End Of History: Ivy League Has Won

Jim Sleeper on human see-saw David Brooks:

For years, Brooks' Ivy fixation has kept him see-sawing: On the one hand, he often displays the pariah's bitter ressentiment toward Yale and Harvard, borne of a slavish attraction to his heart's lost desire (he went to the University of Chicago, so near and yet so far). On the other, Brooks began to display a parvenu's compulsive ingratiation shortly before the Yale Cold War historian John Gaddis, the Reagan diplomat Charles Hill, and other Yale neo-cons welcomed him for a semester in 2002 to teach a course, to sell the Iraq War to students, and to promote his hosts' Bush-worshipping Grand Strategy program in subsequent columns at the Times.

Only a year before, in his Wall Street Journal essay, Brooks had gloated that cleansing Washington of Ivy Leaguers would rid the republic of their characteristic erudite bluffing, arrogant insouciance, and other unrebuttable presumptions of superiority that arouse "both awe and silent hatred" in regular Americans.

Ivy Leaguers - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.