Un-American elites

Talking about the differences between New York, where she used to live, and Washington, where she’s recently moved, Kimberley Strassell, the young (34) and engaging writer of the “Potomac Watch” column for the Wall Street Journal, told Brian Lamb in a C-SPAN interview this evening that her boss, editorial page editor Paul Gigot, had advised her to treat every place as if it were a foreign country.

Hmm. Didn’t Richard Cohen once say that he felt he was a foreign correspondent in America? The elites, whether liberal or “conservative,” do not experience themselves as a part of this country. That is their political essence and it explains why they stand for the things they stand for.

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Laura W. writes:

This is why journalists always campaign for change, rarely for preservation. There’s no bond between them and the places they cover.

LA writes

Strassell comes from a very small rural town in Oregon, where her family still lives. Does she practice Gigot’s precept when she goes back home to visit her parents? Or does she resort to the unprincipled exception in that case?

And what about America as a whole? Does this unpretentious, smart gal who grew up in farm country, but who has worked for the Wall Street Journal since graduating from college, view America as if it were a foreign country?

Karen writes from England:

It is amazing how elites become detached from their nations….where do they think they will go to live when they have completed their nation-destroying project? They are living in a fool’s paradise.

Here is some reality about black crime from the Telegraph:

I reckon even this tame article would not have been published just one year ago and so progress is being made. However the conclusions are not too good. I would consider the answer to the Black Savagery problem is, like the Moslem problem, not one we can resolve. Violence is so widespread in Africa and black communities that it goes beyond sociological explanations. The solution to this is evidently deportation and isolation and containment.

At the end of the article, Janet Daley says some things that hit home:

[Cameron] talks of restoring support for marriage in the tax and benefit system, but would he actively dismantle the benefit support system which has created welfare ghettos?

What about Mr Blair? Will he acknowledge the role that has been played in this mess by his party’s commitment to non-judgmental permissiveness—which has left communities unable to defend themselves and the police afraid to protect them?

And will he ever say a word about the greatest retreat of his premiership: the abandonment of welfare reform that he once rightly believed was essential to restoring Britain’s moral health?

The whole country may not be going to hell in a handcart. But that does not diminish the problem we face with some parts of it, which we have no chance of solving unless politicians speak frankly about the existence of an underclass and the part they have played in creating it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2007 09:07 PM | Send