Monday, August 22, 2022

Our Elite Need to Put More Skin in the Game

Victor Davis Hanson, "The Worst and the Stupidest?"
Our elites are now viewed with the disdain they have earned on their own merits. And they are none too happy about it.

 

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.

Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways.

One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions.

So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom—as they became poorer.

The elite found in the truly poor—neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base—an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.

Second, race became increasingly divorced from class—a phenomenon largely birthed by guilty, wealthy, white elites and privileged, diverse professionals. For the white bicoastal elite, it became a mark of their progressive fides to champion woke racialism that empowered the non-white of their own affluent class, while projecting their own discomfort with and fears of the nonwhite poor onto the middle class as supposed “racists,” despite the latter’s more frequently living among, marrying within, and associating with the “other.”

The net result was more privilege for the elite and wealthy nonwhites, more neglect of the inner-city needy, and more disdain for the supposedly illiberal clingers, dregs, deplorables, chumps, and irredeemables.

The results of these contortions were surreal. The twentysomething who coded a video game that went viral globally became a master of the universe, while the brilliant carpenter or electrical contractor was seen as hopelessly trapped in a world of muscular stasis. Oprah and LeBron James were victims. So were the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, Ilhan Omar, and the Obamas, while the struggling Ohio truck driver, the sergeant on the frontline in Afghanistan, and Indiana plant worker became their oppressors. Or so the progressive bicoastal elite instructed us.

Globalization and its geography, along with the end of ecumenical class concerns, certainly widened the ancient mass-elite divide. But there was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.

An Incompetent Elite

In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.

The masses of homeless in our streets were a consequence of various therapeutic bromides antithetical to the ancient, sound notions of mental hospitals. The new theories ignored the responsibilities of nuclear families to take care of their own, and the assumption that hard-drug use was not a legitimate personal-choice, but rather a catastrophe for all of society.

From universities also came critical race theory and critical legal theory, which were enshrined throughout our institutions. The bizarre idea that “good” racism was justified as a get-even-response to “bad” racism, resonated as ahistorical, illogical, and plain, old-fashioned race-based hatred.

The masses never understood why their children should attend colleges where obsessions with superficial appearances were celebrated as “diversity,” graduation ceremonies matter-of-factly were segregated by race, dorms that were racially exclusive were lauded as “theme houses,” Jim-Crow-style set-aside zones were rebranded “safe spaces,” and racial quotas were merely “affirmative action.”

Ancient notions such as that punishment deters crime were laughed at by the degreed who gave us the current big-city district attorneys. Their experiments with decriminalizing violent acts, defunding the police, and delegitimizing incarceration led to a Lord of the Flies-style anarchy in our major cities. Note well, those with advanced or professional degrees who dreamed all this up did not often live in defunded police zones, did not have homeless people on their lawns, and found ways for their children to navigate around racial quotes in elite college admissions.

So, the credentialed lost their marginal reputations for competency. Were we really to believe 50 former intelligence heads and experts who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”? Even if they were not simply biased, did any of them have the competence to determine what the laptop was?

Or were we to take seriously the expertise of “17 Nobel Prize winners” who swore Biden’s “Build Back Better” debacle would not be inflationary as the country went into 9 percent plus inflation? Did we really believe our retired four-stars that Trump was a Nazi, a Mussolini, and someone to be removed from office “the sooner the better”?

Or were we to trust the 1,200 “health care professionals” who assured us that, medically speaking, while the rest of society was locked down it was injurious for the health of people of color to follow curfews and mask mandates instead of thronging en masse in street protests?

Or were we to believe Kevin Clinesmith’s FISA writ, or Andrew McCabe’s four-time assertion that he did not leak to the media, or that James Comey under oath really did not know the answers to 245 inquiries? Did Robert Mueller really not know what either the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS was?

Middle Class Competence


On the operational level, the elite proved even more suspect. Militarily, the middle classes in the armed forces proved as lethal as ever, despite being demonized as racists and white supremacists. But their generals, diplomats and politicians proved so often incompetent in translating their tactical victories in the Middle East and elsewhere into strategic success or even mere advantage.

Nationally, the failure of the elite that transcends politics is even more manifest. The country is $30 trillion in debt. No one has the courage to simply stop printing money. The border is nonexistent, downtown America is a No Man’s Land, and our air travel is a circus—and not an “expert” can be found willing or able to fix things. Is Pete Buttigieg the answer to thousands of canceled flights or backed-up ports? Is Alejandro Mayorkas to be believed when he assures the border is “closed” and “secure” as millions flood across?

The universities are turning out mediocre graduates without the skills or knowledge of a generation ago, but certainly with both greater debt and arrogance.

Our bureaucratic fixers can only regulate, stop, retard, slow-down, or destroy freeways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, ports, and refineries—and yet never seem to give up their own driving, enjoyment of stored water, or buying of imported goods.

Is it easier to topple than to sculpt a statue?

A generation from now, in the emperor has no clothes fashion, someone may innocently conclude that most “research” in the social sciences and humanities of our age is as unreliable as it is unreadable, or that the frequent copy-cat Hollywood remakes of old films were far worse than the originals.

Does anyone think a Jim Acosta is on par with a John Chancellor? That Mark Milley is equal to a Matthew Ridgway? Is Anthony Fauci like a Jonas Salk or an Albert Sabin?

Yet this lack of competence and taste among the elite is not shared to the same degree in a decline of middle-class standards.

Homes are built better than they were in the 1970s. Cars are better assembled than in the 1960s. The electrician, the plumber, and the roofer are as good or better than ever. The soldier stuck in the messy labyrinth of Baghdad or on patrol in the wilds of Afghanistan was every bit as brave and perhaps far more lethal than his Korean War or World War II counterpart.

How does this translate to the American people? They navigate around the detritus of the elite, avoiding big-city downtown USA.

They are skipping movies at theaters. They are passing on watching professional sports. They don’t watch the network news. They think the CDC, NIAID, and NIH are incompetent—and fear their incompetence can prove deadly.

Millions increasingly doubt their children should enroll in either a four-year college or the military, and they assume the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department are as likely to monitor Americans as they are unlikely to find and arrest those engaged in terrorism or espionage.

When the elite peddles its current civil-war or secession porn—projecting onto the middle classes their own fantasies of a red/blue violent confrontation, or their own desires to see a California or New York detached from Mississippi and Wyoming—they have no idea that America’s recent failures are their own failures.

The reason why the United States begs Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil is not because of lazy frackers in Texas or incompetent rig hands in North Dakota, but because of utterly incompetent diplomats, green zealots, and ideological “scientists.”

Had the views of majors and colonels in Afghanistan rather than their superiors in the Pentagon and White House prevailed, there would have been no mass flight or humiliation in Kabul.

Crime is out of control not because we have either sadistic or incompetent police forces but sinister DAs, and mostly failed, limited academics who fabricated their policies.

Current universities produce more bad books, bad teaching, bad ideas, and badly educated students, not because the janitors are on strike, the maintenance people can’t fix the toilets, or the landscapers cannot keep the shrubbery alive, but because their academics and administrators have hidden their own incompetence and lack of academic rigor and teaching expertise behind the veil of woke censoriousness.

The Naked Emperors’ Furious Search for Fig Leaves

The war between blue and red and mass versus elite is really grounded in the reality that those who feel they were the deserved winners of globalization and who are the sole enlightened on matters of social, economic, political, and military policy have no record of recent success, but a long litany of utter failure.

They have become furious that the rest of the country sees through these naked emperors. Note Merrick Garland’s sanctimonious defense of the supposed professionalism of the Justice Department and FBI hierarchies—while even as he pontificated, they were in the very process of leaking and planting sensational “nuclear secrets” narratives to an obsequious media to justify the indefensible political fishing expedition at a former president’s home and current electoral rival to Merrick Garland’s boss.

