Liberty's Torch: elites

Showing posts with label elites. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The Pretenses Of The Self-Anointed

Now and then, it becomes easy to discern the arrogance of those who deem themselves entitled to rule the rest of us. Indeed, on occasion they blast it at us at pain-threshold levels. This recent example should stand for several others:

     Hillary Clinton told a podcast host that the idea of Donald Trump having a second term as President makes her sick to her stomach....
     From The Sun:
     Clinton said she “can’t entertain the idea of him winning” again in 2020 after what she recently called the “emotional gut punch” of her defeat.
     “Well, because it makes me literally sick to my stomach to think that we’d have four more years of this abuse and destruction of our institutions, and damaging of our norms and our values, and lessening of our leadership, and the list goes on,” she told the podcast.
     “I don’t think he has any boundaries at all, Kara. I don’t think he has any conscience. He’s obviously not a moral, truthful man.”

Mrs. Clinton’s notions of morality must be very weirdly shaped. She condemns President Trump, against whom not one accusation of illegal or immoral behavior has “stuck” despite the most determined efforts of his many attackers. But she sanctifies her own many deceits and venalities, to say nothing of those of her husband. A vessel capable of all that would be of great interest to topologists.

If memory serves, it was G. K. Chesterton who said that “‘good manners’ always means ‘our manners.’” The same appears to be true of “good morals,” at least when it comes to the conduct of public personages. They’ll happily condemn their adversaries, given a chance. But their own behavior is not to be touched! They had perfectly good justifications for what they did, and if you’d only been privy to everything they knew at the time, you’d understand that without needing to be re-educated. Besides, their intentions were always the best...and don’t you dare to contradict them on that, either.

It’s something to ponder, especially if you’re a Christian of any sort. My micro-post of earlier today has much relevance here.

Catholics have a saying: one important enough to deserve large font:

Every saint has a past;
Every sinner has a future.

We maintain that salvation is possible even to the foulest of sinners, right up to the moment of one’s death. God has a rather liberal standard for such things, as Jesus made plain in the Parable of the Prodigal Son:

     And he said: A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to his father: Father, give me the portion of substance that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his substance.
     And not many days after, the younger son, gathering all together, went abroad into a far country: and there wasted his substance, living riotously. And after he had spent all, there came a mighty famine in that country; and he began to be in want. And he went and cleaved to one of the citizens of that country. And he sent him into his farm to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks the swine did eat; and no man gave unto him. And returning to himself, he said: How many hired servants in my father's house abound with bread, and I here perish with hunger?
     I will arise, and will go to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee: I am not worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And rising up he came to his father. And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and running to him fell upon his neck, and kissed him.
     And the son said to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, I am not now worthy to be called thy son.
     And the father said to his servants: Bring forth quickly the first robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and make merry: Because this my son was dead, and is come to life again: was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
     Now his elder son was in the field, and when he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing: And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said to him: Thy brother is come, and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe.
     And he was angry, and would not go in. His father therefore coming out began to entreat him. And he answering, said to his father: Behold, for so many years do I serve thee, and I have never transgressed thy commandment, and yet thou hast never given me a kid to make merry with my friends: But as soon as this thy son is come, who hath devoured his substance with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.
     But he said to him: Son, thou art always with me, and all I have is thine. But it was fit that we should make merry and be glad, for this thy brother was dead and is come to life again; he was lost, and is found.
     [Luke 15:11-32]

But for many, admitting to one’s misdeeds and asking forgiveness for them, while allowing that others’ conscience pangs are for those others to resolve, constitutes betrayal of the self. “The self” is what they worship; it must never be demeaned or disparaged. This is common among the self-anointed of our ruling “elite.”

As a complement to that, the “elite” never allow that they might be mistaken about their adversaries. They allow not even the possibility of forgiveness to those they despise. For if forgiveness is possible, then an Authority Who stands above them maintains a standard that owes nothing to their self-worship...and that standard would apply to them, like it or not.

The older I get, the more inclined I am to view even things that appear entirely secular through “the lens of faith:” the belief that there are absolute standards of right and wrong, established by a Supreme Being Who will hold us all to account at the conclusions of our lives. G. K. Chesterton, when asked why he had chosen to abandon his earlier Unitarianism and become a Catholic, told his interlocutor that his new faith made life “sensible and workable,” and that he found existence without it to be “senseless and unworkable.” While Chesterton was speaking specifically of Catholic teaching, the core beliefs of Catholicism are also maintained by most other Christian denominations; the differences among us are of far less importance.

It’s through that lens – the belief that right and wrong are independent of our opinions, despite the impossibility of proving so in this life – that our “elites’” unsparing condemnation of all who disagree with them comes into the best focus. They see themselves as the only authorities of importance; they will have no other gods before them. As for their own venalities and scurrilities...well, what of them, commoner?

Their pretense of superior wisdom and virtue is what unites the Hillary Clintons, the Chuck Schumers, the Nancy Pelosis, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, and others of their ilk. These, who deem themselves alone fit to rule us, will never concede the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump, for he is not one of them. From that flows all that follows.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Memories

I can’t help myself about this one, Gentle Reader:

Mem'ries,
Light the corners of my mind...
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were
Scattered pictures,
Of the smiles we left behind...
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were

I think that’s enough to establish the flavor clearly. But why? Well, because the redoubtable Glenn “InstaPundit” Reynolds has provided us with a memory over which to chortle nastily:

     It is the season of bed-wetting. For those who follow politics closely – we anxious few – every new poll, whether from the UK or the US, is arriving freighted with apocalyptic significance.
     It’s true that the stakes are high. In five months’ time, we could be standing among the smoking ruins of liberal democracy. The Trump coat of arms will be emblazoned on the dome of the Capitol. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will be making tinny jokes about bulldogs as Vladimir Putin moves tanks to the Finnish border.
     On the other hand, the post-war order may be looking remarkably intact, Britain having voted emphatically to Remain, a liberal Atlanticist with unexciting ideas installed in the Oval Office, and the England football team having returned home from France after three matches of unbearable mediocrity.

Read every word, Gentle Reader. Immerse yourself in the unsurpassable arrogance. Let the memories of politician, pundit, and celebrity certainty flood through you. You’ll find that you can’t help laughing hysterically.

Back then – was it really only three and a half years ago? My word – the consensus admitted of no dissent: Donald Trump was not going to be president. The United Kingdom would not exit the European Union. All the “people in the know,” the folks whose ears decades of experience had tuned to the vibrations from the corridors of power, were certain. But why? Whence came their absolute faith in...themselves?

