Trumptard Warning: Reading Ahead
If the elites go down, we’re all in trouble
SURE, THE INFAMOUS New Yorker interview granted by White House communications-chief-for-less-than-a-fortnight Anthony Scaramucci (long live The Mooch!) was historic, if only for its lasting imagery of Steve Bannon in contortionistic self-pleasure. But I contend that a less noticed interview The Mooch gave during his 11-day tenure was actually far more revealing and important.
During a live stand-up outside the West Wing, Scaramucci insisted to a BBC television journalist that there was nothing to the alleged collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, but the story was being kept alive by “the elites and the media establishment.”
With eyebrows fully arched, the BBC journalist replied, “What part of Donald Trump is not elite? The business side or the politics side? Or the inheritance side . . . . He’s a celebrity. He’s a billionaire.”
Scaramucci didn’t miss a beat. “How about the cheeseburgers?” he asked. “How about the pizza?”
The fact that Scaramucci, a Wall Street player with an estimated net worth of up to $1.5 billion, was using President Trump’s weakness for fast food as the chief evidence that the real estate mogul and reality TV star is not a member of the elite was simply too much for the BBC’s Emily Maitlis. “Everyone eats cheeseburgers and pizzas,” she shot back, mockery oozing from her voice like grease from a patty. “What are you talking about?”
Scaramucci’s claim was so preposterous it hardly seemed worth a response. But that’s what makes it so revealing.
For decades, many logical, rational people ignored the crusade against elites because it was built on such an obviously illogical, irrational premise. Instead of engaging political opponents in an honest debate about issues troubling the nation, it sought to silence those opponents simply by presenting them as members of an effete, out-of-touch, know-it-all elite.
While the word elite had once connoted wealth and breeding, the right-leaning agitators behind this crusade — many of whom were wealthy themselves — worked to redefine it. They established new proxies for elitism, notably education at liberal Ivy League colleges. When that didn’t suit their purposes, such as in the 2004 presidential election that pitted Yale grad (and decorated veteran) John Kerry against Yale grad George W. Bush, they looked for substitute elite markers that could be just as disqualifying. Those included Kerry’s marriage to an heiress, fluency in French, and fondness for windsurfing.
You’d think the fact that Scaramucci had to resort to cheeseburgers to keep this anti-elite nonsense going would be evidence that the crusade had finally run out of gas. In reality, it is a reminder of just how insidiously successful the blame game against elites has been.
It’s not just that Trump managed to ride his rowdy, anti-elite rallies into the White House, despite being an Ivy League-educated son of privilege whose home bathroom has 24-karat-gold fixtures and who, as a child, sometimes relied on his chauffeur to drive him along his paper route.
It’s not even that Trump appointed the richest Cabinet in history, featuring many secretaries who have absolutely no experience with the departments he has asked them to run (while tapping his wealthy 36-year-old son-in-law to oversee pretty much everything else). Surgeon Ben Carson is running the Department of Housing and Urban Development, despite having no experience with either housing or development. Betsy DeVos is running Education, despite having no experience in public education as an educator — or even as a parent of a public-school student. Scott Pruitt is running the Environmental Protection Agency, despite being so hostile to the agency’s mission that as Oklahoma attorney general he repeatedly sued it. And Rick Perry is running Energy, replacing a man considered by many Republicans as well as Democrats to be perhaps the most qualified energy secretary in US history. During a televised debate when he was running for president, Perry boasted he wouldn’t waste any time eliminating three federal departments, but stumbled as he tried to remember the name of the third. It was, of course, Energy.
None of this would have been cause for alarm if these appointees had followed the lead of inexperienced Cabinet secretaries in previous administrations and leaned heavily on the deep bench of experts within their departments. Administrations come and go, but the government has always relied on career people with expertise in their subject areas, thanks to their extensive education, training, and hands-on experience.
Yet in keeping with the way President Trump disparaged and disregarded the various intelligence agencies in his own government, many of his Cabinet secretaries have frozen out — or forced out — highly experienced specialists within their departments. Team Trump has sought to discredit these career, non-politically appointed officials by accusing them of being plotting Obama administration holdovers and calling them “deep state” actors. That’s the term long favored by conspiracy theorists to suggest a cadre of shadowy permanent-government elites.
Even before Trump took office, his transition team sought to isolate scientists at the Energy Department who had attended climate change meetings hosted by the United Nations. At EPA, Pruitt has put climate experts on notice while working to carry out Trump’s planned 40 percent cut of the agency’s main scientific branch. At the State Department, Secretary Rex Tillerson, another outsider with only private-sector experience, has reportedly shut out all but a sliver of the specialists on his org chart.
While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.
That helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia. Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like cheeseburgers.
Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes.
Still, we have reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all into a basket of deplored elites.
It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.
If the elites go down, we’re all in trouble - The Boston Globe
If the elites go down, we’re all in trouble
SURE, THE INFAMOUS New Yorker interview granted by White House communications-chief-for-less-than-a-fortnight Anthony Scaramucci (long live The Mooch!) was historic, if only for its lasting imagery of Steve Bannon in contortionistic self-pleasure. But I contend that a less noticed interview The Mooch gave during his 11-day tenure was actually far more revealing and important.
During a live stand-up outside the West Wing, Scaramucci insisted to a BBC television journalist that there was nothing to the alleged collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, but the story was being kept alive by “the elites and the media establishment.”
With eyebrows fully arched, the BBC journalist replied, “What part of Donald Trump is not elite? The business side or the politics side? Or the inheritance side . . . . He’s a celebrity. He’s a billionaire.”
Scaramucci didn’t miss a beat. “How about the cheeseburgers?” he asked. “How about the pizza?”
The fact that Scaramucci, a Wall Street player with an estimated net worth of up to $1.5 billion, was using President Trump’s weakness for fast food as the chief evidence that the real estate mogul and reality TV star is not a member of the elite was simply too much for the BBC’s Emily Maitlis. “Everyone eats cheeseburgers and pizzas,” she shot back, mockery oozing from her voice like grease from a patty. “What are you talking about?”
Scaramucci’s claim was so preposterous it hardly seemed worth a response. But that’s what makes it so revealing.
For decades, many logical, rational people ignored the crusade against elites because it was built on such an obviously illogical, irrational premise. Instead of engaging political opponents in an honest debate about issues troubling the nation, it sought to silence those opponents simply by presenting them as members of an effete, out-of-touch, know-it-all elite.
While the word elite had once connoted wealth and breeding, the right-leaning agitators behind this crusade — many of whom were wealthy themselves — worked to redefine it. They established new proxies for elitism, notably education at liberal Ivy League colleges. When that didn’t suit their purposes, such as in the 2004 presidential election that pitted Yale grad (and decorated veteran) John Kerry against Yale grad George W. Bush, they looked for substitute elite markers that could be just as disqualifying. Those included Kerry’s marriage to an heiress, fluency in French, and fondness for windsurfing.
You’d think the fact that Scaramucci had to resort to cheeseburgers to keep this anti-elite nonsense going would be evidence that the crusade had finally run out of gas. In reality, it is a reminder of just how insidiously successful the blame game against elites has been.
It’s not just that Trump managed to ride his rowdy, anti-elite rallies into the White House, despite being an Ivy League-educated son of privilege whose home bathroom has 24-karat-gold fixtures and who, as a child, sometimes relied on his chauffeur to drive him along his paper route.
It’s not even that Trump appointed the richest Cabinet in history, featuring many secretaries who have absolutely no experience with the departments he has asked them to run (while tapping his wealthy 36-year-old son-in-law to oversee pretty much everything else). Surgeon Ben Carson is running the Department of Housing and Urban Development, despite having no experience with either housing or development. Betsy DeVos is running Education, despite having no experience in public education as an educator — or even as a parent of a public-school student. Scott Pruitt is running the Environmental Protection Agency, despite being so hostile to the agency’s mission that as Oklahoma attorney general he repeatedly sued it. And Rick Perry is running Energy, replacing a man considered by many Republicans as well as Democrats to be perhaps the most qualified energy secretary in US history. During a televised debate when he was running for president, Perry boasted he wouldn’t waste any time eliminating three federal departments, but stumbled as he tried to remember the name of the third. It was, of course, Energy.
None of this would have been cause for alarm if these appointees had followed the lead of inexperienced Cabinet secretaries in previous administrations and leaned heavily on the deep bench of experts within their departments. Administrations come and go, but the government has always relied on career people with expertise in their subject areas, thanks to their extensive education, training, and hands-on experience.
Yet in keeping with the way President Trump disparaged and disregarded the various intelligence agencies in his own government, many of his Cabinet secretaries have frozen out — or forced out — highly experienced specialists within their departments. Team Trump has sought to discredit these career, non-politically appointed officials by accusing them of being plotting Obama administration holdovers and calling them “deep state” actors. That’s the term long favored by conspiracy theorists to suggest a cadre of shadowy permanent-government elites.
Even before Trump took office, his transition team sought to isolate scientists at the Energy Department who had attended climate change meetings hosted by the United Nations. At EPA, Pruitt has put climate experts on notice while working to carry out Trump’s planned 40 percent cut of the agency’s main scientific branch. At the State Department, Secretary Rex Tillerson, another outsider with only private-sector experience, has reportedly shut out all but a sliver of the specialists on his org chart.
While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.
That helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia. