The anti-elitist movements of today are certainly important. They promote conversation on debt, the role of government at all levels, and they ask important questions about individual responsibility. Conversation about these issues are healthy even if these conversations are dismissed by many in elite society. However, there is an ever-present danger of anti-elitists sounding and acting as dismissive and elitist as those who they decry.
No matter what the popular movements is there will be those within it who disagree, those who agree partially, and those who refuse to agree because they (those who refuse to agree) are one of a self described select few who truly understand. In a very real way these select few who refuse to agree for the purpose of disagreeing are another branch of elitists.
Elitists often come from anti-elitist popular movements. Popular movements start out with simple principles and rhetoric. They are often inclusive and idealistic. This is the case in either the anti-war movements, civil rights groups, tax reform groups and many others groups. In the natural process of a popular group's development there will be differences in ideology because people in these groups will either simply differ, or seek to unseat leadership by being more ideal than those in charge.
What does it all mean?
I'm writing specifically to those who spend a majority of their time criticizing everyone who doesn't fit their narrow ideological worldview, attacking those inside their tiny groups with terms like: progressive, sham, sell-outs, or even unconstitutional. These poor souls criticize nearly everything, cherry picking evidence which supports their narrow view, while they ignore any evidence that inconveniently doesn't support their views. These pure criticizers are pure ideologues who don't like to be challenged or even to discuss that their idea might be wrong.
In the recent populist movements, like the TEA party, ideas were inevitably thrown around. The interesting thing was that while the TEA party people stood united against big-government, when conversations surfaced about immigration, free-trade, defense spending and other contentious issues, not everyone agreed on dogmatic stances. Then fragmenting occurred and those who could not influence others to their side turned to attacking those with whom they disagreed. Many of these disaffected TEA party folk turned into pure criticizers.
Here is a hint on why the pure criticizers are members of very small groups; because their ideas are seen by many people as wacky, or these small groups are awful at getting their points across and(or) because these people in small groups feel vindicated simply because their groups are small, and elite. You see, they are the elite of anti-elitism.
While the pure-criticisers-eltitist-while-being-anti-elitists exclude themselves from conversations purposely by their elitist tendencies, they will remain tiny fractions of the political conversations and will remain in their self important, self imposed, corners.
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