Yesterday, James Taranto discussed the left’s cultural contempt for middle America. He quotes the American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord, who argued that the Democratic Party’s elite around John F. Kennedy had built up a river of resentment against the non-elite–such as, at the time, Vice President Lyndon Johnson–but that Kennedy served as something of a dam, keeping it in check. Après JFK, le deluge:
Slowly this contempt for the American people spread to institutions that were not government, manifesting itself in a thousand different ways. It infected the media, academe and Hollywood, where stars identified with middle-America like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball were eclipsed in the spotlight by leftists like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda.
This is certainly problematic enough, both for liberalism and the American culture it relentlessly targeted. But it’s also worth pointing out that the corrupting of cultural institutions creates a feedback loop, producing political personalities who feed on the spite and bigotry of the institutions from which they emerged. And this is the feedback loop with which Mitt Romney, as a high-profile Mormon candidate, will have to contend, as Idaho State professor Thomas C. Terry writes in Inside Higher Ed.
