Why is the political class so confident?
Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?
The old British aristocracy could at least truthfully say that they had physical courage and patriotism and cared for their shires and neighborhoods and served for free as justices of the peace. The old French aristocracy could at least truthfully say that had refinement and manners and a love for art and literature and sophistication and beautiful things. The old Yankee elite could truthfully say that it was enterprising and public spirited and willing to rough it and do hard work when necessary. This lot have little or nothing to be proud of, but they are arrogant as Hell.
Why aren’t these people laughed out of the room?
This would be a good start:
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott:
That the gulf between these two Americas is growing wider is seen most disturbingly in Rasmussen’s finding that less than a quarter of Mainstream America now believe the government has the consent of the governed. Washington has a profound credibility crisis.
That Rasmussen’s results are far from unique or isolated is seen in the Gallup Poll’s most recent finding that only 11 percent of those surveyed have confidence in Congress and only a third have confidence in the presidency.
So how do we explain these two Americas? Rasmussen says his data shows that “the American people don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. The American people want to govern themselves.”
President Reagan understood this. In his first inaugural address, he reminded us that “from time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
Reagan in 1981 and Rasmussen in 2010 are pointing to the same fundamental truth: Our Political Class wants to govern Mainstream America, indeed thinks it’s their right and privilege to tell the rest of us how to live because they think they are smarter than we are. But that attitude flies in the face of what America is and always has been about, though imperfectly so, to be sure.
That the Political Class’ attitudes toward Mainstream America are corrosive and destructive is seen in Obamacare. It became law despite opposition from a clear majority of voters and only after President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress resorted to corrupt bargains and procedural abuses to force its passage.
I think there’s going to be a great reckoning in less than ninety days.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The Obama elite versus the American people.
These people might revive the great American tradition of tar and feathers.
You also have to factor in the business “elite” as well. Harvard Business School types — think George W. Bush for an example in politics — have not exactly served the country and the public all that well either.
And perhaps other elites that have turned out to be narrow specialists who, because they know one thing well, think they can tell us how to run our society and our lives.
“Harvard Business School types — think George W. Bush for an example in politics ”
He is actually the most down to earth President since Reagan. Elitist, he is not. If you ever saw him in person you would know that.
Indeed, GWB is the Truman figure in this “first as tragedy, second as farce” passion play…
Good heavens yes, GWB was anything but elite. It’s why he didn’t give a damn whether you liked how he pronounced “nuclear.” What planet have you been living on, Chuck?
Nor is it my impression that your Harvard B school grads are trying to govern the nation as a whole. My impression is that they just want to be CEO of some $50 billion company and retire rich by persuading umpty million customers to buy a Kindle, iPhone, Tesla, time-share, premium cable TV service, and so forth and so on. I’ve rarely met one who said What I REALLY want to do is become President/Speaker/Majority Leader and tell all of America what to do with their lives and money. You need a leftist who utterly lacks the skills to persuade people to part with their money for that kind of ambition.
I think getting involved in local politics might give you some perspective. I live in a blue collar town. Most of the people on the city council do not have college degrees: the council members include: a cop (employed by a neighboring town), a construction contractor, a guy who owns a greenhouse, and the council president mayor is a rather inarticulate unschooled woman (with a knack for making friends, naturally) who worked her way up the ranks of a local bank branch from secretary to VP of something or other (not entirely unlike Obama’s grandma, but different). These elected officials are not “the political elite”. But sit in on a council meeting, and listen to the upset residents who come to plead their case, or read the angry letters to the editor in the local paper (or lately, on the local blog). You’ll hear the exact same criticisms leveled at the council members and at the mayor that are being leveled at the “political elite” above. You’ll hear “Our [elected officials] want to govern [us local citizens], indeed thinks it’s their right and privilege to tell the rest of us how to live because they think they are smarter than we are.” Even in a representative democracy, complete with freedom and fair elections, people are going to resist being governed — the cause of the discontent is not elitism.
