There was a time in the democratic world, where some of the people at the very top of their party’s — people with the actual reins of power — were unabashed intellectuals.<\/p>\n
Woodrow Wilson was a scholar and an academic.\u00a0 Winston Churchill was a soldier, but he was also a writer and a historian.<\/p>\n
Many of our founding fathers were wonks and idea junkies.<\/p>\n
Barack Obama can lay claim to some of this mantle.\u00a0 His Ivy League credentials and his widely-praised books were a comfort to his friends and a source of scorn to his critics.<\/p>\n
But Obama’s surge to power in 2008 is looking more and more like an anomaly.<\/p>\n
His cerebral, cautious approach to American politics has alienated many in his own party who prefer a more confrontational, bare-knuckled approach.<\/p>\n
And this week, Canadian voters had a chance to vote for Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Cambridge, Oxford and<\/em> Harvard, to serve as their next prime minister.<\/p>\n Ignatieff is an accomplished writer, scholar, and human rights activist.\u00a0 He’s also handsome, charismatic, and reasonably talented on the stump.<\/p>\n None of that mattered.\u00a0 With Ignatieff as their standard-bearer, his Liberal Party suffered a devastating defeat and it now appears that Ignatieff himself lost his own seat in Parliament, a rare humiliation for a party leader.<\/p>\n I’ve scoured the Canadian press for some explanation about Ignatieff’s drubbing.<\/p>\n The rationales offered up are remarkably thin.\u00a0 He “failed to connect.”\u00a0 He called the elections “too soon.”\u00a0 He didn’t articulate a clear vision.<\/p>\n All that played a part, to be sure, and Ignatieff was also caught in some weird political cross currents, including the rise of a new center-left party, the NDP and the historic implosion of the Bloc Quebecois.<\/p>\n But I’m chocking this election up to the would-I-want-to-have-a-beer-with-him?<\/em> question.\u00a0 Ignatieff joins the long list of philosopher-pol also-rans that stretches back from Gordon Brown to John Kerry to Nelson Rockefeller.<\/p>\n Men of ideas and character, they lacked something of the common touch.\u00a0 They seemed a little aloof.<\/p>\n It may well be, of course, that Michael Ignatieff wasn’t the man to lead Canada.\u00a0 Voters certainly saw it that way.\u00a0 The fact that someone has big ideas doesn’t mean they’re the right ideas, or the right ideas for the moment.<\/p>\n But it’s worth pondering what it means that our Western societies appear to have developed an aversion for thinkers and intellectuals.\u00a0 What does a democracy look like if the best and brightest need not apply?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was a time in the democratic world, where some of the people at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4187,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186\/revisions\/4187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}