Victor Davis Hanson on The Coming Aristocracy

In a recent article on National Review Online entitled “The Trouble with Elitist Theories,” Victor Davis Hanson echoes themes from Oliver DeMille’s The Coming Aristocracy.

Hanson, a renowned scholar, Hoover Institute Fellow and the author of 15 books, including one of my personal favorites, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm & the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, asks:

“What’s behind the Tea Party protests, low approval ratings for Congress, distrust of the media, and unease with experts in the Obama administration?”

“In short,” he answers, “a growing anger at the sermonizing and condescension by many of America’s elites.”

After analyzing several examples of aristocracy, he concludes with this:

“There is an unfocused but growing anger in this country — and it should come as no surprise. Nobody likes to be lectured by those claiming superior wisdom but often lacking common sense about everything from out-of-control spending and predicting the weather to dealing with enemies who are trying to kill us all.”

The problem is this: While the “growing anger” is a sign of increased awareness, which is a good sign, if the People do not learn to channel that anger productively, we’ll end up with nothing better than a French Revolution scenario.

This is why education precedes activism and why it must inform, temper and direct the freedom movement.

To be clear, no so-called freedom-lover has any business joining Tea Parties and wasting time marching on Washington holding signs and chanting slogans who hasn’t deeply explored the writings of Montesquieu, Locke, the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, de Tocqueville, Acton and dozens of other classics.

If you truly want to impact freedom and defeat aristocracy, then channel your anger into education. We can’t just be against elitism; we must be for freedom, and we can’t know what that is until we’ve studied the nature and anatomy of freedom in depth through a classical, liberal arts education.

Anger is cheap and alone will cause more problems than it solves; education is priceless and will win the long-term, legitimate war for freedom.

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Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and persuasive writer with KGaps Consulting, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.

He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.

Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela. Stephen and Karina blog about their magical life on Palmer Journeys.

Connect With Stephen:

Email: spalmer [at] kgaps [dot] com