Here’s another good start:
http://highhorsethreads.spreadshirt.com/shop/designs
Having been involved in local politics myself, I can tell you that this assertion is belied by
That knack is what defines the political elite, and the problem is that their friendships become ever more insular as they climb the political ladder.
You may be confusing elite credentials with elite attitudes, bob. Any big fish in a small pond can sport the attitude of a born-to-rule aristocrat. Conversely, there are plenty of folks with amazing credentials that don’t think of themselves as inherently better than their fellow man.
I strongly suspect that when people complain about elitism they’re not complaining about Harvard degrees per se, but about the attitude of some Harvard degree holders — and some who don’t have Harvard degrees — that their degree entitles them to rule the lives of others.
I think getting involved in local politics might give you some perspective.
I like how Bob always throws in something irrelevant.
Bob, why do you think all local governments will share the properties of the group you describe? In other words, probably nobody who will ever read your post will live in the same town at the same time (and hence under the particular leadership you describe). As it is, my limited experience in local politics indicates that they have the same elitism problems as crop up in national-level politics. It’s just more petty. Hell, I’ve seen the problem of elitism in college student groups where the stakes are as petty as you get outside of a bridge game, sports party, or D&D session (at least they have $134.56 in student union funds to bicker over, not just who ate all the Cheetos).
And that observation still ignores the elitism problem prevalent in national-level politics. Just because your particular town allegedly doesn’t happen to be run by a bunch of pompous, self-entitled jerks, doesn’t mean that national-level politics is the same.
Karl, my point was that is that anyone in the role of political leader will end up getting treated as though they are undeserving of their position, even when they are elected by free people in a free election, and even if those elected to office are just regular schmoes.
Bob, why do you think all local governments will share the properties of the group you describe?
e.g. Bell City, CA
I didn’t say all local govts are the same, but many are, since the “elite” that Rand is talking about are geographically concentrated . Moreover, when the same complaint is leveled to against both the “elite” and non-elite folks, I think it indicates tbat the problem isn’t elitism. Contrary to the rhetoric Rand quoted above, people don’t especially want to be governed by anyone , even by people who pretty much just like them in terms of socioeconomic status, and this claim ought to resonate with all the libertarians who contribute here.
Finally: Karl, of course my town is run by pompous self-entitled jerks! And of course your student union was too. I took Rand’s post to be about people who are “elite” because they went to Harvard (and then went on to work in Washington).
Another possibility, bob, is that power corrupts, eh? Maybe your ruling class, at the city or national level, starts out as regular schmoes, but they don’t stay that way once they’ve marinated in the juices of power. Probably most of the 19-year-olds the SS recruited in 1937 were decent farm boys, eh? Power over others does very destructive things to the souls of men.
Sure, Carl, power corrupts, but I’m responding to the quote by Mark Tapscott that Rand picked out (requoted below).
If Joe the greenhouse owner and Hank the construction contractor, once elected to the town council, become corrupt, then what is the quote below getting at?
I think what we’ve got here is a bunch of libertarians who don’t want to be governed by anyone (not that there is anything wrong with that), but instead of just admitting it, they are complaining about the “Political Class”. In the current president’s administration, there are large number of ivy league graduates, and so the libertarians like Rand are complaining about the elite not deserving to be in power. If the administration was composed of a bunch of high-school drop-outs, the libertarians would still be still be complaining that those in power do not deserve to be in power (and maybe more justly so, in that case). No matter who was president, no matter who was in the administration, the libertarians would say they don’t deserve to be in power. And that makes the libertarians pretty much like everyone else.
From the selection by Mark Tapscott which Rand quoted:
So how do we explain these two Americas? Rasmussen says his data shows that “the American people don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. The American people want to govern themselves.”
President Reagan understood this. In his first inaugural address, he reminded us that “from time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
Reagan in 1981 and Rasmussen in 2010 are pointing to the same fundamental truth: Our Political Class wants to govern Mainstream America, indeed thinks it’s their right and privilege to tell the rest of us how to live because they think they are smarter than we are. But that attitude flies in the face of what America is and always has been about, though imperfectly so, to be sure.
