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Die Gefahr des „populistischen Chic“

 

Mark Lilla, Professor an der Columbia Universität, besichtigt im Wall Street Journal die Überbleibsel einer einstmals erfrischenden konservativen Denktradition. Mark Lilla tut dies mit einer gewissen Trauer, denn er hat seinerzeit selber von der neokonservativen Wende profitiert. (Ein früherer Post zu ihm hier.)

Mark Lilla

Wie konnte es passieren, dass Intellektuelle einer ernstzunehmenden Denktradition schließlich eine populistische, geist- und ahnungslose Kandidatin wie Sarah Palin unterstützten? Dazu muss man ein wenig zurückgehen. (Der ganze Text hier. Wer nicht durch den englischen Text forsten will, kann eine Übersetzung in der ZEIT am Donnerstag finden.)

„Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion. In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.

Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about „radical chic,“ the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their „struggles.“ But „populist chic“ is just the inversion of „radical chic,“ and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives‘ „disdain for liberal intellectuals“ had slipped into „disdain for the educated class as a whole,“ and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn’t care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.“