Victor Davis Hanson: The Elites Are Not Elite

I wanna put a baby in this column.

Long before Trump's monotonous repetition of "tremendous" and "great," Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke "Austrian" rather than German. Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.

The Western world is having a breakdown...

The malady... stems from our false notion of elitism. The public no longer believes that privilege and influence should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz, rather than on demonstrable knowledge and proven character.

The idea that brilliance can be manifested in trade skills or retail sales, or courage expressed by dealing with the hardship of factory work, or character found on an Indiana farm, is foreign to the Washington Beltway, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. Instead, 21st-century repute is accrued from the false gods of the right zip code, high income, proper social circles, and media exposure, rather than from a demonstrable record of moral or intellectual excellence.

...

What got the brash Trump elected was a similar popular outrage that the self-described best and brightest of our time are has-beens, having enjoyed influence without real merit or visible achievement. If Donald Trump did not exist, something like him would have had to be invented.

To me this is the only question. I do not care nearly as much about anything else. I forgive Trump his heresies on policy because during a revolution you are not worried about what policies will be implemented after the revolution -- the focus is on sweeping the old guard out.

As Hillary Clinton once said about the staffers of the White House Travel Office: "I want their people out and our people in."

Competent establishments are not deposed -- because they're competent. They are nimble, react well to changing circumstances and growing discontent, and tweak their course to maintain their power and authority.

Only incompetent establishments provoke a rebellion.

And competent establishments are not surprised by rebellions, either. They see them coming, and head them off by co-optation and adaptation.

The very fact that these cretins are still surprised by all this -- still surprised! Four months after the fact! -- shows them to be incompetent, and not nearly so clever as they flatter themselves.

Competent, smart establishments are not surprised by the long-brewing and obvious, and competent, sane establishments have already begun processing the new information they've been presented with just weeks after it's been presented.

We are now four months on, and they are so stupid they still don't understand, and so lunatic and impervious to reality they're still trying to wishcast an Alternate Universe into existence in which things which happened simply did not happen.

Those still fighting to keep the failed establishment, of both the leftist and slightly-to-the-right-of-leftist varieties, in power over us all to continue denigrating us and destroying the world with their incompetency and arrogance may be better "conservatives" than I am, and may be better "Republicans" than I am, but they're enemy soldiers in a war that cannot be lost if we're to have any hope of something better or any kind of future at all.

posted by Ace at 03:45 PM

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