The masses increasingly view the elites’ money, their ZIP codes, their degrees and certificates, and their titles not just with indifference, but with the disdain they now have earned on their own merits.

And that pushback has made millions of our worst and stupidest quite mad.

23 comments:

  1. LOL! "The worst and the stupidest" is donald tRump.

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  2. (((Thought Criminal)))August 22, 2022 at 10:19 PM

    I sometimes wonder if Victor Davis Hanson has ever read a history book. Maybe he knows someone who has?

    Does it not logically follow that if globalism were at the root of society's ills that someone familiar with historical analysis could show VDH the better America that existed
    before globalism turned it to shit, so that VDH in turn could show us? Or is this article just the boxscore of the latest round of Buzzword Bingo down at the Sloppy Scholarship Vanity Publisher's Forum?

    My survey of the pre-globalist history of civil rights, crime, race relations, labor rights, technology, medicine, arts, education and so on in America doesn't find this utopia. Was it in government created railroad and oil company monopolies or debtor's prisons? Organized crime? Lynching? Believing tariffs prevent depressed economies? What?

    Or were we to take seriously the expertise of “17 Nobel Prize winners” who swore Biden’s “Build Back Better” debacle would not be inflationary as the country went into 9 percent plus inflation?

    Okay Vickie, tell us you're unaware that Biden's Build Back Better proposal never passed into law without telling us that you're unaware that Biden's Build Back Better proposal never passed into law.

    Needs more big shoes and bicycle horns, this clown does.


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  3. You're right, beamish. Before "globalisation" there were millions of small market utopias, instead of just one.

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  4. (((Thought Criminal)))August 23, 2022 at 9:35 AM

    And multi-millionaires standing tall over millions of people working for 12 cents a day. People so broke owning a home was a dream and owning a share of stock was a ludicrous fantasy. A home with heat and air conditioning, indoor plumbing, markets brimming with food and goods from afar mitigating the absence of food and goods locally... Pre-globalization, all these things were.... science fiction. The city of St. Louis itself has hospitals with more x-ray machines and trained professional medical providers than *most countries.* This is the same in every major American city and most of the minor ones.

    So, when VDH pines for some pre-globalist time in the past that was allegedly better than now, I have to wonder if the guy that's mach a niche vanity-publishing claims that today's academics have worthless credentials really has what it takes to compete with Bozo the Clown.

    Make a list of America's greatest historians past and present. Victor Davis Hanson ain't on it. Dude can't even describe today correctly. How's he doing to tell you about the past?

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  5. Who cares? VDH doesn't. He's got his farm with +++ acreage. What have you got?

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  6. ...btw - Where did all those $0.12 workers come from. That's right, dad bought a tractor and didn't need the kids anymore.

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  7. (((Thought Criminal)))August 23, 2022 at 2:34 PM

    You're going way out of the way to miss the point.

    Historians, at a bare minimum, should be able to provide insights into history. VDH can't even do that. At least he's over his Battle of Thermopylae explains everything phase of hackery.

    This wonderful pre-globalist world that VDH fantasizes about and extols the virtues of actually never existed. At least, it didn't exist the way he imagines it did.

    Notice he avoids at all costs any real comparisons between present and past. Because he knows as well as you and I do that globalism made America great.

    VDH is a feckless hack.

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  8. So, there are no conservative elites? All the elites are liberal? Makes sense. I can buy it.

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  9. There are conservative elites, but few conservative "cultural" elites. The masses imitate the liberal elites, because they require so much less...

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  10. Ever read Nietzsche "Uses and Abuses of History for life", beamish? Historians explain "why things are the way they are", not how things could have gone differently.

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  11. ...not how life could be, and once was, "lived" differently.

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  12. globalization is merely the last stage of "late capitalism". It didn't make America great. An already great America won WWII and made it "global" where it "lost" its' greatness.

