I’m Smarter Than You. Just Ask Me.  
By Martin Harris

Since this is an opinion column, here’s my opinion: I find the self-declared moral and intellectual superiority of the gentry-left even more distasteful than their political philosophies. 

There are, after all, historical precedents for various forms of communal social organization, actual and proposed, with the supposedly best and brightest in charge, ranging from the New Testament to the medieval Scandinavian kingdoms, from Periclean Greece to 19^th century American Shakers, and they are least rationally arguable as alternates to the sometimes awkward mix of republic and democracy to which we currently pay lip service. As we’ve seen in Vermont in recent decades, the new gentry-left brooks no such rational discussion as was, once upon a now-gone time, standard practice at Town Meeting or public hearing; now, if you disagree, you’re the enemy to be hooted down and booed, silenced by jeering or ad hominem attack. 

In previous readings on the Progressive movement, that late-19^th century political reform movement which started out under Republican auspices but gradually moved leftward, I’d garnered the impression that it was the founders and early joiners, from Wisconsin’s Governor LaFollette to Vermont’s education-theorist Dewey, who first articulated the idea that, for modern American governance to work even better than the late-18^th-century Constitution-writers ever hoped, and to achieve this noble goal, the opinions (and votes) of the less-well-educated and-endowed masses had to be counted for less than the more enlightened judgments of their intellectual superiors. Somewhere I had read that it was the underlying Progressive thesis that it was, indeed, the duty and obligation of the Nation’s brightest 10 percent to guide the remaining 90 percent, better than they, with limited cognitive abilities, could do for themselves. You get some flavor of this basic Progressive attitude from the famous quote of that famous English author (and sometime Vermont resident, down Brattleboro way) Rudyard Kipling who wrote about "the white man’s burden" to go forth and civilize less-well-equipped peoples everywhere.

Now, in going back through histories of the Progressive movement, the best source I’ve so far been able to find comes through the writings of one Samuel Hays, prolific author and former University of Pittsburgh academic. You can wade through such of his books as "The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914" looking for trenchant quotes, but I found a better-distilled source in the Hays section of David Kennedy’s "Progressivism, The Critical Issues" in which you can find such observations as this one ( page 95) wherein he writes that "the [Progressive] movement for reform in municipal government therefore constituted an attempt by upper-class, advanced professional, and large business groups to take formal political power from the previously-dominant lower- and middle-class elements so that they might advance their own conceptions of desirable public policy."

A century or so later, this same description could easily be applied to Vermont’s gentry-left demand for control over everything from nuclear power (minimize it) to public education (maximize it), from capital investment in private-sector housing and commercial growth (minimize it) to personnel investment in advocacy groups, affordable housing, land-use control, and an ever-growing spectrum of environmental initiatives. 

It’s historically interesting that only a few decades after the initially-somewhat-conservative Progressives articulated this "governance by the best and brightest" doctrine, it was seized upon by the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920’s, who wrote and spoke of "the Bolshevik Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, that small group that could understand the interests of the proletariat better than the workers themselves, that would seize power in their name, then would help them to achieve their own "class consciousness" while creating a society that was just and suitable for them", as described by historian Fredreick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. 

Does this historical retro-glance help explain modern gentry-left political behavior in such States as Washington, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and, of course, Vermont? You decide. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights