Cute bit from "Best of the Web"
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The Cognitive Elite
It's been nine years since Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein published "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," in which they argued that American society has become stratified along lines of intelligence, so that a "cognitive elite" consisting of people with high IQs who enjoy levels of wealth and power far disproportionate to their numbers. (The book was hugely controversial because of its section on the radioactive subject of racial disparities in IQ scores, but the cognitive-elite argument did not depend on the race section.)
The emergence of a cognitive elite may be inevitable in a knowledge-based economy, but it is a development Murray and Herrnstein viewed with considerable concern. What's fascinating is that liberals, who denounced Murray and Herrnstein over the racial aspect of their book, seem to view rule by the cognitive elite as the natural order of things. And of course they think they are the cognitive elite. We saw this in Jonathan Chait's Bush-hating cover story last month in The New Republic (which was, but is no longer, available online), in which Chait opined that the "striving, educated elite" views the president, because of his success despite his "dullness," as "an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy." (In 1994 TNR devoted an entire issue to a series of essays on "The Bell Curve"; views ranged from harsh criticism to furious denunciation.)
The same phenomenon is evident in the reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California. The Oakland Tribune reports that state Sen. John Vasconcellos, a San Jose Democrat, has called the governor-elect "a boob" and is threatening to leave office on the grounds that he's too good for Californians: "If people want this actor to govern . . . they don't need or deserve me."
Sacramento Bee blogger Dan Weintraub has an interview with another Democratic state senator, Sheila Kuhl of Santa Monica, who opines that it's up to the Senate "to save the state." When Weintraub asks "from what?" Kuhl replies: "From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state." She tells Weintraub she may skip the governor's State of the State speech, "because frankly I don't think there is going to be a lot of content that anyone's interested in. What's this guy got to say to us about the state of the state? Nothing."
And it's not just elected officials. The San Francisco Chronicle hits the streets of the Bay Area, where voters favored keeping Gray Davis in office, and manages to find one Sydney Webster of Oakland, a self-described "hair-color diva," who opines that Bay Area residents are simply "smarter" than people elsewhere in the state.
There's no reason to think that liberals actually are smarter than conservatives; there is plenty of brainpower on the political right. And surely Bush's and Schwarzenegger's detractors are mistaken when they characterize them as dull. The president, after all, is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, and the governor-elect is a self-made immigrant businessman. It is possible for very intelligent people not to be snobs about it, not to adopt the pose of an "intellectual," and that would seem to describe both Bush and Schwarzenegger.
Some liberals also tend to overestimate their own intelligence. Consider this post from the Angry Left Web site DemocraticUnderground.com:
I would dare to assume that most of us here are in the upper 1%-20% of the population intelligence-wise. We must come to the realization that the majority of the population is in the lower 80% to 99% percent of the bell-curve. WE are not the norm. The Republicans understand that the average American is not very bright. They cater and pander to the masses. The Democratic Party tries to appeal to the population about "issues" that these people just don't understand.
If it comes as a revelation to the Democratic Undergrounders that 20% is less than a majority, they're not exactly rocket scientists, are they?
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