David Brooks captures two elements of Obamania.  First is its close association with privilege:

Obama is not only a member of this temperate [post-boomer] generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.

His upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.

Second is its unpreparedness in handling the nation’s challenges.  The ruling elite will come to face problems America has not seen for decades.  Deflating asset prices, higher unemployment, and lower tax revenues will challenge any new administration, no matter who wins tonight.  Can the young Obama supports, roused to the polls by promises of hope and change, fully comprehend the pending hard-nosed politicking?

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

….

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

Indeed, the boomers continue to haunt American politics, even if one of their representatives is not in the Oval Office.  Hope and change are good talking points, but health care plans cost money and most economists agree that raising taxes right now would further damage the economy.  We can’t hold hands to make tough decisions; some constituencies will inevitably lose and if Sen. Obama wins the election, it won’t take long before some of his young naifs are disillusioned with the messiness and required compromise of democratic politics.

A President Obama may claim to represent change, but as Brooks astutely concludes, “In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.”

One’s IQ depends significantly (or mostly, as some would argue) on genetic influence.  If this is the case, individual ability and life prospects are distributed in a cruel manner.  Combine this unearned intellectual inheritance with the egalitarian mandate of meritocracy and society starts to develop a merited elite, an intelligentsia, or to put it more cruelly, a caste system.

John Derbyshire in The National Review argues that meritocracy dismantles old elites, as its proponents expect, but also constructs new elites in its wake:

This means that our cognitive elites are increasingly inbred. Doctors used to marry nurses, professors used to marry their secretaries, business moguls used to marry starlets. Now doctors marry doctors, professors professors, moguls moguls, lawyers lawyers, etc. Those “modest origins” of our meritocratic elites are less modest by the year. We might be drifting towards a caste system, except that meritocracy requires some openness, some vacuuming-up of high-I.Q. outliers from the lower classes, some dumping of low-I.Q. duffers from the elites.

This new elite will elicit considerable resentment as the merely average masses feel shortchanged in the genetic lottery.  Fortunately for them, Derbyshire fails to mention, the emerging intellectual underclass may not have the smarts to realize the cause of their state.

Paul Krugman asserts that much of American’s political discourse over the past forty years has really been a disguised discussion on race. The Right, Krugman states, has more effectively taken advantage of this new, disguised racism since,

Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.

Krugman asserts that the following political mantras are really racially charged code meant to quietly reinstate Jim Crow:

Thank you, omniscient Paul Krugman, for translating these political code words of the bigoted masses. Here I was under the impression that all the people who wanted reduced government spending simply didn’t want to saddle their children with enormous debt. Little did I know they wanted to cold-heartedly snatch welfare payments from blacks.

I was also under the impression that people who were fed up with heinous, incivil, urban violence merely valued human lives and the safety and civility of civilization. Little did I know they were merely looking for an excuse to incarcerate blacks.

Leave it to Paul Krugman to trivialize and dismiss the political beliefs of others as mere racism. Maybe he’ll next take a page from the Obama playbook and write a column about guns and religion.