attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”19
He’s right. Over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.”20 And yet we’re screwed anyway, with or without the Harvard-Yale game. If the smart guys are so smart, how come we’re broke? How come those Americans who aren’t tenured
Unlike less sophisticated creeds, the statist ideology denies it’s any such thing. Why, they’re way beyond that: just as the political class are merely technocrats, so our educators are not leftist ideologues but impartial scholars, and the media establishment are objective reporters who would never dream of imposing their own biases even if they had any. Because, if you accept the idea that your worldview is merely that—a view—it implicitly acknowledges there are other views, against which yours should be tested.
Far easier to pronounce your side of the table the objective truth, and therefore any opposing argument is not a disagreement about policy or philosophy or economics, but merely evidence of Nazism, racism, or mental retardation. Contemplating a hostile electorate on the eve of the 2010 election, John Kerry bemoaned the ignorance of the voters: “Truth and facts and science don’t seem to weigh in,” he sighed.21
Senator Kerry is so wedded to “truth” and “facts” that, like his fellow Massachusetts patrician Ted Kennedy, he spent the Bush years disseminating a fake Thomas Jefferson quote (“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”).22 Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”).23 Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from
In a culture so convinced of its truth, facts, science, and smarts, even the Cliffs Notes are too much like hard work. As Shakespeare said to Sinclair Lewis at a Friars’ Club roast for Thomas Jefferson, when conformity comes to America, it will be wrapped in torpor and bent in the arc of portentous banality. The United States has not just a ruling class, but a ruling monoculture. Its “truth” and “facts” and “science” permeate not just government but the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the very societal air we breathe. That’s the problem, and just pulling the lever for a guy with an R after his name every other November isn’t going to fix it. If Hollywood’s liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn’t going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore’s allegedly rising sea levels.
In such a world, the Conformicrats think of themselves as a meritocracy, a term coined by the sociologist Michael Young in 1958 for a satirical fantasy contemplating the state of Britain in the year 2032.26 And, as with “brains trust,” a droll jest got taken up by humorless lefties for real. By the time Tony Blair started bandying the word ad nauseam as a description of the bright new talents running the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century, Lord Young felt obliged to object. Six decades earlier, he had written the party manifesto that swept the Labour Party to power in 1945, and he reminded the Blairite generation of two of the most powerful members of that government: Ernie Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, and Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council (and deputy prime minister). Morrison had left school at fourteen and become an errand boy, Bevin at eleven to work as a farmhand. Against considerable odds, they rose to become two of the most powerful men in the land. There were no such figures in Tony Blair’s “meritocratic” cabinet—nor in Barack Obama’s. But there used to be, even in the Oval Office.
Yet today, whene’er such a person heaves on the horizon, the so-called meritocrats recoil in horror. Remember the early sneers at Sarah Palin? Not for her policy positions or her track record as governor but for her life, where she came from, where she went to, her frightful no-name schools: My dear, who goes to North Idaho College? Or Matanuska-Susitna College, wherever and whatever that is. “Celebrate diversity”? Well, yes, but good grief, there are limits…
Imagine what the new Condescendi would have made of candidates from Allegheny College (William McKinley, for one term), or, despite its name, Clinton Liberal Academy (Grover Cleveland, but he left to support his family). Why, Truman didn’t even have a degree! And Van Buren left school at fourteen! And Lincoln only had eighteen months of formal education! And Zachary Taylor never went to school at all! Since the departure of Ronald Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), America, for the first time in its history, has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League—less a two-party than a two-school system: Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In an America ever less educated but ever more credentialed, who wants to take a flyer on autodidacts like Truman or Lincoln? And, even if you went to the right schools and got higher scores than John Kerry, as Bush Jr. did, the slightest departure from the assumptions of the conformocracy will earn you a zillion “SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT” stickers.27
Our new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was “in trade,” so today’s rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin’s executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts? In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn’t want to fill it up with “mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk.”28 But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have government by men who’ve done nothing but “think and talk.”29 There was less private-sector business experience in Obama’s cabinet than in any administration going back a century.30
If you sit around “thinking and talking,” the humdrum responsibilities of government are bound to seem drearily earthbound. Hence, the political class’ preference for ersatz crises, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans31 or the Prince of Wales saying we only have ninety-six months left to save the planet.32
As Madame Cornuel observed, no man is a hero to his valet. But fortunately it’s a lot easier to be a hero to your typist, especially when it’s
Wow!
Back in the real world, a couple days after Christmas 2010, a snow storm descended on New York, and the action-hero mayor, relentless in his pursuit of trans-fats, was unable, for more than three days, to fulfill as basic a municipal responsibility as clearing the streets.34 His Big Nanny administration can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger, but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue. Perhaps, if New Yorkers had appeared to be enjoying the snow by engaging in unregulated sledding or snowballing without safety helmets, Nanny Bloomberg could have scraped the boulevards bare in nothing flat. But, lacking that incentive, he let it sit there.
In Governor Schwarzenegger’s state, over one-third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they’ve overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed after degenerating into a de facto Mexican health-care network.35 If you’re a legal resident of the state of