The answer isn’t hard to find: from the start of the Wilson Administration to the end of the Obama regime, the grip on power of the political / bureaucratic / media elite (a.k.a. the Deep State) had never been seriously threatened. What’s harder to find is an explanation for why those selfsame, perfectly assured mouthpieces for The Way Things Are And Must Be haven’t yet grasped how wrong they were.

Once upon a time, back when blogging was young, there was a lovely, intelligent lady named Megan McArdle, who went by the Internet moniker of Jane Galt. Miss McArdle promulgated an observation that came to be called Jane Galt’s Law:

The party in power is smug and arrogant.
The party out of power is insane.

That might seem a trifle overwrought, but it comes closer to capturing the psychological state of the American elite – first before the 2016 presidential election, then afterward – than any more temperate assessment.

“The party in power” in pre-November-2016 America, nominally the Democrats but what a deeper look reveals as the political / bureaucratic / media elite, was convinced that its grip on the electoral system would be sufficient to prevent upstart Donald Trump from gaining the White House. It had all manner of tools at its disposal. In combination, those tools must have appeared invincible. Their duly Anointed One, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would become the president as they had foreordained. A chastened Donald Trump would return to his real-estate empire, his fantasies of national leadership permanently dispelled. Business as usual would continue without a hitch.

The elite did not believe its hegemony could be challenged.

Then came the election. What’s this? Trump has won – and by a commanding Electoral College margin, at that? How can this be? It must be a mistake! The nation would not dare to defy Our will, We Who Are The Ultimate Power. It must be corrected at once!

The inability to believe was transformed into a refusal to believe: a willful rejection of the reality that had whacked the elite across the chops.

The elite went from smug and arrogant to insane with the flip of a voting machine lever. Innumerable YouTube video collages testify to their frothing at the mouth. Personages from cable-news opinion-mongers all the way to former presidents girded themselves for war against the Usurper. That war, while it has gone through several stages, has never come near to bringing them what they seek. As of yesterday, they appear to have expended the last of their ammunition.

They were certain of victory.

They’re still insane with rage. They’ll remain so until the levers of power are once again secure in their hands. At that point they’ll revert to smugness and arrogance. They’ll contrive further protections against ever again having those levers snatched out of their hands, of course. You’ve probably read about some of their notions: the “National Popular Vote Compact,” the proposal to divide the District of Columbia into 127 states, the enfranchising of convicted felons and illegal aliens, a new “Fairness Doctrine” that would cover cable news and the Internet, and so forth.

No doubt the elite of the United Kingdom is planning something similar. It’s what elites do.

I started this screed in a jovial mood, something akin to Schadenfreude. But I intend to close on a monitory note. Should the elite of the United States manage to re-establish its hegemony, it will take whatever steps are necessary to prevent any future loss of power. Those folks believe that they can do perfectly well without “the consent of the governed,” and they mean to prove it.

Keep your powder dry.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Elitism, 21st Century Style

Somewhere in my vast humor files, I have an old New Yorker cartoon of two obvious Christian clerics walking down a city street. One is speaking to the other; the other is plainly displeased by what he’s hearing. The caption:

“When will you admit it, Perkins? I am holier than thou.”

I got a big laugh out of it, back when. Today it’s practically a schematic for the behavior of the luminaries of the Left.

My Gentle Readers have all encountered the term virtue signaling by now. Its meaning is pretty plain; no need to go into a painfully detailed exposition on it. The subject I have in mind this fine rainy morning is competitive virtue signaling: the new indoor sport by which left-wing politicians and mouthpieces who seek prominence among their admirers – some in the quest for high office, others hoping for a billet at the New York Times — strive to outdo one another.

Competitive virtue signaling is inherently as lucid as its base phrase: Smith seeks to persuade listeners that he’s “holier” than Jones and Davis. The applications of the tactics available are circumscribed by the issues the left-inclined regard as “America’s sins.” Perennially popular venues include “slavery,” “racism,” “inequality,” “the environment,” and “colonialism.”

The thinking, if that notion be applicable to such activities, is that he who castigates America and Americans most severely for these things will stand out from the field. He’ll become a “leader” to those who subscribe to the Left’s gospel. His statements will be amplified by his perceived virtue, hopefully to his elevation.

It’s clear that this sort of competition is zero-sum at best. It’s just as clear that the “issues” constitute a constrained field in which to exercise one’s powers of condemnation and promised redress. People eventually feel they’ve “heard enough” about issue X. Sometimes they begin to wonder whether they’re the targets of Smith’s rhetoric. They want something new...at any rate, something else.

As always, innovation is driven by imaginative and energetic persons dissatisfied with the status quo.

For Smith to rise in the Left’s elite requires that he out-virtue-signal others who seek the adulation of the masses. But once the current “conceptual domain” for virtue signaling is saturated, what’s he to do? He can’t rant any more intensely about the existing subjects than his competitors. Neither can he innovate within the domain. What now?

The answer, of course, is to expand the domain: i.e., to broaden the conceptual arena for virtue-signaling by adding new “issues” about which to rant. Several have been added in recent years:

“Environmental racism”
“Trans acceptance”
“Food justice”
“Hate speech”
“Triggerings”

Those are the ones that come to mind as I write. There are others. If Smith manages to introduce a new subject to the virtue-signaling domain, he will naturally be the first to plumb its possibilities. His competitors will race to catch up. When they have done so, it will be time to find a new subject that will support further proclamations of America’s crimes and the Left’s moral superiority.

If this progression has a hard terminus, beyond which further expansion of the virtue-signaling domain is impossible, I’m unable to find it.

The competition for elite status on the Left doesn’t have an exact equivalent on the Right. The closest we come at this time is among the “NeverTrumpers:” “conservative” commentators who refuse to accept Donald Trump as the legitimate president despite his having been elected to the post. These compete with one another in finding ever more rarefied ways to criticize President Trump on his style and manner. Their conceptual domain is very difficult to expand, especially as President Trump is compiling a remarkable record of success at the very things the NeverTrumpers have claimed to advocate but have never delivered.

The NeverTrumpers are steadily being squeezed out of the political space they once dominated: the Right-leaning opinion-editorial press. But what else would we have expected, given that Trump’s successes are multiplying, his popularity is rising among all demographic cohorts, and the nation’s overall metrics of prosperity and security are steadily strengthening? If there’s even a possibility of expanding the NeverTrump conceptual domain, I can’t see it...and apparently neither can the NeverTrumpers.

Kurt Schlichter has a good column today on the falsity of our “elite.” That falsity is revealed most dramatically by the “elite’s” inability ever to deliver on what it claims it advocates:

What have they ever solved? Hell, they created most of these problems in the first place. They whine about student loans, but who set up the college cash machine that is American academia? Our medical system is a wreck? Dudes, our medical system is Obamacare, and you’re the ones who stuffed it down our gullets!
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.

