"the return of the best and brightest"

That's the title of R.R. Reno's insightful piece, also in this month's First Things...

Another great little observation-- over-played in parts, but still quite interesting and useful...

The election is over and the inauguration is upon us. There has been and will be a great deal of talk about the historic significance of Barack Obama—our first black president. The symbolism is powerful. America may be flawed, it may be arrogant in its power and sated with its wealth, but it is an extraordinary, unprecedented place.

So yes, a dramatic moment in American history. But the larger significance of the incoming administration is not racial at all. Obama’s electoral success shows, in fact, that race is an old and now passing fixation in American politics. Instead, what is striking about Obama is something deeper. Not since John F. Kennedy have we elected a man so closely identified with Northern, urban, educated elites.

His inner circle shares a similar profile....recalls Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, the Whiz Kids who revitalized the Ford Motor Company after the Second World War....[and] the experts whom Kennedy promised would bring new ideas to government. Their progressive views, trim physiques, and well-disciplined lives remove all doubt: We’re witnessing the restoration of the Establishment.

Interesting enough, but especially in light of the recent past:

This restoration comes after four decades of antiestablishment political sentiment. David Halberstam’s brilliant portrayal of the failures of the old Establishment in The Best and the Brightest gives a detailed account of the smug arrogance of “sound men” with “good backgrounds” who bungled the war in Vietnam....

Reno details the presidents we've had since then. And with the exception of Bush I's Reagan-inspired, one-term effort, it's been all non-establishment guys!

With the election of Obama, one must ask for cause/effect. Is it really any desire for the Establishment (as a general trend)-- or simply Obama's charisma and eloquence combined with the public's anger and disappointment with Bush and the GOP? It's difficult for me to imagine the former, but...

Establishments are always suspicious of grassroots movements and populism....Almost all forms of populism today are socially conservative....The new Establishment may be committed to progressive social ideals, but it wants people with advanced degrees to lead the charge....Experts need to lead the way, because ordinary folks can’t be trusted to understand the complexities of social systems and identify their own best interests. Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? provides an excellent argument in support of the new Establishment tendency toward progressive paternalism.

Wow...the reference to Frank's book is spot-on and funny. Frank wants to help Kansas by giving it the Establishment, elitism and paternalism.

To wrap-up, I think Reno overstates the case for "what the people voted for", but otherwise, he has a strong ending...

William F. Buckley famously quipped that he would rather be governed by the first five hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. It was and remains a widely shared sentiment. But history suggests that in troubled times most Americans are happy to be ruled by those educated by the Harvard faculty. As the economic crisis deepens and global conflicts increase, the new Establishment image of competence and achievement is bound to reassure.

I take some consolation, however, in the fact that Barack Obama himself is difficult to slot neatly into the new Establishment role. He seems to have been more directly influenced by his church than anyone elected president in living memory. Although a product of elite universities, he managed to avoid being turned into a permanent ornament of the University of Chicago Law School. Instead of writing a policy treatise or a book hectoring America to go green, he penned Dreams from My Father. And he has been a smoker, the ultimate personal sin for any member of the new Establishment, right up there with guns and religious convictions.

Perhaps, then, Obama is something more than Robert McNamara in the Oval Office. Perhaps he is more interesting, more nimble, and more useful to a society that needs to draw on the talent of the new Establishment without being dominated by it. It could be that he looks back and sees Columbia and Harvard as supremely useful rather than surpassingly important....

I hope so.