Over at Concurring Opinions, Frank Pasquale has a great post entitled, “The Culture of Cynicism Eats Its Own.”  As I raised in the smaller context of the public’s attitude toward lawyers, Frank addresses in the broader context of American politics:

Americans, so we have been told endlessly by the media, hate politicians. . . and their natural henchmen, lawyers. The press fearlessly confronts official misdeeds, subtly educating the populace about the rottenness of its elected leaders. And once wasteful lawsuits are finally cleared out of the courts, captains of industry will be free to exercise the innovative genius that can make the country great again.

Where exactly does the media think we’re heading?  I doubt they think about it at all.  They just see a soft spot that can be easily attacked, and blood lust takes over.  Frank provides a number of examples, such as:

Having “exposed” Barack Obama’s unforgivable hauteur, the media exhibited its own in the process. For example, here’s Frank Rich on tribune of the people Lou Dobbs:

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch. When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce. It’s typical of the syndrome that the man who plays a raging populist on CNN, Lou Dobbs, dismissed Mr. Obama last week by saying “we don’t need another Ivy League-educated knucklehead.” Mr. Dobbs must know whereof he speaks, since he’s Harvard ’67.

Since when did being smart turn into a deficit, a failing to be ridiculed?  What makes people in trailer parks think that the people best qualified to run the monster mechanism of federal government should live in the trailer next door?

It’s not that I don’t believe there is much to question, challenge or even dislike about the crop of candidates for the presidency.  Just not the fact that they are well-educated and have, as a result of the successes they’ve enjoyed over time, come to live a better lifestyle than most of us.  Would we really be better off to have people who have proven to be failures and ignorant running the show?

The cheerleaders of this new attack, corporate America, operates under the belief that if they get the “ordinary” people to hate their enemies (who would they be, lawyer elitists?), a new age will dawn for profit and pleasure.  Divide and conquer is an old strategy, but it’s time tested and proven to work.  The media, without much thought as to the end result of its class-warfare tactics, are opening the door to this new era of greed by undermining the “elitists” who would oppose it.

Where’s it all leading to? Here’s one clue from Floyd Norris, discussing Steven Fraser’s book on the story of Wall Street:

“By the time of the American Revolution there was already a robust plebeian resentment of the aristocrat as parasite, a privileged nonproducer living off the hard labor of those he lorded over,” Fraser writes. It has not helped that the financial lords have not always been subtle about their superiority, as when Jay Gould, the robber baron who ran railroads in the late 19th century, boasted he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

It is one thing to be seen as venal but brilliant, and another to be seen as both greedy and stupid. That is the risk Wall Street now faces.

It’s not to suggest that the media should suddenly color their commentary to support a particular end goal, thus eliminating any pretense at objectivity.  Rather, feeding the anti-elitism frenzy and thereby fostering the elevation of ignorance that appeals to the lowest common denominator is neither worthy commentary nor helpful.  They are playing a game to enrage the masses just because they can.

Frank predicts that it will come back to bite them in the butt.  And it should, but that won’t help much either, by reducing the fourth estate to just another group to be hated by the mass of people who are angry, frustrated and looking for someone to blame.  What would help is getting off the kick of lowering the value of discussion by skewering people for sport and start elevating the discussion by evaluating what these people, elitist or not, have to offer.

I don’t care if a politician swears like a sailor, wears women’s undergarments or drinks fuzzy navels.  If he has a way to fix what’s going on in our country, he’s got my vote.  I’m not looking for a new best friend, just a person who can serve in an office that will make a huge impact on my life and my world.  So media-types, focus on the issues and stop screwing with people over the irrelevant.