Shall we have a big “of course?” Anyone who’s paid enough attention these past few decades knows the truth of Schlichter’s observations. A nation whose “elite” has taken it from putting men on the Moon to putting men in women’s lavatories has no substantive claim to its status. But the virtue signaling has continued nonstop...and it will continue onward, as long as there are persons who pay more attention to rhetoric and style than to substance and performance.

Ignore what the virtue-signalers say. Watch what they do. It’s often good for a laugh, if nothing else.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

From Merit To Certification

It becomes ever more important – nay, critical — that one who wants to grasp the reasons for the deterioration of American society and the American Republic be aware of history, including the history of major institutions.

Not many persons are aware of the history of American higher education. (Indeed, not many are aware of the history of education period, but that’s a tirade for another day.) The institution we call a university was a rare item before 1900. They began to multiply with the blossoming of large-scale American commerce, as men who had become successful in monetary terms produced sons and sought distinctions for them other than wealth. Colleges and universities were billed as places for intellectual advancement, but on a deeper and arguably more important level they provided sheltered gathering places for the progeny of the commercial elite. They facilitated the formation of the acquaintances and relationships the sons of wealth would exploit in later life.

A university such as Harvard or Yale served its patrons in several ways, apart from whatever actual learning it could confer upon them. For two, it provided the aforementioned watering hole for the sons of wealth, and it awarded them the distinction of association with its name (i.e., “He’s a Harvard man”). But these things had a superstitious effect upon subsequent generations. Americans of less wealth came to believe that a college degree could somehow lead them to exceptional success. The universities, while they might not have actively encouraged that notion, certainly didn’t do anything to discourage it. The demand for degrees from degree-granting institutions exploded, as did the number of such institutions.

The postwar G.I. Bill added a huge amount of impetus to the demand. Never before had so many common citizens, persons who possess neither great wealth nor any other special status, flocked into universities seeking degrees. Because the immediate postwar period was also a time of unprecedented advancement in the sciences, much of which lent itself to commercialization through technology, for a while there appeared to be a positive correlation between material success and degreed-ness. But other things were happening as well.

The degree came to be regarded as a credential: a ticket for admission to a new kind of elite. Whether the degree holder has anything much between his ears became secondary to the degree itself – and, of course, to the name of the institution that had granted it.

Hearken to Arthur Herzog on this subject:

Since a good proportion of those in college are dullards (those who weren’t to start with may have become so through education), courses must be invented that are interesting enough to keep the students awake, “relevant” enough to make them feel “involved,” and easy enough to let them pass so that they stay in school. The trivial and the obvious are elevated to the level of course requirements, and the student is taught that faking it and the real world are interchangeable. A great many fellows in fakery of one sort or another emerge.

Herzog wrote that in 1973, Gentle Reader. It was painfully true then; it’s both tragic and incontrovertible today.

Via the indispensable Never Yet Melted comes this Yuval Levin observation:

For much of American history .. [t]he apex of American political, cultural, and economic power was largely the preserve of a fairly narrow white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant near-aristocracy, centered in the Northeast and exercising power across generations. This was never an absolute barrier to others’ rising, of course, but it was a major obstacle.
The claim to power of this WASP elite, like that of most modern aristocracies, was a mix of heritage and rearing. They possessed their privileges by virtue of their birth, but they were raised and educated in ways intended to prepare them for responsibility and authority. And they were—at least in principle though in many cases also in practice—expected to subject themselves to a code of behavior, a commitment to public service, a degree of personal reticence, a regard for the rules of fair play, and a sense of responsibility that was rooted in the implicit recognition that their power was an inherited privilege, not an earned achievement.

This is a reasonably fair and accurate characterization of the elites of the early Twentieth Century. The sons of men who had risen strictly through commerce could elect some form of public service to make their own marks on the nation. Not all of them entered government. Many established themselves as what we would now style “public intellectuals:” persons of repute who declaimed, usually through the pages of a newspaper or other print organ, on the issues of the day. It was the case both here and in England, from which most such persons traced their heritage.

The multiplication of colleges and universities throughout that century naturally gave rise to a stratification into more and less prestigious levels. The “Ivy League” stood at the pinnacle of the pyramid; the mostly young state universities were at the bottom; many other, mostly private institutions stood between them. The distinction attached to graduates from the upper levels of that pyramid greased their paths into the niches they sought, whether in government, opinion journalism, or at the universities themselves. Persons with degrees from less prestigious universities had to make do with the leavings.

As the universities steadily came under the control of successive generations of their own graduates and the trend Arthur Herzog noted toward educational vapidity advanced, the college degree became commodified: a purchasable credential of a significance no greater than its price. The more prestigious ones, of course, commanded the highest prices. The recent purchased-admissions pseudo-scandal involving a couple of minor actresses should be viewed in that light. The universities, of course, would prefer otherwise.

Today’s “elite” has little in common with the elite of a century past. A good working definition of the new “elite” would be “those who matter to those who think they matter.” In particular, the ethic of genuine public service, understood as a responsibility to provide others with something of real value to them, is largely absent. But they wave their credentials at every opportunity. This is particularly noteworthy in the American political class.

Consider in this connection the members of “Conservatism, Inc.:” the bastion of “NeverTrump” pseudo-conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Max Boot. To such persons, the all-important priority is to maintain their status in the “elite.” Regardless of the height of their perches or the bluster with which they orate from them, the majority of them have little of value to offer anyone. But they can brandish all the best credentials: all the right associations and associates. “They matter to those who think they matter.”

Merit is not a term I would associate with such persons. Certified “elitists,” yes; persons with important knowledge and insights they will share with others, no. The time has come for this recognition to emerge from our national subconscious and be made explicit.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The Priority Schedule Of An Elite Part 2

Regard, if you will, this brief snippet from the recent Congressional interrogation of disgraced former FBI director James Comey:

It could hardly be clearer that Comey, who has demonstrably lied to Congress on more than one occasion did not “believe it then.” He was determined to see Clinton walk, and made sure of it with the wording of his report on the investigation. Why else would he have written the memo exonerating Clinton nearly two weeks before Clinton was first interviewed?

But Comey did not respond to Congressman Ratcliffe as he did because he “believed it then” and “believe it now.” Hundreds of persons – admittedly, none of them a former First ~~Bitch~~ Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State – have been imprisoned for long years forexactly what Clinton and her aides did. When I was in defense engineering, I was warned of what would happen to me – not what “could” happen, mind you – if I were to disregard the classified material handling provisions of the National Security Act and the Espionage Act. I know a former engineer who was prosecuted for such violations.

