Now, Wm. Kristol has for a long time been making David Brooks look like a rational, in-touch-with-reality pundit. Particularly since the former appears to have gone so far off the deep end as to be in the Marianas trench over Sarah Palin.
My impression of Kristol is one of extreme deviousness. I tend to think that he is putting on a "populist who cares about conservative causes" appearance in order to get (neo-)cons in power, which will serve whatever end it is that he ultimately has in view.
In that light,
Monday's column". Infuriating, but at least I have to give Kristol credit for constructing a complex persona.
These are the relevant portions; the body of the essay is a (typical) attack on pointy-headed intellectual elites who want intellectual control of public discourse, whereas we should trust to the popular common sense of the ordinary, hard-working patriotic American:
Conservatives’ hearts have always beaten a little faster when they read Horace’s famous line: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance.”
But is the ignorant crowd really our problem today? Are populism and anti-intellectualism rampant in the land? Does the common man too thoroughly dominate our national life? I don’t think so.
...
One of those people is Joe Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber. He’s the latest ordinary American to do a star turn in our vulgar democratic circus. He seems like a sensible man to me.
And to Peggy Noonan, who wrote that Joe “in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made.” At least McCain and Palin have had the good sense to embrace him. I join them in taking my stand with Joe the Plumber — in defiance of Horace the Poet.
But really, what is going on here? Ostensibly Kristol is revealing the Secret Elite Code (and he even translates it for us!) in order to repudiate it. But first of all, who is Horace? Horace is the (affluent, intellectual, elite) poet who condemns the wealthy and elite in favor of the
blue-toga simple, real Roman farmer who works hard and returns to his simple hearth and simple hearth gods. In fact,
vulgus in Roman Ode I turns out to be a play on
vulgus: not the common crowd that the elites want to avoid, but the uninitiated crowd of materialist elites who lack the common sense of Josephus ille Plumbarius. Kristol is actually therefore himself identified with Horace (elite who condemns elite).
Second, who is Kristol? And who is the kind of person who quotes Horace? Latin poetry is currently the provenance, mostly, of intellectuals (cf. my angst last night), the kind of people who are out of touch with popular common sense. Historically, Latin poetry, and Horace in particular, is the provenance of a political elite. This is Kristol's point, but he can't help but be implicated in this elitism by his citation. Horace does not need to be brought up in order to condemn the pointy-headed intellectuals. What it seems to do is establish Kristol's intellectual cred among the people who can appreciate a Horace quote, (namely: intellectual elites), and establish his authority among people who can't (i.e. the common man) through his ability to pull quotes from the Canon out of the air and incorporate the Classics into his intellectual thought. Either way, Kristol ends up staged utterly as an elite, and as an elite depending on and using his intellectual elitism.