I think you’ve got a fallacy of a false dilemma there, bob. First of all, it’s hardly any remarkable discovery that people don’t like to be governed — don’t like to be told to do things which they do not of their own free will want to do — for there is no other logical definition of “governed” — it does not require government to get you to do things you want to do, right? I mean, who, aside from a bottom in an S&M game, enjoys having his will overriden by another? No one. So this “conclusion” is rather a straw man here. It’s neither remarkable nor leads to any particular insight into the distinction between libertarians, progressives, or indeed any normal human being and any other normal human being.
Secondly, you fail to consider that while everyone dislikes being governed, there are degrees of dislike. One might well — indeed, common sense would suggest you’d — dislike being governed poorly more than being governed well, and dislike being governed by arrogant shitheads who gratuitously rub your nose in their power (droit de seigneur, obsequious titles, bowing and scraping, Kelo) than by humble men who remember for whom they really work, and dislike being governed more than necessary to a greater degree than being governed no more than is necessary.
The second lies at the core of what I said, and I think Rand’s point: to be governed by people who are arrogant and overreaching, even if unsuccessfully so, is annoying. (And to be annoyed is not cost-free: if citizens are hostile to and annoyed by government, the social contract frays, and that has real long-term costs.)
The third lies at the heart of the Tapscott quote: to be governed unnecessarily much affronts many people, and without question has very large long-term costs. Government has, arguably, already thrown away $1 trillion of our money in the past year, whether you call the stimulosaurus a failure, or point to the absurd life support of the UAW, or even the current $26 billion candy to the teachers’ unions.
A lot of what we’d saved up for our daughter’s college tuition or retirement at 65 instead of 70, or a 50th wedding anniversary trip around the world, or the special therapy our autistic kid needs has been taken from us by Congress and wasted. Thrown right down the toilet. When that happens, and the people who did it, instead of exhibiting some shame, roll down the window of their limos or stand on the tarmac next to their Gulfstream and lecture us about how we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for our racist teapartying reluctance to hand over more of our savings to fund their next free lunch scheme — well, this is indeed something that would make most folks quite cross.
Finally, you are ipso facto wrong about the degree of complaint about those in power. Yes, no one likes to be governed. Vide supra, what else is new? But it is also true — and this is why Tapscott made the comment in the first place! — that the degree of hostility that the American voter presently has to his government has reached record levels. It has, in fact, not been the case that people will always hate government as much as they hate it right now. People hate this government more than they’ve hated any government in the past 30 years. The fact that they’ve never loved any government is irrelevant.
Bush’s down to earth act was that — an act.
As far as HBS elitism, have any of you ever worked for a big corporation run by HBS types? Good grief, talk about an assault on liberty. Do check out Rand’s comment on Worker Abuse.
“I mean, who, aside from a bottom in an S&M game, enjoys having his will overriden by another? No one.” I think you underestimate the strong streak of self-loathing masochism running through those of the State-fellating persuasion. (When they’re not power-loving sadists.)
Yes, I’ll never forget all the speeches GWB made about how he was going to fundamentally transform America.
No, wait, that was O’Bama. GWB was the guy who, before 9/11, demonstrated that he had no clue about what he was going to do while in office.
“Bush’s down to earth act was that — an act.”
1) How would you know?
And,
2) So what if it was? At least acting down-to-earth meant Bush had the savvy to know that Americans prefer that attitude rather than the snobbish disregard for their sensibilities and desires that the Obama administration has shown.
And I don’t think “an assault on liberty” means what Chuck Divine thinks it means.
People hate this government more than they’ve hated any government in the past 30 years.
While harsher words may have been used in the past… I don’t think there has ever been more hate of government in America… I’d even include King George of England in that assessment. Nor have more ever drunk the kool aid.
What’s missing is a state change and I’m not sure what the catalyst of that would be.
One reason for the confidence of the Ruling Class is that there are a handful of issues where they actually have some evidence (best example: evolution vs. creationism).
Every time a conservative asks “If humans came from apes, why are there still apes?” the Ruling Class gains more confidence.
Everything they’re right about enables them to be wrong about a host of other things without blushing.