Comey was flaunting his status as a member of The Elite. He believes himself protected under Rules 5 and 6. Given recent events and trends, he’s probably right about that.

The Feral Irishman has posted a few words on the subject:

     james comey is bragging about how he suckered mike flynn into a perjury trap….he’s running around in the main stream media bragging about it….bragging about how he took advantage of the confusion of a new administration…bragging about how he broke the rules because there was no one to notice he was breaking the rules in place yet…..why is he still free???….why is he not locked up..???
     he’s running around admitting he broke the law…and he’s free to keep running around admitting he broke the law…and no one gives a shit…..he laughs about it, and brags about how smart he was…..yeah, right…..
     because he’s a hero of the resistance, and also because he has some kind of job security and/or pension protection on account of bean a government employee….
     but mostly….
     BECAUSE THEY ARE SHOWING US THEIR POWER….THEY ARE IN OUR FACE, AND THEY BELIEVE THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT….

Having weathered President Trump’s initial assaults, Washington’s swamp-dwelling Elitists are thumbing their noses at the White House, at the remaining decent persons in Congress...and at Us the People. The victory dance may be premature, but it’s no less blatant for that.

Yes, they believe there is “nothing we can do about it.” Are they correct?

Regardless of the image it projects, the federal Department of Justice is just as much a bureaucracy – just as much a part of the Washington Swamp – as any other federal agency. Its employees are protected by the Civil Service Acts. Its appointed functionaries mostly arise from its employee ranks. And as is the case with any bureaucracy, its primary priorities are survival and growth. It is observably in perfect conformance with Parkinson’s Lemmas:

An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals;
Officials make work for one another.

Note that despite the blatant malfeasances of Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Page, there have been no indictments. Without indictments there will be no prosecutions. But who would bring indictments against accused members of the DoJ? The Attorney-General...who was until recently former U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, a Trump backer and ostensibly not a Swamp creature. Yet Sessions did nothing. What about his successor, acting AG Matthew Whittaker? Is he a Swamp creature...or does the Swamp “have something on him?”

From outside the corridors of power it’s effectively impossible to know, unless you can get one of its doyens drunk enough to confess. What we do know is that the above-named miscreants, each of which was a principal collaborator in a scheme to overturn a presidential election, continue to walk free.

Is there truly “nothing we can do about it” -- ?

The Elite will protect its members and their privileges with every available weapon. It will lie. It will conceal. It will coerce potential witnesses, whether by blackmail or outright threats to their lives and loved ones. It will punish those members who succumb to attacks of conscience. And every time it succeeds in thwarting an assault against it, it will do a victory dance in our faces. That’s how an Elite revels in having demonstrated its immunity to punishment. No matter how we hoi polloi suffer at their hands, what matters is that their priorities have been well served.

The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. Shadow-joy. The pleasure evil persons derive from the misfortunes of the good. Elitists would never admit to it in so many words, but then, they don’t really need to.

That’s enough for the present, as I feel my blood pressure cresting from this subject. Perhaps I’ll be back later with something less exercising. But if you’d like a few more fulminations on it, enjoy this Kurt Schlichter column. What Schlichter suggests might be the only possible rejoinder to the Elite’s caperings at our expense.

May God protect and preserve us and these United States.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

The Priority Schedule Of An Elite

Does anyone else remember the marvelous movie Fight Club? Surely you remember the first two rules of Fight Club:

Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club!

For “Fight Club” in the above, feel free to substitute “The Elite.” And now, let’s have the full list of the rules:

You do not talk about The Elite.
You do not talk about the Elite. (We’re selfless public servants, like the postman!)
Your membership in The Elite is the supreme grace of your life. You shall place it above all other considerations.
You shall not, under any circumstances, attack another member of The Elite.
You shall not, whether directly or indirectly, provide aid and comfort to anyone who attacks The Elite or any of its members.
You shall, circumstances permitting, defend a member of The Elite who comes under attack.
The privileges and perquisites of The Elite are equivalent to membership therein. You shall defend them when they are questioned, regardless of the identity or station of the questioner.
Upon failure to abide by these commandments, your membership in The Elite shall be revoked.

An Elite is an aristocracy. Remember what I said about the nature of an aristocracy?

     A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.
     The American response to the failings of traditional aristocracies was the Rule of Law: the fundamental principle that the law must treat all men impartially, regardless of their identities or station in life. The old shorthand for this principle was "blind justice," meaning that the law must not see one's person, only one's deeds. In a society that respects the Rule of Law, a king would stand in the same dock as a trash-hauler, were the two accused of the same offense. All that would matter would be the evidence for their guilt or innocence.
     In the absence of a scrupulously observed Rule of Law, classes with differing degrees of privilege will emerge. The flourishing of the members of each class will be influenced, often heavily, by the class's privileges and how effectively they can be exploited. Men being what we are, we will be moved to use those privileges in our own interest, both against competitors within our class and against other classes.

When Robert Mueller blatantly defies a court order to surrender critical documents, he is exerting an Elite privilege: We don’t have to do that. When James Comey lies to protect Hillary Clinton from prosecution under the National Security Act and the Espionage Act, he is conforming to The Elite’s Rule 6 above. And when the entire Justice Department collaborates in an attempt to prevent the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, it’s enforcing the unwritten, unspoken rule:

Only The Elite shall decide who may join its ranks.

All these things are of the essence of an Elite.

It’s my contention that the existence of an Elite in a republic such as ours requires the rules I enumerated:

Rule 1 enforces self-protective discretion.
Rule 2 implies severe penalties for violating Rule 1.
Rule 3 is a reminder: This is why you want to be one of us.
Rule 4 establishes the first external priority of membership.
Rule 5 extends Rule 4.
Rule 6 completes the enclosure of The Elite.
Rule 7 extends that enclosure to The Elite’s special privileges.
Do I really have to explain Rule 8?

These rules also make plain why The Elite must acquire an unshakable grip on supreme political power and guard it against outsiders, for The Elite could not exist nor persist if it could be attacked through the law! Thus any outsider who attempts to use the law to attack The Elite, a member thereof, or any of its privileges will be immediately counterattacked with maximum force.

Is it not “obvious” that a self-perpetuating Elite is impossible when the Rule of Law is scrupulously observed? There cannot be an Elite if the law applies to its members just as it would to a commoner. It negates the nature and purpose of an Elite: to stand apart from the common folk and above them.

Are you thinking of Donald Trump? You should be.

This nation was founded on an anti-aristocratic basis: the firm conviction that no one shall have privileges that allow him to defy the laws that bind the rest of us. Yet we have an Elite, demonstrably so. We have a class of persons who work most assiduously to set the law at naught when its observance or enforcement might discommode them, threaten their privileges, or violate their enclosure.

