With this, I swear, I’m done writ­ing about the National Review for a while, but I would appre­ci­ate if some­one would help me under­stand how it is that they’re able to write things like this with­out a hint of irony:

Much has been writ­ten why Palin both brings strength to the McCain ticket and is a gamble at the same time. Why then the grow­ing wave of pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment in her favor?

Var­i­ous rea­sons, but one I think is that mil­lions of Amer­i­cans are simply tired of being lec­tured at by smug elites.

The author of these sen­tences is Victor Davis Hanson, a man who holds a Ph.D. in Clas­sics from Stan­ford, who serves as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti­tute, and who writes for a mag­a­zine founded by the son of an oil tycoon whose first edi­to­r­ial famously asserted “the superiority…of cham­pagne to ditchwater.” I know that the suc­cess of this kind of faux-​populism is an endur­ing mys­tery of Amer­i­can life, but what really inter­ests me is the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect of the phe­nom­e­non: is Hanson’s lack of self-​awareness willed, faked, or genuine?

I don’t know about mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, but speak­ing for myself I’ll say that I’m simply tired of being lec­tured at by smug elites about the smug­ness of elites.