palin and the cultural elites

Even a blind squirrel, rooting about desperately for food, bumps into an acorn on occasion. In this case, that squirrel is the former governor of Alaska. 


Sarah Palin is correct to observe that there is a cultural elite in the United States opposing her and her followers. Yuval Levin described the problem succinctly two years ago: "Palin’s cultural populism put her at odds with the foe that did her the most serious damage: the nation’s intellectual elite, whose initial suspicion of her deepened into outright loathing as the campaign progressed. Her inability in interviews to offer coherent answers about the Bush Doctrine, regulatory reform, and the Supreme Court’s case history, together with her unexceptional academic record and the fact that she had spent almost no time abroad, were offered as evidence that Palin represented a dangerous strain of anti-intellectualism on the Right."


By these measures, Mrs. Palin lacked what George W. Bush lacked before her--cultural capital. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined cultural capital as knowledge, condensed in the symbol of the university diploma. Cultural capital is not equivalent to economic capital, but it can be exchanged for it, as degree-holders expect their salaries to rise with their credentials. 


On the whole, liberal arts education has prided itself on producing opposition to the economic values of capitalism. More than anyone, students and professors in the humanities have claimed that devotion to interpreting the great works of art and philosophy produces true knowledge about human nature and disposes persons to more ethical modes of behavior. But the entanglement of the systems of distributing cultural and economic capital is not easily overlooked.