Where have our "best and brightest" taken us?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness,

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

"You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America."

So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.

Yale law graduates are not dairy farmers. But those who milk cows know enough not to peddle lies that one can invest $1,000 in cattle futures, beat the one in a trillion odds, and pocket a speculative profit of $100,000, all through autodidactic study of “the Wall Street Journal”—about as a believable yarn as claiming 30,000 deleted emails on an illegal home-brewed server under government request concerned a wedding and yoga.

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Thus spoke candidate Barack Obama about another “they.” Obama apparently did not grasp that the so-called white population voted for him in greater numbers in the general election than it did for Al Gore or John Kerry, including the very constituency he wrote off as near Neanderthal.

On what criteria of excellence did Obama in 2008 justify separating himself from the objects of his stereotyped condemnations?

"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement . . . my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

So said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, in a similar fashion to the condescension that lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and nearly cost Barack Obama the 2008 nomination.

Romney’s rhetorical sins were somewhat comparable to those of Clinton and Obama and similarly reflected an out-of-touch sense of superior wisdom and insight not always warranted. Did the multimillionaire Romney not know that many citizens of the 47 percent who work nobly as minimum-wage peach pickers or clerks understandably need assistance through health or education subsidies?

Romney was, of course, correct that someone like himself could never convince those culpable of unduly receiving entitlements to take responsibilities for their lives. But could someone else have done it through a general invigoration of the industrial and manufacturing sectors? Perhaps someone who used the pronoun “our” rather than “I,” and sought to jaw bone and persuade outsourcers and off-shorers to again create jobs in American in anticipation of a more favorable business, regulatory and energy climate, and as a way of helping “our miners,” “our farmers,” “our vets,” and “our workers”?

When a presidential candidate gives up on 47 percent of the country, or a quarter of the electorate or on an entire state, it is difficult to see any evidence of deep political insight. Elise Jordan no doubt found Romney a more fitting candidate than the raucous Trump. Yet neither a dairy farmer nor Trump so far has written off tens of millions of American as culturally hopeless.

One strange manifestation of elite contempt is a romance with illegal immigration—usually by needs conflated with legal immigration to caricature its opponents. Illegal immigration is often idealized in the abstract but rarely lived with in the concrete, and also is useful as a surrogate club with which to beat down the proverbial white working class.

But surely if there is decadent, lazy, spoiled white class it is not in places like Bakersfield or Dayton, but more likely on tony college campuses. There a new generation of “spoiled” elites is increasingly poorly educated but strident in its indoctrination. They are zealous about their claims on behalf of wisdom, but ignorant of any broad knowledge that might substantiate that zealotry.

Our best and brightest, with the most impressive resumes and degrees, not the “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever” of Middle America ran up $20 trillion in national debt. Our best failed over a decade to achieve 3 percent economic growth. The supposedly smartest warped the health care system. The brightest could not translate overseas interventions into a strategic or cost-to-benefit advantage. The anointed eroded the border. The most knowledgeable gave us state nullification of federal law. The purportedly most ethical weaponized the IRS, the FISA courts, the DOJ, and the FBI, undermined the idea of free-speech in the university, and politicized everything from the eroding NFL to the increasingly irrelevant Oscars.

Our so-called elite, not the middle classes, has made a desert and called it success.

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