A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them. And Friedman openly deplores the internet, which decimates moderation because there are people like me who who persecute elite truthbearers like him. Ooh! It's a lynch mob. Ha. Sorry. I don't want the rope. I just want to laugh at you.
Update, 5/25/10: The Anchoress:
Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on ‘remaking America.’
3 comments:
"Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world."
I don't think this is correct for imperial Japan. Am I mistaken? Or do we not want to count Japan as totalitarian (I suppose we could start categorizing the various forms of vicious dictatorships ...).
I thought that the intellectuals tended to be more pro-Western, but silent or dead.
-Mark Roulo
Counterexample #2: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Murderous: check
Totalitarian: check
Began with some insulatdd group of faux-intellectuals: um ... no check?
-Mark Roulo
They considered themselves intellectual inasmuch as they were college educated. Most were trained in engineering. Just another reason why we shouldn't be so anxious to make our kids engineers.
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