It's Personal

The Intellectual Class prides themselves on their superior thinking ability. It's how they entered their field (the University, or the media); it's how they advance once in it. Always the best students in the class, they learned very early how to collect information, how to sort the wheat from the chaff, how to muster the winning argument.

So it's been a bit of a mystery as to why so many lean towards, or are sympathetic to socialism. After all, it's not like there are a wealth of examples of successful socialist economies. Or any at all.

So what gives?

To understand it, you need to understand the Intellectual Class, and their view of their role. We can start a couple millenia ago, with Plato, in The Republic:

Socrates makes it clear that one is virtuous if and only if one is a philosopher. For we already knew that virtue requires knowledge, and now we learn that only the philosophers have knowledge (esp. 474b-480a).

Mind you, this may be nonsense on stilts, but this is the sort of thing a young member of the intellectual elite gets immersed in. Certainly I did, when I was a downy cheeked member of the "best and brightest."

OK, well so what? Eventually the overwhelming evidence of socialist failure will out, won't it? After all, there are no examples of successful socialist experiments, and many (and tragic) examples of its failures. Why the life long loyalty to an empty philosophy?

Well, everything you need to know about this, you can read at Megan McArdle's:

Yet writers are, as a class, extraordinarily at risk. They spend their twenties, and often their thirties, living paycheck to paycheck. They are extremely well educated, and all that education is not only expensive, but builds expensive habits. You end up with a lot of friends who make much more money than you--who don't even realize that a dinner with $10 entrees and a bottle of wine is an expensive treat, not a cheap outing to catch up on old times. Our business is in crisis, and we lose jobs often. When we do, it's catastrophic.

This is what David Brooks calls "status-income disequilibrium", and unless you are among that happy breed of writers who is married to someone with a high-paying job, or who has a trust fund, you feel it keenly. Everyone you write about makes more than you. Most of the people you know make more than you. And you come to feel that shopping at the farmer's market, traveling to Europe, drinking good coffee, are minimum necessities. Your house is small, your furniture is shabby, and you can't even really afford to shop at Whole Foods. Yet you're at the top of your field, working for one of the world's top media outlets. This can't be so.

It's personal. One is virtuous if and only if one is a philosopher. All this expensive intellectual training can't have been a waste - it must be that the system is rotten.

It's not at all astonishing that they cling to a socialism that promises them power and (relative) wealth. In fact, it would astonish if they weren't. They'd be on the barricades, except they're men (and women) of words, not deeds.

UPDATE 20 May 15:58: Holy cow, it's a T-Boltalanche! Thanks for the link, T-Bolt, and welcome all. If you like this, you might also like a series I wrote a bit back starting with the Founder's view of the 2nd Amendment (T-Bolt just had a post about this, too).