"The Mix of Elitism and Banality" and the Chattering Classes

Some years ago The New Republic, offering its list of "DC's most over-rated thinkers," named Fareed Zakaria for his "mix of elitism and banality."

Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.

Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.