This is wrong. It’s un-American. Others have said it. Now I have said it. But what, then, must we do?

Time to pray.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Josh Billings Was Right

What’s that you say? Who the BLEEP! was Josh Billings? Why, none other than the man who first said this:

“It’s better not to know so much than to know so many things that aren’t so.”

I’ve heard that statement attributed to every historical figure from Ronald Reagan to Attila the Hun. You might have done so yourself. But you probably consider yourself educated.

Here’s another one for you:

“Nothing is more terrifying than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I’ve heard that multiply misattributed, too. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as I’m reasonably sure Goethe would agree. The sentiment is what counts...which makes the abysmal ignorance of so many arrogant “educated people” as ironic as it is terrifying.

Charlie Martin provides a case for us today:

     I recently had a little argument that started with someone — no, I'm not going to say who, except to say a respected scientist who may have been in Boulder too long — announced that if people really knew how meat was produced, they'd think twice about eating it.
     That struck me both arrogant and odd. I grew up on a cattle ranch; later in life, I cut meat for money. I'm pretty clear on the process from bull covering cow, to bull calf, to steer, to feedlot, to abattoir, to butcher. So my immediate reaction was "heh, city folks."
     My second reaction, almost as immediate, was to be annoyed.
     The truth is that the people who actually do know from childhood how meat is produced are the least likely to have qualms about it. It's the people who grow up thinking meat comes from the meat factory on a styrofoam tray, already wrapped in cling film, who never thought about the connection between steer on the hoof and steak on the table.

In one sense it’s merely a manifestation of the “coastal bubble:” the deep divide that separates the coastal-urban “elites” from “heartland America.” There is some crossover, but the divide is more real than not – and it manifests itself in important socioeconomic and political attitudes more vividly than in any other venue.

I’m a product of the coasts. I’ve lived in New York State, and close to New York City, my whole life but for two years. However, owing to fortunate developments of which I will decline to speak, I’ve also had the advantage of exposure to the heartland. I’ve made use of it now and then in fiction:

     As usual, she was up before him, but this time he found her in the kitchen, coffee made and mugs steaming at their respective places. She looked up as he entered and smiled.
     It was the radiant smile of the morning before, when she’d shown him the first visible sign of the life she’d nurtured, but it was more. It compounded discovery, triumph, love, and peace into a single visible expression of joy. He could hardly believe he was its object.
     He sat at his place and stretched out his hands. She took them in hers.
     “What now?” he murmured.
     She shrugged. “Breakfast, a quick shower, then I guess I’ll weed and water.”
     “Come on!”
     She leered. “Got something else in mind?”
     “Kate!”
     “From where I’m sitting, everything’s great, Allan. What’s got you so wound up?”
     “I might have impregnated you last night!”
     “You think I’m not aware of that? Farm girl, remember? Oh, excuse me, farm woman. I know what semen is for, Allan. I’ve inseminated cows.” She looked off briefly. “Now that’s really grotty. The bull semen comes in this turkey baster thing. You have to wear these long lubricated gloves, because one hand goes all the way up the cow’s—”
     “Kate!”
     She giggled little-girl naughtily.

That’s from “Farm Girl,” a novella in my collection Romance A La Mode. Kate is modeled on a young woman I had the great good fortune to know and love when I was a young man: a mathematical genius who came from the “tall corn” of Kansas. She had a pronounced Kansas accent – yes, there is such a thing – that immediately marked her as not from the coasts. I sometimes think she deliberately exaggerated it to provoke a reaction – a reaction she would quickly and humorously crush. She refused to allow anyone to make derogatory assumptions about her, her home state, or its people.

The left-liberal “#Resist” nonsense is essentially a manifestation of the “those ignorant hicks” attitude Charlie Martin has fingered. These self-nominated “elites” have decided that the only reason we aren’t allowing them uninterrupted and unbounded power over the rest of us is that we’re too stupid to know that it would be for the best. So they’re striving to reverse the results of a wholly legitimate election with false accusations – indeed, with accusations they know to be false — on the grounds that “it’s for your own good”...buttressed, of course, by their underlying assumption that “the end justifies the means.”

No lie is quite as pernicious as a lie about moral principles. It’s infinitely more so when one is lying to oneself.

Self-exaltation is bad enough: the famous capital sin of vanity. But the reason vanity is a capital sin is because it has a capital nature: i.e., a productive nature. It produces the sort of behavior we see from the Democrats and the NeverTrump Republicans determined to impede and ultimately destroy the Trump Administration.

But you can’t tell any of the “elites” that. They’ll sniff you aside, dismiss you as “one of them:” an uneducated and unsophisticated hick. You probably went to a state college, if you went to college at all.

These folks consider their origins, intellects, educations, and connections to be a skeleton key to the corridors of power. They refuse to acknowledge the appropriate limitations of power, because folks “as smart as we are” should be under no limitations whatsoever. Yet they are baffled by how and why a majority of Americans could reject them and the hegemony to which they’re so obviously entitled.

I could go on. Perhaps I will at another time.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Mask Slippages Dept.

The defining characteristic of an aristocracy, a.k.a. “the elite” or “the Establishment,” is the arrogation of one or more privileges that persons outside that group are legally forbidden to exercise. For example, for many decades the legal privilege of owning real estate was reserved to members of the English nobility. In medieval Europe, only a noble or a knight in service to a noble was permitted to own a sword. Aristocracies have often been favored by sumptuary laws. In societies with a legally defined aristocracy, a commoner who attempts to exercise a privilege reserved to the aristocracy will be punished for it. Sometimes the penalty has been execution.

In societies without a recognized aristocracy, a group whose members seek to be thought of as “superior,” in whatever sense, will often behave like an aristocracy. The symptom is often verbal: “talking down” to the rest of us, or arguing for positions that would imply a privilege reserved to them.

There’s no ideological dividing line that separates aristocrats, legally recognized or not, from us of the Great Unwashed.

Just now, a number of “conservatives” – I remember when what they were striving to conserve was freedom — are arguing strenuously against a Constitutionally protected right:

I’m not personally acquainted with any of these...persons. I know them only as three commentators deemed right-of-center. I have no idea whether any of them own a weapon of any sort. But I’m perfectly willing to call them aspiring aristocrats. And I’d bet you the mortgage money that they’d have no qualms about hiring armed bodyguards were they to feel threatened.

(Hm. A quick Googling reveals that all three are NeverTrumpers. More than coincidence? Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.)

