Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Enlightened (aka the Educated) Class and the WTC Mosque
Not to go overboard on this whole educated-elite-vs-the-country thing, but there’s an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Dorothy Rabinowitz that speaks to the issue.
She writes about the failure of the elite class to understand why folks are protesting the building of a mosque near Ground Zero:
The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened.
[The enlightened class believes that]… without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.
[The enlightened ones have]… a contempt for the citizenry that’s of longstanding, but never so blatant as today.
And, she backs it up with a detailed analysis of current politics in New York City.
