The hubristic elites and Trump: new clothes, anyone?
Realizing that human institutions are made up of frail people is part of growing up; to be humble before the self-knowledge of our own defects. Only the stupid believe they can bestride the world like conquering colossi. But God knows there are no shortage of these.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) January 2, 2020
That pretty much sums up the work of Thomas Sowell in his books The Vision of the Anointed and The Quest for Cosmic Justice, wherein he describe the hubristic flaws of the leftist elites. There are plenty of people who think they can design a world to distribute “social justice” more fairly by controlling more and more and more of life. Equality of outcome is the stated goal, but the gulag and the guillotine somehow end up coming into it, and liberty is always highly compromised.
Fernandez writes this about Trump:
Trump's recent successes aren't proof of superlative Napoleonic genius. They were mostly of the common sense of the kind the public intuitively understood. The reason he looks so good is his predecessors were so bad. He just had to raise his head above an abyssmal standard.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) January 2, 2020
I’ve never been a proponent of the “Trump plays 3-D chess” theory. I understand what Fernandez is getting at; there’s a quality of Trump’s that makes him something like the brave child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the one who blurts out what just about anyone can see, which is that the emperor (in Trump’s case, the previous emperors and the leftist would-be emperors) is naked.
In addition, however, I think that Trump does have some special expertise in deal-making. He’s also particularly good at insulting his rivals and critics. But it’s also true that a great deal of his success comes from stating the commonsense obvious, principles that once were commonly agreed on by most Americans but have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.
Adam Smith made similar observations a couple of hundred years ago
“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.” – Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments
We gotta get ourselves some new elites.
Huxley….better yet dispense with them. We have enough brain power around so we do not need another set of “betters”.
Michael: In theory I agree, but there will always be hierarchies and if so, it’s better that the people on top are competent and somewhat moral.
“It’s also true that a great deal of his success comes from stating the commonsense obvious, principles that once were commonly agreed on by most Americans but have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.
It was a secret to Reagan’s success, too. That came home to me again in reading Amity Shlaes’s excellent “Great Society.” Strongly recommend to New Neo readers.
re Nonapod’s Adam Smith quote: the French writer Andre Maurois observed that people who are *intelligent* but not at all *creative* tend to be eager adopters and fanatical maintainers of intellectual systems developed by others, and apply those systems more rigidly than the creators of those systems would have.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
–Albert Einstein
I think you are right. Fo a long time, the American people got bamboozled by the Elites saying, “This stuff is really complicated. You wouldn’t understand. Just trust us.”
“principles that once were commonly agreed on by most Americans but have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.”
Nay, Neo, nay.
Not fallen by the wayside, but pushed bulldozed into the ditch, with the next step almost complete, that of total burial.
huxley posted:
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
FWIW I’ve seen that quote attributed to the famous philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra.
And I’ve been told he stole most of his aphorisms from Leo Ernest Durocher.
Mike Doran, @doranimated: “I’m hearing from an informed source that we successfully assassinated Qassem Soleimani.
Source says also killed Muhandis. It was a DOD operation. Esper will make a statement soon and then we’ll know for sure.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1212899080642408454
Says I: Finally. If this report proves out.
There may be a backbone in the White House after all.
Common sense trumps genius (no pun) in every day life; which is what politics is about.
Leave genius to the arts and STEM where it belongs; and, and provided it is tempered by common sense, philosophy.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1212905550561914882
The photos in this tweet look like a kind of confirmation on Hajj Q. As to the Engineer? We’ll have to wait and see.
FWIW I’ve seen that quote attributed to the famous philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra.
Tuvea: Could be. I vaguely remembered the quote, googled for it, and Uncle Albert popped up.
If something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
I didn’t say that.
Got him, evidently.
Kyle Orton, @KyleWOrton: “The Hashd leadership (#Iran’s Shia proxy militias in #Iraq) confirm that the head of #Iran’s #IRGC-Quds Force Qassem Sulaymani and his Iraqi deputy, Jamal al-Ibrahimi (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis), have been killed.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1212904371136188417
Barbara Slavin is getting (more) hysterical: her hero is no more.
I’ve been clenching my fists and gnashing my teeth over the incompetence and dishonesty of the elites for a few decades now. However, as a college dropout I felt I had little standing to point fingers and argue.
