Quickies: “A Vote Against Meritocracy”

     Every now and then, I play through a few YouTube videos of the major media on Election Night 2016, when the Trump campaign confounded all the prognosticators. Just today I encountered one in which Lawrence O’Donnell, ever the self-exalting, self-justifying left-liberal, pronounced the Trump victory “a vote against meritocracy.” “She did everything right,” he said. He meant it as a slap: against Trump certainly, but also against the millions of Americans who voted for Trump. For O’Donnell was unshakably certain not only that Hillary Clinton would win the election, but that she was far better suited to be president than Donald Trump. It was O’Donnell’s way of saying that to vote for Trump was a denigration of Clinton’s fitness – i.e., her prior “service” in federal offices – and a deliberate choice of the less worthy candidate.

     Yes, those are “sneer quotes.”

     Heads nodded throughout the media at O’Donnell’s sentiment. To the media handmaidens of the political elite, two assertions constitute unquestionable postulates of “public service:”

• They know who “deserves” (and who doesn’t) to be admitted to the political class;
• Prior occupancy of lower offices is the sole acceptable qualification for higher ones.

     The media, in particular, weren’t merely shocked by Trump’s victory; they took it as a personal insult. For they regard themselves as the official arbiters, the self-anointed “authorities” fit to judge who may and who may not attain high office. To contradict their wisdom once issued is the American version of lese majeste.

     I deem this to be multiply confirmed by the unending and utterly groundless attacks on President Trump since Election Night. The talking heads who were so firmly behind Clinton, and so confident that she would prevail, cannot maintain their self-regard – really, their assumption of superior wisdom and morality — without hammering home to their viewers what a terrible lapse of judgment America displayed when it elevated this rank upstart, this crass bourgeois construction magnate, this uncultured barbarian boor to the highest office in the land.

     And I can’t watch those Election Night videos without cackling fiendishly over the way Trump shattered all their illusions and pretensions. I do so whenever I’m feeling a bit low about our national discourse. It has been said, and truly, that laughter is the best medicine.