Why is elitism bad? [View All]

[wuushew]

Often liberals are accused of being elitists on this board. Somehow this is something to be ashamed of or avoided. I ask why, a majority of the important issues of our time including economics,foreign policy and law are all areas where emotion and knee-jerk reactions should take a back seat to knowledge and understanding.

For all the name calling of "bleeding heart liberals" liberals at least on this board have a great hunger for understanding the tiny details and nuances of any given issue. Instead of building solidarity like simplistic right-wing talking points this effort oftens leads to criticism of our own candidates and elected officals(which I view as a healthy thing).

Leftist elitism is based on knowledge and wisedom which logically should be the basis for making important decisions. The rationale for not bringing up the taboo subject of elitism seems to stem from the fact that it will emotionally upset the "great unwashed masses".

Elitism is the belief that an elite - or small body of expert persons - are the only people whose views on a matter are to be taken seriously. The views of the majority of people who do not belong to the elite are worthless because they are deemed ignorant or incompetent.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism

The term 'elitist' is often used rather vaguely as a criticism of political and cultural attitudes thought to encourage the exclusion of large numbers of people from decision-making.


In a related link the main obstacles to elitism as linked to by wikipeida is anti-intellectualism. Three prominent entries under this topic are religion,corporatism and populism. I see many bad outcomes stemming from these three factors in today's political landscape and I would ask are those who opposed to elitism out of soley a pragmatic realization that we must pander to the fools.

Prevalence
Anti-intellectualism is found in every nation on earth, but has become associated in particular with the United States of America. It existed in the US before the nation itself; the New England Puritan writer John Cotton wrote in 1642 that "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee." In 1843, Bayard R. Hall wrote of frontier Indiana, that "(w)e always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness." Anti-intellectual folklore values the self-reliant and "self-made man," schooled by society and by experience, over the intellectual whose learning was acquired through books and formal study.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism