VDH on why the “masses” detest the “elites”
…[T]here was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.
In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book related to that topic quite some time ago, entitled Intellectuals and Society.
Well, the Mayor of Washington is insisting that children come to school unless they’ve been vaccinated against COVID. The children were never at risk, the vaccines were never sterilizing, and the vaccines were designed to combat variants which disappeared from North America a year ago. What the last two and a half years have taught us is that there’s an ample supply of idiots and poseurs in every walk of life.
It would be superfluous to say read Sowell’s book. Read EVERYTHNG the guy writes.
His book is right on, which is also a superfluous comment.
Those ruling over us are hardly “the best and the brightest”, but rather, with shockingly few exceptions, “credentialed morons” grotesquely mis-educated at the hedge-funds currently masquerading as the Ivies and other schools of their ilk. A perfect example was provided on Bill Maher’s program last night; Amy Klobuchar (Yale and U of C Law) stated that “Trump literally tried to lead an armed insurrection” on January 6. No-one so utterly untethered from reality should be holding a position of such power in a republic.
In America, “elite” no longer means someone of exceptional talent or accomplishment. It basically means someone in a particular profession who lives in a particular area.
Mike
j. e. Possibly Klobuchar knows better but hopes looking like a fool or a liar is worth it if maybe two or three LIV can be convinced of its literal validity.
To assert she actually believes it would be a horrid insult to her intelligence. So, to be kind, we call her a liar.
Now, if a relation were to say that and you object, in addition to being flooded with falsehoods, the use of the hyperbole which is meant to be misunderstood would be validated as well.
The great majority of today’s “elite” are composed of those with a self-satisfied lustful ambition for status, power and money. So empty are their souls that they tell themselves that their status and celebrity demonstrates innate superiority. “Let them eat bugs…”
“Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.”
So far that’s true but… the fat lady has yet to sing. It ain’t over till it’s over.
I finally listed to the TRIGGERnometry podcast that had on Sam Harris, not the singer but someone they described as an intellectual. This is the episode in which Sam claims to be against conspiracies against democracy unless the conspiracy is against Donald Trump, in which case democracy just gets in Sam’s way. Sam claims he is non-partisan, like Liz Cheney (seriously, he makes this claim), except against Trump because of Trump University. Sam tells that even if dead children were found in Hunter Biden’s basement; it wouldn’t be as bad as Trump University. It is good to hear these people from time to time to know what they believe, but the episode was anything but intellectually stimulating.
The People are waking up more widely to the Ruling Class con: Trust Us, we have your best interests in front of us.
They used tipi gaslight us constantly via their media idiot-whores. Now it’s become more brazen. VDH is inconsistent in his opinion writing, updating his amend re-working his themes.
But then comes a Victor David Hanson piece that is either noticeably more crystalline or deeper, or more factual and inarguable. Some commentary combines both.
I overlooked this NYPost on the prior grounds, only to find that this is both lengthy, concise and unarguable. Something to put in the face of family lefties and get them re-thinking, I hope.
The last line of the snippet is a phrase that, with slightly different wording each time, VDH uses very frequently. “Immune to the consequences of their ideology,” is the primary way he phrases it, and it’s the way I remember it.
So trenchant. And you can see it everywhere. At my previous job, the owner’s daughter, after being awarded a meaningless degree at the U of Wisconsin, came back to the printing company to be the gopher for the salesperson who handled national accounts. She was insufferably upbeat and chatty, as leftist as her father (who is, of course, a legacy; Daddy built the company he’s now running into the ground), and leaning into diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Think about it. If she was the daughter of a press operator, it would all be different. If she embraced the left, sided with management over labor, and did the whole white guilt thing, people would just shake their heads and ignore her. She wouldn’t be hired as a sales assistant, but as a bindery helper, and agitating too much would get her fired.
But this girl will eventually help run the company, meaning she’s completely free to advocate against the very system which allowed her life to be what it is. She will always be immune to the consequences of her ideology.
“The WEF globalists are pushing the UN’s proposal for compulsory “climate change studies” as “a core component of all education systems at all levels by 2025.” [my emphasis]
https://thenewamerican.com/wef-un-push-compulsory-climate-education-to-transform-kids-into-enviro-activists/?pk_campaign=feed&pk_kwd=wef-un-push-compulsory-climate-education-to-transform-kids-into-enviro-activists
Yes, the Biden administration is a case in point. These are the educated experts who were supposed to save us from the chaos of the Trump years, and they made everything worse. We are coming to realize that “expertise” means having the right ideology, rather than actually knowing anything.
Pete Buttigieg didn’t learn anything about transportation at Harvard and Oxford. He doesn’t seem to have learned much about real world problem solving either. He just got his ticket punched. Biden’s chief economic advisors are a lawyer and a social welfare expert. They are pushing a political program for partisan and ideological reasons, not trying to make the economy work. To be fair, though, Janet Yellen, who does have an economics background, isn’t doing any good either. Nor are the 17 or 13 Nobel laureates who endorsed Biden’s program.
Before Sowell, there was Joseph Schumpeter. He say that capitalism turned out people who had been educated but not trained for any economically productive position. They naturally turned to the government for employment and worked to get more for themselves out of the government. Still, in his day, those people might actually have been educated. Today, many are only indoctrinated.
M Smith, thank you fir bringing up Schumpeter. ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’ is a fantastic book and, alas, once again very relevant to current events. Arrogant, hubristic and self-righteous ‘intellectuals’ and ‘elites’ never really go away; their destructive influence merely waxes and wanes.
Men build things. Women have good meetings. DC is the meeting capital of losers. IMO.
I prefer to call them “Credentialed” as they are not very knowledgeable. I prefer Sowell’s term, “The Anointed.”
The national testosterone level seems to be dropping.
Democrat wolves and sheeple, so aghast at Trump, chose as their last two presidential candidates the very refined, honest and competent H. Clinton and J. Biden.
About 10 years ago there was a 3 part BBC show called Worricker. The protagonist is a Brit intelligence analyst ( Bill Nighy) who uncovers a malfeasance by a Tony Blair like PM. There is something the analyst says about a 2008 financial crisis-like elite response. “Whenever something bad happens, all of you important people get into a room to come up with a solution. Every time the solution always seems to make you richer and more powerful.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the perfect description of our elite.
Leland, harris got borg zombified after the shots. Dont take it personally. His soul is long gone by now.
Gb, i am impressed u have lasted so long in my apocalypse. Wait until yoi see what i have for this season s finale and also 2023. You will not regret incarnating on earth. I got loads of….. and you will learn much more about my secret societies that do……
I think Sowell said something like this. “When ever there is a really nasty crisis, there is a Harvard man somewhere in the middle of it.”
there’s an italian import series, on sky, devils about about self proclaimed masters of the universe, at london branch of a newyork bank the writer worked for the bank that assange first hacked, you’re meant to root for the italian massimo, rather than the American dominic played by patrick dempsey,
the first season running through 2011, in the timeline is about the european financial crisis came into being, the 2nd is about brexit leading to the covid epidemic,
Mike K & miguel; the Corsicans have a saying – At the end of many disasters, there’s always an Italian. 🙂
“ Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.”
This is especially true of the Green New Deal. I called it the Great Leap Forward when I spoke to the Omaha Public Power District this month. It is all about the “right” people making big bucks.
Remember when the speaker of the house (Tom Foley IIRC) was caught getting stock in IPOs from someone on Wall Street at low prices and immediately selling the day of the IPO for big profits. Basically a way to give him a payoff and pretend it was legal. (Somewhat like Hillary’s corrupt cattle future bribes.)
The Wall Street guy justified it by saying Foley was a wonderful public servant whose pay was far less than what he could earn if he left office.
Of course, Foley’s only value once retired from Congress would have been as a lobbyist and influence peddler helping others game the system. In other words, we gave him all this corrupt largesse because he could have really exploited the corrupt system he helped create if he left Congress.
I had an exchange on Facebook, some years ago now, which I still think about now and then with frustration and a sense of just how deep and unquestioning is the respect progressives have for educational credentials and the expertise assumed to go along with them.
It was kicked off by a meme comparing the degrees held by left-wing vs right-wing media personalities. “Rachel Maddow, doctorate in political science from Oxford. Rush Limbaugh, college dropout.” And so forth. I posted it with a comment about the mistake of ascribing too much importance to educational credentials, or something along those lines.
Half a dozen or so progressive acquaintances protested, posing snarky remarks like “So you would be ok with a plumber who didn’t know plumbing?” “So you don’t care whether one lawyer is better qualified than another?”
So far, so unsurprising. The real frustration came in the ensuing conversation where I tried to make more explicit the point that degrees do not confer wisdom or good sense. They never did get it. The only person who did was of course a conservative, who just said something like “It doesn’t require a lot of education to denounce your political enemies on tv or radio.”
TJ
“The People are waking up more widely to the Ruling Class con: Trust Us, we have your best interests in front of us.”
And yet the number of folks who say Brandon is doing a good job remains over 40% and does not seem to budge. The degree of brain washing is terrifying.
It is this that trouble me the most. Such a large block of folks who seem incapable of reasoning.
some background on the source material
https://www.idiavoli.com/en/topic/tredicesimo-piano
Mac:
It is an interesting phenomenon. Why do some people put so much faith and give so much weight to academic credentials? I have to say that I never have. I always did mega-well in school and have academic credentials that are very impressive to people who are impressed by such things, but I know how many fools got degrees from and even taught at the highly-rated schools from which I got my degrees. It seems to me that it is completely obvious that this is true, and anyone who ever spent a day at such a school should have observed it. Every person must be evaluated on the strength of his or her mind and the ideas he or she expresses as well as actions, and I’m not so sure that wisdom is correlated with academic credentials at all, nor is ethics. The puzzlement for me is how many people don’t see that. I would understand it better if the overvaluing was done by people who haven’t attended those institutions and might be inclined to idealize them. But it’s the other way around. They tend to be most valued by those who attended them, who should know better.
That’s not to say there aren’t brilliant minds with great academic credentials. There are. But not as many as people like to think.
Neo: “It seems to me that it is completely obvious that this is true, and anyone who ever spent a day at such a school should have observed it.”
I know. It’s really remarkable. It should be even more obvious than ever now that so many academic areas are riddled with equally obvious nonsense. You don’t even have to have observed it in higher ed. Surely we’ve all known people who were very diligent and made good grades, but didn’t seem to be outstandingly intelligent.
“They tend to be most valued by those who attended them, who should know better.”
I suppose those who have attended might be reluctant to see that. It might make them ask whether they themselves are really as smart as they think they are.
I’m from the provinces and attended a lower-tier state university, so I was prepared to be impressed and intimidated when I first met someone who had attended a very upper-crust Eastern school. I was…not impressed.
Stan, you’re right: that was Foley, congressthing from Spokane, I believe. He fought tooth and nail against the citizens of Washington when we passed a term limits initiative because no one but him was entitled to his sinecure. I realized what he was up to the day of the Microsoft IPO, and I never could understand how he could be so obviously bribed and never ever pay a price for it. Endless praise, blah, blah, blah for Foley after he was booted from office for his little term limits stunt, and strangely enough, he never again lived in his district that I’m sure was ever so dear to him.
Mac & Neo – yep, I noticed the same thing when I was in graduate school. So much emphasis was put on whether someone held a degree or not.
I’ll share a story from one of my classes. The class was about education and the discussion that day was “what makes a teacher a great teacher?”
Almost all of my classmates said that having the right degree to “know” the subject matter was what mattered.
While I agreed that knowing the subject that you are teaching was important that didn’t answer the question. I told them they were describing a competent teacher while the question was what makes a great teacher.
I said that having empathy for the student, in the sense of understanding how the learner might perceive the subject and know what roadblocks they would have to grasping the content was one of the things that made a great teacher.
Not the “sage on the stage” that they were proposing, but the great teacher is one who can “reach” the learners and help them to understand better.
Ha! Most did not agreed with me; especially not the professor. After class, I realized during that discussion that I was basically challenging (although that was NOT my intent) their own advanced degrees. Although I do believe they were not conscientiously aware of it, they saw what I was saying as a threat.
Interestingly, only one other person in class spoke up and agreed with me. And, like me, he wasn’t a part of academia either. I came from the corporate world and so did he. He was actually an HR director.
On a not unrelated topic the class discussion on another day took an ugly turn when the discussion was about diversity and elitism. I made the claim that academia wasn’t as “diverse” as they all claimed it to be and it was rather “elitist.” I pointed out that the for-profit world had people of all backgrounds (race, nationality, gender, religion, etc.) as did the academic world; but, that the for-profit world had a diversity that academia did not: education levels. In academia everyone has a college degree (many held several) and was therefore “elitist” and not diverse where in mattered (educational background) while the for-profit world had people of various educational backgrounds. Some held advanced degrees, some had high school diplomas, while some had GEDs. Some with degrees went to Ivy league while others worked full time while attending community college or state schools. Yet, these people with different educational backgrounds often worked together as teams. Yea, I was chastised that day too for thinking different.
It would be safe to say that I wasn’t very popular in my graduate school program.
VDH points out that Trump was the best at not abusing government. https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/28/the-strangest-thing-about-semi-fascist-trump/
And as we all know, he must be the most honest politician in the history of DC. He’s had every word he spoke, wrote or read spied on by his enemies. They even invented stuff in an effort to get him. And came up with nothing. If there had been any smidge of corruption, we’d have heard about it daily relentlessly.
Robert Malley is leading the US team in the appeasement deal with Iran. Yale undergrad. Rhodes Scholar. Doctorate from Oxford. Harvard Law. Supreme Court clerk. And he named one of his sons “Baby Boy Brown Malley.”
This clown has no idea about the real world. He needs to spend a month in Nebraska. I can get him a job at one of Jim Pillen’s hog confinement operations.
charles: ‘ I made the claim that academia wasn’t as “diverse” as they all claimed it to be and it was rather “elitist.” ‘
On some level they must know that, and the resultant guilt is probably one of the drivers of woke hatred of lower-class white people.
Cornhead on Malley. OMG — they really are THAT moronic!
evil, and his top ten, include the taliban, hamas and algerian islamists, and he tells blinken what to say,
From medieval times, “education” for 90% of university attendees was a caste-class initiation newwoking gentry-rentier status: Esquires “read Latin” to establish Thorsten Veblen’s leisure bona fides, rarely if ever to acquire expertise, knowledge, wisdom in any real-world practical endeavor.
On this point, genuine savants like Friedrich Nietzche commented (“Beyond Good and Evil”), “Of all positive, true, unselfish values, one might assign Life a … more fundamental rule of pretense, a willed delusion reflecting cupidity, (rank ignorance) and selfishness” (“The Prejudice of Philosophers,” 1886).
Indeed one might, but for one thing: “Pretense” is just that. While you’re indulging delusional pipe-dreams, in reality Time’s Crocodile advances, jaws agape. “The moving finger writes, and having writ, / “Moves on. Not all your piety nor wit / “Will lure it back to cancel half a line, / “Nor all your tears wash out a word of it” (Edward Fitzgerald, “Rubaiyat”
And in the end, “nothing is changed, John Brown– Nothing is changed” (Stephen Vincent Benet). From potentate to veriest peasant, human nature runs it course… where Being exists in essence as Potential, not in Being but Becoming lies the way. “There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.”
From medieval times, “education” for 90% of university attendees was a caste-class initiation netwoking gentry-rentier status: Esquires “read Latin” to establish Thorsten Veblen’s leisure bona fides, rarely if ever to acquire expertise, knowledge, wisdom in any real-world practical endeavor.
On this point, genuine savants like Friedrich Nietzche commented (“Beyond Good and Evil”), “Of all positive, true, unselfish values, one might assign Life a … more fundamental rule of pretense, a willed delusion reflecting cupidity, (rank ignorance) and selfishness” (“The Prejudice of Philosophers,” 1886).
Indeed one might, but for one thing: “Pretense” is just that. While you’re indulging delusional pipe-dreams, in reality Time’s Crocodile advances, jaws agape. “The moving finger writes, and having writ, / “Moves on. Not all your piety nor wit / “Will lure it back to cancel half a line, / “Nor all your tears wash out a word of it” (Edward Fitzgerald, “Rubaiyat”
And in the end, “nothing is changed, John Brown– Nothing is changed” (Stephen Vincent Benet). From potentate to veriest peasant, human nature runs it course… where Being exists in essence as Potential, not in Being but Becoming lies the way. “There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.”