Happily the elites are now doing the hard work for me.
Nonetheless, it’s a dangerous situation when the Emperor’s clothes are revealed as imaginary. The fairy tale ends on that climactic note, so we don’t know what happened to the king, the little boy or the crowd.
Maybe the king nods his head and a knight dispatches the boy with a quick sword thrust. Maybe the crowd becomes a mob and manages, at great bloody cost, to take out the king’s defenders then hangs the king from a lamp post.
Maybe good sense prevails. The king laughs, pats the little boy on the head and everyone lives happily ever after.
But I wouldn’t count on it.
Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. The same political and cultural issues are in play in wider Europe and this interview makes that point very well. Perhaps his success is due to being in the right place at the right time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kf1YKeq7lA
Neo, I agree in re President Trump’s horse sense. I also agree in re his deal-making skills. (I keep running into people who haven’t read “The Art Of The Deal” yet; I think it explains a lot.)
But there’s more. He also has raw guts to stake out an unpopular position and say, “never mind what the critics say. This is the right answer; we’re doing it.” (Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem comes to mind. Fortifying the American embassy in Baghdad is probably another.)
We haven’t seen that in a President in some time. We saw it in Reagan; before that I think you have to go to Truman.
The common-sensibility of Trump’s ideas, that is so easily taken up by the average person, is what makes his insults so devastatingly effective. When you hear a leader saying something about a problematic issue that makes sense, and that you might have already concluded for yourself, it puts the insult into a different light. It makes one more likely to accept the insult as also being on point – even if it’s coarse or more biting than one would come up with themselves.
The way people ignore that Trump spent most of his life as a businessman is one of the weirder things about this whole situation. And Trump wasn’t some corporate guy who could drive the company into the ditch and walk away with a $50 million golden parachute. That means Trump’s successes and failures usually wound up having SOME impact on his life, making it important that he pay attention to what does and doesn’t work.
Our political/media elites, in comparison, are mostly lesser versions of Bill Kristol. That dude has been wrong about just about every important issue over the last 20 years and, until very recently, it had virtually no effect on his life or public standing.
Mike
I love it. Earlier Drudge headline trumpets Iran’s big cheese “taunting” Trump, “You can’t do anything.” Now Drudge lead is “Top Iran Commander Killed.” It’s like an Eastwood western. Darkly delicious. In Daniel Schwartz’s words earlier tonight, “…This is the right answer; we’re doing it.”
One thing I have always found most amusing. Is the constant statements by the left that Trump lies all the time. But they rarely notice the consistent pattern in said lies.
1) When he does lie bigly. It is usually to compliment someone or for self aggrandizement.
2) But when it comes to policy. He uses exaggeration as an opening gambit. For which the left always seems to bite. Even when its extremely obvious that is what it is. Simply because they are humorless. And they really imagine him to be the boogeyman they have created in their heads.
3) And this is the point about why he is so successful. When he says something he actually means it. Which I think is what scares the hell out of the Washington types. They are so used to simply giving lip service to things. And never being called to account for their failures. Today was a perfect example. He followed up the embassy attack with a decisive action. After saying he would. Immigration, the wall, the economy, judges. All things he said he would accomplish. And to varying degrees has. I think people know that the area’s he has been less successful in. Are not from lack of effort.
So sure the guy loves to tell stories about himself. But frankly what supermodel marrying millionaire who becomes President doesn’t? His intentions are crystal clear. And for all his faults. This I think is the root of his popularity.
@doranimated: “I worked in the WH under 1 president & I’ve followed it closely under 4. Trump is the first to understand 2 basic things: 1) The Iranians are thugs; & 2) The US is 100 times more powerful. We don’t have to take their shit sitting down. Trump, in short, has got their number. […] Time and again, they have killed Americans, prompting hand-wringers like @kellymagsamen to offer 17 learned arguments why treating Iran the way Iran treats us will cause Iran to treat us even worse. Iran will treat us better only when we teach Iran the basics: namely that we are ready, willing, and able to inflict far more hurt on it than it can dream of inflicting on us. This is the basic logic that has informed successful foreign policies since Thucydides. But educated Americans have educated themselves out of common sense.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1212920195561512963
FWIW: A few things about President Trump:
1. As MBunge noted, he didn’t have a “golden parachute;” he usually had some of his own money at risk in the deal.
2. He has sometimes failed, and felt the sting. I’d rather follow someone who has tasted failure, learned from it, and got back up to fight again, than someone who has never failed, but only because they were so afraid of failing that they never dared.
