The Bush Haters

Peter Berkowitz has a nice piece in the WSJ on the irrational hatred of President Bush that passes for rational opinion in todays intellectual elites. He argues that Bush hatred is something distinct from previous hate campaigns.

Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.

Read the whole thing here.

He's right. In my decades in academia I had to endure the malignant assaults of Nixon haters and Reagan haters, but Bush Derangement Syndrome is something else again. I suspect that class and ethnic antagonisms are in play here -- the children and grandchildren of late nineteenth and early twentieth century immigrants and self-styled "meritocrats" reacting to what they see as the undeserved success enjoyed by a scion of the old WASP aristocracy.

UPDATE:

Shannon Love has an interesting take on BDS:

Bush hatred serves as group identification marker for the Left. Since the 60’s, the articulate intellectuals and their wanna-bes have created a entire subculture which uses politics as a social glue in the same way that traditional culture used religion. People who do not hate Bush get ejected from the subculture.

Read it here.

I'm not sure that is a legitimate use of the term "culture" but it is an interesting perspective.
AND IN A RELATED STORY:

Stewart Taylor, no conservative he, has a nice piece in the National Journal on the intellectual corruption that has infested our institutions of higher learning.

He points to the malignant effects of:

totalitarian "diversity" obsessives who pollute -- and often dominate -- political discourse at almost all of our universities, from coast to coast.

and opines that,

that the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Read the whole thing here.

Fortunately there are sane and heroic individuals like Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate who are waging a courageous struggle against this perversity.