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  13. Don't make the mistake of many modern historians of interpreting eighteenth century events through the lens of 21st century values.... of "censoring" texts to make them suitable for 21st century readers.

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  14. There is no "grand march of history" towards progress. There are merely endless but predicable In the short term) "cycles" of chaos.

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  15. By the measures of every ill VDH is laying at globalism's feet, pre-globalist America was much, much worse in those measures.

    For example, since 1950, the population of the United States has slightly more than doubled, but poverty rates have decreased, crime rates have fallen, and so on. If you think murder rates are bad now, go back to VDH's alleged golden age before global trade and immigration increased America"a industrial and intellectual power.

    Where is this better America VDH thinks was lost by globalism? It never happened. By that I mean it wasn't better.

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  16. Define "better". Is a "directed" economy "better" than a "laissez Faire" one? If so, China is the best economy in the world.

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  17. (((Thought Criminal)))August 25, 2022 at 11:44 AM

    Well, better is proportional. If you think violent crime is bad now, imagine the crime rates of the 1920s in a population as huge as 100 years later. I'd be almost afraid to go outside.

    But the "better" question should be posed to VDH. He's the one poo-poohing globalism. Whatever was "better" before globalism didn't exist. Not crime, not poverty, not civil rights, not technology, not even a can of mixed nuts.

    He paints with a paint roller, and got paint all over himself.

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  18. I think that you begin to run into real problems the minute you put everyone into same "global" economic boar...

    ...the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

    -Michel Foucault, "Of Other Places" (1967)

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  19. (((Thought Criminal)))August 25, 2022 at 2:31 PM

    Sichuan peppercorns. Import to the US was banned from 1968 to 2005 due to a bacterial canker that grows on them that can harm domestic citrus trees (California and Florida oranges, etc.) The spice itself isn't a biologically a pepper, it's the dried berry of the prickly ash tree. It is one of the most popular spices in the world, and it has been used for millennia to stimulate the immune system, to reduce pain, boost appetite, increase blood circulation, strengthen bones, and reduce inflammation. Sichuan pepper is good medicine.

    For a good 37 years, nobody in America had access to the real deal when they went to the Chinese restaurant and ordered Kung Pao Chicken, they got something less spicy, less healthy, less medicinal, less flavorful. Even now it's hard to find Sichuan peppercorn that hasn't had the really hot spiciness roasted out of it before it hit American shores, because the roasting kills the bacteria canker everyone was worried about killing orange and lemon and lime trees, although that never really happened. What did happen is millions of Americans died of clogged arteries and heart disease, malnutrition from loss of appetite, weak bone health, and in pain. Probably some of them died with a glass of orange juice at their side when eating REAL Kung Pao Chicken might have saved them.

    If you order Kung Pao Chicken and it's not crap Panda Express totally drowned in peppercorns but STILL HOT, you have the real deal, and eating it will save your life.

    Pre-globalism, you'd just die.

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  20. Yeah, well most Wasabi that you put on your Sushi is probably just horseradish with green colouring.

    btw - I hear that if you eat roasted essence of tigers balls, or put powdered rhino horn in your Lo Mein, it'll put viagra to shame. You'll have to call a doctor for the 24 hr. "election".

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  21. btw2 - A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke!

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  22. from Wiki:

    The popularity of wasabi in English-speaking countries has coincided with that of sushi, growing steadily starting in about 1980.[7]

    Due to issues that limit the Japanese wasabi plant's mass cultivation and thus increase its price and decreased availability outside Japan, the western horseradish plant is generally used in place of the Japanese horseradish. This version is commonly referred to as "western wasabi" (西洋わさび) in Japan.

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  23. I knew about "Wasabi." The first time I had *real* wasabi I thought a firecracker had gone off in my upper sinus cavity lol. After the snot stopped flowing I felt like I had a brand new nose.

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