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An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.

The elite denizens of Washington and Wall Street scorn and mock the good and decent people of this country for wanting their laws enforced and their communities protected.

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf.

The popular tendency is to listen approvingly to the most extreme statements and claims of politicians and orators who seek popularity by declaring their own country right in everything and other countries wrong in everything.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their G's and saying things in a folksy sort of way that's meant to capture the hearts of people. And it's all fraud; it's all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if it's proletariat behavior.