I wrote, back at Eternity Road, about the phenomenon of eminent conservative figures who find abridgements of Americans’ right to keep and bear arms perfectly acceptable. Such persons tend to share quite a few “cultural markers” with left-liberal enemies of Americans’ Second Amendment rights. They live along the coasts, usually in or near large cities. They’re well to do if not wealthy. They work in one of the communications trades, often as writers or opinion-mongers. And their social circles overlap heavily with their supposed ideological opponents.

Such persons tend to be conservative in the original sense: i.e., the sense expressed by this lapel-button joke:

Conservative:
Someone who thinks nothing should be done
For the first time.

Such “conservatives” are hardly of the classical-liberal / Constitutionalist / Americanist bent. They’re concerned with preserving the status quo, most particularly their piece of the status quo. Their sort largely goes unarmed. If there are firearms near to them, they’re in the possession of the hired security guards at the apartment tower doors or the villa’s wrought-iron gates. Their left-liberal friends and party guests are quite all right with those. They’re less a means of defense or security than a token of having been accepted into America’s aristocracy: the “opinion leaders,” the “people who matter.” They have nothing in common with the guns of the hoi polloi.

When a Max Boot, a David Frum, or a Tom Nichols “comes out” as those persons did in the tweets reproduced above, they’re telling you a great deal more than they might realize. It’s valuable information – and it should be factored into everything else they say, on any topic in the national discourse.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

A Maslovian Upheaval

The patterns are beginning to coalesce in genuinely illuminating ways.

I’ve written about America’s elite – actually, twice now – out of a sense that I ought to be able to light a few cranial bulbs merely by stressing the fact of its existence. After all, an elite is something “we’re not supposed to have,” at least in the political sense. No kings, princes, dukes, earls, counts, viscounts, barons, marquises, or whatnot allowed, right? Shall we all shout DEMOCRACY!! as one, preferably in the key of C?

And yes, a few people did write to say that they’d been disturbed by the notion. Mildly, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Now tell us about corporate takeovers.

It seems my fulminations were missing something.

The indispensable Ace of Spades supplies the critical element: Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Immediate survival.
Security against threats, immediate or potential.
Acceptance by a valued group.
Self-esteem.
Self-actualization.

...which Ace recasts from an explicitly political viewpoint:

Security from bandits, invaders, Vikings, street criminals.
Security from harassment or assault from government officials themselves. (Note that 1 and 2 can easily flip depending on which is more threatening, but generally, states are formed to defend a land against outside conquerers and then that state moves on to conquering its own people.)
Security from social or cultural degradation and being assigned to an officially or semi-officially inferior caste -- think "Civil Rights." Think casual slurs directed at any group.
Big picture, gut level, philosophy-defining questions, such as on abortion, the sanctity of marriage, whether the state will permit personal property or whether it will all be shared, whether criminals will be treated leniently or punitively, etc.
More wonkish refinements of the big-picture gut level items -- whether or not we'll have a border adjustment tax or an Ex-Im Bank or whether we will declare as a nation that we will go to war with Russia if it threatens Estonia, even though we all know it doesn't matter what we say, we won't go to war, but it's important for our self-esteem to claim we might.

I might quibble over the placement of particular items in certain categories, especially at levels 4 (Self-esteem) and 5 (Self-actualization), but on the whole Ace has captured the political implications of Maslow’s hierarchy quite well.

The insight here is so large that even a Certified Galactic Intellect can overlook it, purely out of the inability to “see the edges:”

The elite and the non-elite operate at different levels of the hierarchy. Moreover, at levels 4 and 5, the elite and non-elite apply different criteria.

If you’re a member of the American political elite – and I severely doubt that one of them would bother reading Liberty’s Torch – until quite recently your level 4 criteria were all satisfied, and you spent your time and attention at level 5. For us of the hoi polloi, “the action” is elsewhere:

Some of us are under immediate, survival-endangering attack (level 1);
Many Americans are struggling for self-sufficiency (level 2);
Acceptance can be elusive if your circle is politically divided (level 3);
And many Americans’ self-regard is challenged by recent events (level 4).

Very few non-elite Americans are fortunate enough to operate at the level of self-actualization.

The property that determines whether one is a member of the political elite is access to power: more specifically, power over the non-elite. Such access virtually guarantees the elitist the satisfaction of his levels 1 through 4...or it did until recently.

The election of Donald Trump, and the stunning discovery that he means to carry through on his promises, is of course at the base of the upheaval. The elite sees Trump and his agenda as an existential – i.e., level 1 – threat.

Tom Clancy captured their upset beautifully in Executive Orders, the novel in which his perennial hero Jack Ryan assumes the presidency after the mass murder chronicled in Debt Of Honor:

     It was as though a foreigner had usurped the throne, not necessarily a bad man, but a different man who didn’t assemble people from the Establishment. They’d waited patiently for him to come to them, as all presidents did, to seek their wisdom and counsel, to give access and get it in return, as courtiers had for centuries. They handled things for a busy chief, doling out justice, seeing to it that things were done in the same old way, which had to be the right way, since all of their number agreed with it while serving and being served by it.
     But the old system hadn’t so much been destroyed as ignored, and that befuddled the thousands of members of the Great Network. They held their cocktail parties and discussed the new President over Perrier and pate, smiling tolerantly at his new ideas and waiting for him to see the light. But it had been quite a while now since that awful night, and it hadn’t happened yet. Networked people still working inside as appointees of the Fowler-Durling Administration came to the parties and reported that they didn’t understand what was going on. Senior lobbyists tried to make appointments through the office of the President, only to be told that the President was extremely tied up and didn’t have time.
     Didn’t have time?
     Didn’t have time for them?
     It was as though Pharaoh had told all the nobles and courtiers to go home and tend their estates up and down the river kingdom, and that was no fun—to live in the provinces...with the...common folk?

Perfect. What we grubby groundlings see as a ray of hope, the possibility of salvation from Leviathan’s ever expanding maw, the elites see as a threat to what they value most – and critically, the power that’s brought them the goods we’ve struggled to amass and conserve.

What’s followed...follows.

Ace makes the stakes perfectly plain:

Stated as offensively and provocatively as possible (and I'm cribbing this from a cynical friend): Morality is a luxury good. Rich, prosperous countries breed a value of life. Desperately impoverished people will murder people for a meal.

Their protestations about “public service” notwithstanding, the elite are aware that their opulence and status are founded on exploiting their political power over the rest of us. Moreover, they know that were they in our place, they’d resent such treatment – i.e., what they’ve done to us – and want to take a bloody vengeance. That sense is what makes the ascendancy of Donald Trump a level 1 threat to them.

Accordingly, just now, for the elite, there are no rules. They’ll do whatever they “must” to remove the usurper and reinstate themselves in Their Right and Proper Place.

