The attitude of the media/academic elite that Hanson decries is encapsulated brilliantly in Robert Warshow’s critique of The Crucible. Here Warshow nails the smug audiences who applauded Miller’s smug play:

“The Salem witch trials are in fact more relevant than Arthur Miller can have suspected. For this community of “dissent,” inexorably stripped of all principle and all specific belief, has retreated at last into a kind of extreme Calvinism of its own where political truth ceases to have any real connection with politics but becomes a property of the soul. Apart from all belief and all action, these people are “right” in themselves, and no longer need to prove themselves in the world of experience; the Revolution — or “liberalism” or “dissent” — has entered into them as the grace of God was once conceived to have entered into the “elect,” and, like the grace of God, it is given irrevocably. . .

For the Puritans themselves, the doctrine of absolute election was finally intolerable, and it cannot be believed that this new community of the elect finds its position comfortable. But it has yet to discover that its discomfort, like its election, comes from within.”

http://whatstherumpus.blogspot.com/