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… is from page 231 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society [2]:
The vision of the anointed lends itself to dramatic categorical decisions – a proliferation of “rights,” for example – rather than to incremental trade-offs. Whatever the benefits and losses to the general public from each of these decision-making approaches in particular instances, the benefits to the anointed come from making categorical decisions which ringingly and dramatically affirm their loftier vision, while trade-offs reduce issues to undramatic quibbling over more or less – with all of this being done on a plane of moral equality with their adversaries, at that, this itself being a violation of the vision of the anointed.
DBx: Yes.
No one in America today regards himself or herself as being more surely anointed by the fates to lord it over the masses – to snarl with dripping contempt at those who dare to question his proclamations – to dismiss with the casual wave of a hand the concerns of those who speak of the downsides of his preferred policies – than does the man pictured above.