOP tactics and Reason's predicament: Populism is to democracy what demagoguery is to politics -- and both forerunners now rule the pseudoconservative scene.
As a stand-alone quote it could have been charitably interpreted as less an endorsement than an objective observation -- "It's a damn shame that 'principle' is so easily demoted, but whatcha gonna do?" kind of thing -- but as the Post's piece progressed it became depressingly apparent that collective endorsement trumped singular observation.
Chimed a GOP pollster: "Intellectually, [Obama] may be right, but this is a very emotional issue to many Americans, and ... it seems as if he has a tin ear to the politics of the issue." Concurred a GOP strategist: on the mosque controversy Obama "represents the elites of our country and not the average American."
So Obama is both right on principle and right intellectually, which the GOP freely confesses but then openly casts in the demotic: He's an "elitist," since intellectual principles popularly opposed (with a little demagogic assistance) are "elitist."
Anti-intellectualism has of course a long and dishonorable history in America, but generally its purveyors sell it as the sublime: The virtuous people know in their gut what's right, and no eggheaded professor or politico, with all his statistical charts or scholarly tomes, is going to convince them otherwise.
What's shocking about the above quotes, however, is that the GOP is unabashedly reworking and even exacerbating America's anti-intellectual tradition. We know and openly concede, say GOP tacticians, that Obama & Friends are right, we know they're standing on proper principle and we recognize the intellectually valid and popularly ignorant when we see it; but screw it, screw it all, they further contend in almost audible Wagnerian tones -- we just don't give a damn what's right or wrong, if not caring means a few more votes.
Shocking. And frightening.