With that I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Elites In Crisis

Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals....Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference; in other words, that he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from no action. – Murray N. Rothbard

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell, 1984

The most obvious truths are among those men struggle most desperately to deny.

Like a college fraternity, an elite of whatever variety is an in-group. Those “in” possess privileges, perquisites, and (in the specific case of governments) powers that those “out” do not. He who values those things will compare the requirements for admission and the barriers to entry to his own assets, motivation, and endurance, and decide on that basis whether to “pledge.” Similarly, each of those “in,” should they feel their status threatened by developments, will assess the magnitude of the threat and the difficulties of active resistance, and decide on that basis whether to fight – and how.

Recent revelations, nicely aggregated and summarized here, make it seem incontrovertible that the political elite, a.k.a. “the Establishment,” has been waging a quiet campaign to defeat the Trump Administration before it can get fully into motion.

Scoffers will scoff. They’ll slow-clap and bray “Yeah, yeah, another evil conspiracy.” And because conspiracy and allegations thereof have been systematically ridiculed for so long, they’ll succeed in deflecting some of the attention the timeline in that article would otherwise get. But in point of fact, a conscious, all-pervading conspiracy is not required for the events in the cited article to have their full sinister import.

The individual members of the Beltway Elite, being uniformly motivated by the same considerations and to approximately the same degree, are all too likely to act uniformly in defense of their “in” status.” Given recent events, we may take it as written that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

Members of the progressive Hive likewise act on their own instincts and have their own code of communication. They feel free, but they are also predictable. Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control; but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern. – Joseph Sobran, “The Hive”

Several categories of actors have participated in the dogpile on the Trump Insurgency and its nominees. The federal officeholders are the most easily understood, as they have careers to preserve. Civil Service employees, though protected by law from dismissal for even the most grievous wrongdoing, will feel a similar impetus toward defense against the interloper and his lieutenants. Slightly less obvious is the central motivation of the media, which has become an open handmaiden of Big Government since the New Deal. Bluntly stated, the more government there is, the more things it involves itself in, and the more “access” reporters can acquire, the more there will be to report. Thus, they will feel much the same survival pressure to collaborate with those resisting the new regime as those more plainly affected – and they will do so whether or not their cooperation is requested.

“Leaks” are the key. In the view of a reporter with “access,” a leak is merely possible material for his next story. While the reporter’s political preferences should not be entirely discounted, it is nevertheless to his practical advantage to use those leaks:

That will entice the interest of many readers;
That will enhance his reputation for investigating allegations of wrongdoing;
That will further ingratiate him with those who’ve granted him “access.”

It is plausible that the highest echelons of the Beltway Elite consciously set out on the path Joel Pollak has delineated. Such persons have great pride. They feel a terrible resentment of those who would undo their handiwork. They’re surely capable of using indirect implication to communicate their preferences to underlings. Some conscious collaboration among lower-level leakers is possible, but once the word has been whispered, it’s hardly required. The motivations that impel their disclosures are much the same as those of the strata above them. The matter passes thence to the media, of which the Left’s conquest is no longer in doubt.

"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen...and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few...in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."— Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery. [From Garet Garrett's essay "The Revolution Was"]

Lincoln’s deductions notwithstanding, sometimes the cause-and-effect pattern we think we see is backwards from what has really occurred. While the bees in a hive don’t possess awareness of what drives their actions, human beings are more completely equipped. Sometimes our “bees” act originally on personal motivations, but later on become aware how their efforts interlock and synergize with the efforts of those around them. The questions that arise then are two:

“Do we want to keep doing this?”
“How will we get away with it, now that the pattern is so visible?”

From the evidence, I’d say the media megaphones, the minions of the Deep State, and the more visible members of the political elite, to the extent that each participant has realized what the others are doing and how it interlocks with his own efforts, have answered those questions:

“Yes;”
“By doubling down and never letting up.”

Will Trump and his lieutenants impose penalties upon any of those involved? Perhaps. Indeed, to judge from Rex Tillerson’s purge of the State Department’s 7th floor cabal, the process might already be in motion. However, the federal government is vast. Cleaning house will not be a quick purge. The media, of course, are beyond direct correction; all the new Administration can do is limit their access, thus compelling them to work for what they seek.

We shall see.

Friday, March 3, 2017

The Creation And Perpetuation Of An Elite

It would be like him to do that; that was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder...by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh, yes, once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York. And I have bought my ties from that firm ever since. [Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier]

The nature of an elite is plain from the attitude of those who claim to belong to one: We’re superior to you. It doesn’t matter how elaborately an elitist dresses his snobbery in noblesse oblige. The snobbery – the air of elevation over others – is the meat of the matter.

The snobbery is a required element. It contributes to the perception of an elite by “outsiders.” Superiors must act superior, whether blatantly or subtly. It’s also indispensable to the perpetuation of the elite veneer. If elitists were to refrain from lording it over others, they would soon forfeit all claims to elite status.

And it must extend to the smallest, least consequential of matters.

Dystopic, who’s getting to be a power in the Blogosphere, has posted a humorous and penetrating article on a key aspect of elitism. An indicative snippet:

     Food virtue signalling, or more aptly, food snobbery has been a thing for a very long time. And like political virtue signalling, it is all about display one’s superiority over another based on some irrelevant metric. “Look at me,” says the narcissist, “I’m superior because I like my steak rare.”
     Of course, it is not merely steak that has suffered this effect. Wine has traditionally been a strong bastion of snobbery, but the practice has moved to craft beer. Now, again, don’t get me wrong, I like craft beer. For the longest time, I thought I didn’t like beer, because I found Bud, Coors, and Miller Lite to be foul-tasting beverage abominations. But therein lies the point: I found them foul. Another man might like them. Indeed, even today these beers sell like hotcakes. Obviously somebody likes them.
     If the President wants a Bud Lite, get him a damned Bud Lite. And just because you drink Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA (which I also find foul, by the way, as it’s a totally overrated beer in my opinion) doesn’t mean you are a better man, or have a more “elevated” palette, or anything of the sort.

Please read it all.

Snobbery of the palate is one of the most common components to elitism. It’s been around for a long time. Note the dishes supposedly elite chefs concoct on cooking-contest shows. Note the bizarre ingredients they frequently incorporate. Note the incomprehensible foreign-language names attached to the resulting dishes. Note the still more incomprehensible comments the “judges” make about those dishes. Note – and ponder.

The “judges” supposedly have “cosmopolitan tastes” and “educated palates.” They muse and declaim over the dubious plates nervously set before them like Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. But how often do they take more than a tentative bite from what’s set before them? How often would you, Gentle Reader, willingly partake of those...creations?