3. I get the sense that because he was from Queens, he was shunned by the snobbish swells in the City. He seems to revel in the adulation of ordinary people, but cares little for what the self-styled “elites” think.
4. It was recently reported that when he went to Afghanistan in early 2018, he only visited and talked with the grunts. No generals; no officers. He wanted to hear from the guys who did the actual fighting, the actual bleeding, the actual dying. As a former enlisted person, that speaks to my heart.
I have been waiting for the US to finally stand up for itself since the Beirut Marines bombing, when Reagan decided a pinprick or two on Iran was sufficient; Osama bin Laden took that as his cue. Again, finally, I say, this has been too long in coming. Qom, if Khamenei chooses to continue to attack us, should be next on the target list. End them. Well done, Mr. President, well done at long last.
One of the things about Trump is that he has actual real-world experience. Obama, though much more polished and smooth-talking, did not. Unless you count being a “community organizer” which I still don’t know what that is and I’ve met community organizers.
Man, this is tremendous stuff.
I’ve never been a proponent of the “Trump plays 3-D chess” theory.
You win by looking three or four moves ahead even if you’re only playing checkers.
@huxley:
Nowadays it’s more likely that the crowd turns on the boy and rends him limb from limb for violating the Narrative. Because otherwise they’d have to reflect on all the lies they’ve assented to.
One of the things about Trump is that he has actual real-world experience. Obama, though much more polished and smooth-talking, did not. Unless you count being a “community organizer” which I still don’t know what that is and I’ve met community organizers.
As a rule, Republican presidential nominees since 1928 have been drawn from the ranks of people who were accomplished to a degree in trades and professions outside political life, or at least put in an extensive run of years in such employments (exceptions being Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Robert Dole). Among Democratic nominees in that time, this has been so of Adlai Stevenson and Jimmy Carter. (Michael Dukakis, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and Harry Truman did not have careers as truncated as some others).
Nowadays it’s more likely that the crowd turns on the boy and rends him limb from limb for violating the Narrative.
Bryan Lovely: Good point! Or at least “cancel” the boy…
“But it’s also true that a great deal of his success comes from stating the commonsense obvious, principles that once were commonly agreed on by most Americans but have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.” – Neo
A lot of that common sense shows up in this list of accomplishments, although I do disagree with some of his policies and actions.
It also shows his dedication to keeping campaign promises – such an astounding change!
https://www.docdroid.net/KDaSuMo/trumpaccomplishments.pdf
Daily mail uk is showing the actual strike ( fire & brimstone) on suleimoni.
Speaking of hubristic elites, the pearl-clutching yesterday was of a piece.
Trump’s successful attack on Iran’s top terror general is good news — and the new Neo thread.
Matthew asks about “community organizers” — which used to be admirable. When they organized folk to solve their own community’s problems. But then the Dems took over, and made them little local community lobbyists, demanding gov’t money because they have some unsolved local problem. I don’t think Obama solved any problems in his time, neither in any community nor in America.
On the elites, there’s a good Arnold Kling note on running corporations:
https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/how-corporations-are-managed-b64973a6cb10
The heads of corporations CAN’T know most of what’s happening, all the reports are to make it summarized so that the CEO has a good idea of what’s the real situation. Small business owners can know, but walking around and meeting everybody – very different.
Trump seems to have a talent for getting rid of not-so-helpful people. The Dems like to claim this is a problem, but I see it as healthy. If somebody is NOT doing the job that The Donald wants done, he gets rid of them. That’s actually not so usual, but is mostly good.
Trump speaking honestly instead of mushy PC-acceptable is also part of his “everyman charm”. Trump being willing to insult just about anybody who insults him is also being noted — he fights.
I was NeverHillary (not too late to Lock Her Up), but now I’m Trump 2020, as well as 20/20 — see his good AND bad points.
AesopFan:
I would have said “pants-wetting”, but yes. It was epic.
The argument from Milton Friedman is that you can never get a group of people on top who are ‘somewhat moral.’ What you have to do is set up the incentives such that acting moral rewards them properly. Then, whether or not they’re really moral deep down inside, they’ll act that way.