David brooks: the class war before palin

Modern American conservativism began as a motion of dissenter intellect.

Richard Weaver wrote a book called, "Ideas Have effect." Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he'd instead be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Hub of the Universe phonebook than by the mental faculty of Harvard University. But he didn't believe those were the only two options. His stallion life was a jubilation of urbane values, edification and the rigorous and constant quantity application of mind.

Driven by a need to engage elite sentiment, conservatives tried to build an intellect counter-establishment with think tanks and mag. They disdained the ideas of the progressive professoriate, but they did not contempt the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellect, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decennary working them through. He was rooted in the Middle West, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad alliance - small-town values with coastal reach.

While narrowly losing the 1976 election, Gerald R. Ford carried the stallion West Coast, along with Northeastern states like New t-shirt, Connecticut, Green Mountain State and Maine. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won every state but Gopher State.

But over the past few decennary, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in metropolis, in extremely educated part and on the coasts. This ejection has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their alliance with a form of sociable class war. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same statement has been heard from a one thousand politicians and a 100 television and talk-radio jocks. The United States is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party - the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism - but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, "Rebel in Chief," Bush "reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don't live along the East or West Coast. He's not a sophisticate and doesn't spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn't come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven't."

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions - Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-1 rates.

With doctors, it's 2-1. With tech executives, it's 5-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The Republicans had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney attacked "Eastern elites." (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the "normal Joe Sixpack American" and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all - men from different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.

Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the Republican Party is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission - because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission - by telling members of that class to go away.