I submit to you that if it isn’t 100% pretense, it comes damned close...and that there’s a lot of upchucking being done and antacid being consumed behind the scenes.

A personal note: I’m particularly exercised by wine snobs: the elitists who specialize in telling us from their oh-so-overflowing founts of knowledge and experience which wines we “should” prefer. I can’t stand the wines they advocate. I can’t stand them.

Wine is a luxury beverage; the more expensive, the more extreme the luxury. A luxury is pointless if it isn’t enjoyable. Shriekingly expensive wine that tastes unpleasant and is difficult to swallow is the antithesis of enjoyable, and therefore the antithesis of luxury. “Pointless” is the mildest of the adjectives applicable to it.

I submit that the evidence that wine elitism is pure pose is available at any of their much-promoted “tastings.” Here’s a humorous take on it:

Beneath the obvious humor, there’s a lot of truth in that commercial. Wine snobs often fulsomely praise wines that fight being swallowed: they’re so astringent and acidic that the throat struggles to reject them. If you’ve ever seen a bunch of wine snobs at a wine tasting, of the sniffing, staring, swirling, delicate sip, and the spitting-out, the last part is the only bit that was sincere.

I’ve been there, Gentle Reader. I’ve actually been there. The miasma of assumed superiority, the pretense of refinement and erudition that eclipses the tawdry tastes and preferences of us grubby groundlings, is thick enough to sculpt.

“Of tastes there is nothing written,” says the Talmud. That grates on those desperate to consider themselves superior and to advertise their superiority. They do it to exalt themselves over us of the Fish Sticks and Tater Tots with a White Zinfandel set, of course, but just as imperatively to signal their membership in “the better sort” to others who share their aspirations and pretenses. The signaling is what matters.

Dystopic has applied the phrase “virtue signaling” to elitism of the palate. This is indeed part of the syndrome, for an elitist wants to be taken as superior to others in all ways, but most emphatically in virtue. Yet just as there’s no virtue involved, there’s also no true superiority. Their pretenses are merely emblems to imply superiority via membership in a difficult-to-join group.

In truth, the emblems – the difficult, expensive, unpleasant practices they embrace and promote as badges of membership in their set – are all elitists have. It’s almost a reason to pity them.

Almost. Not quite.

Friday, January 6, 2017

The Downside Of The Politicization Of Everything

The New Yorker, a journal with which I’ve had little acquaintance in recent years, recently printed this cartoon:

I can’t imagine that even one of my Gentle Readers doesn’t “get” that cartoon, or its targets. I’d imagine that the reactions among you would be about evenly split between scorn and raucous laughter at the cartoon’s author.

The message embedded in the cartoon, of course, is that the populist wave that elevated Donald Trump to the presidency is akin to piloting an airliner by plebiscite. The redoubtable Glenn Reynolds has a few words to say about that:

In this view, ordinary people are just carried along for the ride, while the country is run by experts with vast experience and credentials. Letting ordinary people take charge would surely result in a disastrous crash. If the pilots are “smug” it’s because they have abilities that ordinary people lack.

But do they? Have they demonstrated special abilities whose exclusion from the corridors of power we’re likely to mourn?

Don’t all rush to answer at once, now.

Some years ago, during a voir dire examination for jury service in a civil case, an attorney dismayed by my various credentials asked me if I could “set aside” my habits of mind to give his client “a fair shake.” I asked him to clarify his rather disturbing question. He responded by saying, in approximately these words, that in rendering a verdict I shouldn’t be concerned with “mathematical accuracy.”

To which I replied, “Counselor, to the extent that justice fails to be accurate, it fails to be justice.”

Need I say that he asked me to be dismissed, or is that too screamingly obvious?

Yet there is nothing in governance, the most error-prone of all human undertakings, that isn’t about justice. That’s inherent in the nature of governance: the nominally sanctioned use of coercion to achieve particular ends. It’s why I once had my fictional president, Stephen Graham Sumner, say this:

     “Do you know why everyone allows himself opinions about politics, Ethan? Because politics is supposed to be simple. It’s supposed to be about justice. Right and wrong. Things every schoolchild learns at his mother’s knee. Politics isn’t supposed to be the property of a bunch of specialists running simulations on high-powered computers. It’s supposed to be about the defense of the nation and peace in the streets.
     “I never expected to land here, until I actually did. But when the final tallies were in, I knew what would happen immediately afterward. And did it ever! I was practically overrun by would-be advisors, each of them toting some grand scheme to create a Utopia by federal action. Have you ever read about the Coolidge Administration, Ethan?”
     The chief of staff shook his head.
     “I gave them the Coolidge treatment. I invited them to pitch their cases, listened in total silence, and showed them out. To a man, they hoped to become parts of my administration, awarded power and prestige. None of them did, of course.
     “Politics is supposed to be the pursuit of justice. That and nothing else. From what you’ve told me, the public agrees with my understanding of justice, in this instance at least. But if it were the other way around, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. I will do as I think justice requires, regardless of anyone’s opinion before, during, or after the fact.”
     [From this short story]

The contrary notion, that politics and governance are far too complex to be put at the mercy of popular opinion, is what has all but ruined this nation.

We’re about to embark upon a course the nation has never before taken. A complete government neophyte, who has never held public office or served in the military, will soon be our chief executive, the man charged to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

That’s got the Left completely outraged. They were certain the power seat belonged to them...that it would go to their anointed one, who had all the proper punches on her ticket. For the great unwashed mass of Compassion-Challenged Deplorables, Those Who Do Not Understand The Complexities, to spurn her in preference for a total outsider – A reality-TV buffoon! A vulgarian! A businessman! – has turned their world upside down. As Professor Reynolds has noted, it’s a devastating blow to their self-regard:

And now that Trump has won, people are, in fact, a lot less respectful of the traditional academic and media and political elites. Trump didn’t just beat them, after all. He also humiliated them, as they repeatedly assured everyone (and each other) that he had no chance. It’s a huge blow to the self-importance of a lot of people. No wonder they’re still lashing out.

Had these persons not made politics their pole star – had they not insisted that everything is political and that they, the Inherently Superior of Wisdom and Virtue, are the only legitimate arbiters of all that is right, true, and just – they would not be suffering quite so much angst. The moral could hardly be clearer.

Now, as the late Robert Sheckley has said, he who practices soul-doctoring without a license must restrict his prescriptions to remedies you can get over the counter. And so, to our Leftist, ah, friends, so tormented by their anticipation of the coming Trump Administration and its aims, I say:

Take a vacation from politics. Read some entirely non-political books. See a big, gaudy, special-effects-laden movie. Get drunk a time or two. Jump your Significant Other. And for the sake of our ears and a modicum of public peace, you might consider shutting the BLEEP! up.