Camille Paglia Skewers Elite, Gullible Democrats

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?

Camille Paglia is the only reason I visit Salon. She's a liberal feminist lesbian college professor who is also a brilliant thinker and writer. She enjoys skewering the unthinking, illiberal, doctrinaire left, and she defends Sarah Palin from the unfair attacks while still disagreeing with every stitch of her politics. She is a rarity: A true, intellectually honest liberal academic.

She can't stand elitism, least of all in her own ideological cohort:

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills).

She asks the question I often ask. How did these supposedly smart, iconoclastic liberals become so gullible?

Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem.

They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them.

What does she blame for this? Our Education System

Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught.

Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible.

The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

It is refreshing to hear someone from the hallowed halls of academe say this. We no longer teach students how to think so much as what to think.

The election of an ordinary, inexperienced, neighborhood agitator to the highest office in the land needs no further explanation.

Salon - Paglia