"The Best and the Brightest"

If you read nothing else this week, make sure you read Angelo M. Cordevilla's essay:

America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The essay is long, occasionally overwrought, but is an attempt to explain the inchoate feelings suffered by all too many Americans that the present ruling class is attempting to engineer an entirely new class of subjects.  While the majority of this new Nomenklatura are Democrats, the republicans, in their time running Washington, showed that they inhabit the same political/psychological space, though might be thought of as Nomenklatura-lite.

Time pressures prevent me from devoting the time necessary to do this essay justice, but a few additional links might be illuminating.  First there is Nicole Gelinas, who discusses ten recent books addressing the recent financial meltdown:

Surveying the Wreckage

What can we learn from the top books on the financial crisis?

 

Congress also seems oblivious to the fact that, throughout history, financial crises have come about because of two factors: too much debt and too much hidden risk. That’s why Roubini and Mihm rightly call for a “robust set of simple rules”—not coincidentally, largely the same ones that governed finance from the thirties through the eighties, when financial crises were rarer and milder than today—to prevent future crises. Forcing credit derivatives onto stock-market-style public exchanges and limiting borrowing across financial firms and instruments “should be absolute and should be applied across the board,” they say, with heavy borrowing restrictions and disclosure requirements for any “customized” derivatives. In fact, they would go even further, separating commercial and investment banks to break “too-big-to-fail” giants into smaller units that pose less risk to the economy. Not even the more modest of these steps, however, is in the congressional bill.

Note that she leaves with reason for pessimism; the game was rigged and the financial reform bill does nothing to change that unhappy fact.

Too many naive, well intentioned liberals will find this to be difficult to believe: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” [Emphasis mine-SW]

There is much more; read Glenn's excerpt and comments or go to the Daily Caller for more.  This is a far more important story than the lies, or if I were more forgiving, the erroneous reports, claiming a non-existent N-word was hurled by the Tea Party Protesters in Washington, DC; Reed the Viking has a good summary (plus a bonus picture):

This Post Contains a Scantily Clad Beauty

NAACP passes resolution condemning Tea Party for racism. Video of Tea Party racism found here. Oh? That's a Latino supremacist separatist group telling Whitey to go back to Europe, is it? I'm sorry, I meant this video of Tea Party racism found HERE... What do you mean that's video of an NAACP conference where the speaker on stage is openly admitting her racism and discriminatory acts against a white guy? There has to be SOME sort of video evidence of the widely recorded event the CBC claims took place at a Tea Party rally, where racial epithets were hurled at them and protesters spit on them as they passed, right? Well Andrew Breitbart offered an $100,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund if somebody could produce proof that this event ever happened and nobody has come forth with any evidence. Just so we've all got it straight, you can go out and call anybody racist with no proof, but when you challenge the claims, you need proof that it NEVER happened... interesting. Follow the link, Andrew holds up his claims using facts and video evidence from the event in question, or you could just take the CBC's word and label an entire group racist based on zero evidence. It's like Duke Lacrosse; you're guilty until proven innocent when you're up against these schmucks who'll use race to divide any issue. They told me if Obama was elected President, we'd have a post-racial America... oh well. Read the Breitbart article, it's enlightening for those who haven't been paying attention.

[As an aside, Reed the Viking is very funny, very un-PC, and in his humor captures the essence of outrage; plus, he now is promising to include more pictures.]

When this period of our Nation's history comes to an end, presuming it ends well, with a reaffirmation of what has made this the greatest nation in the world, there will be many books written trying to explain how, once again, The Best and the Brightest, in their hubris and foolishness, proved to be no match for the inherent judgement and wisdom of the people of this country.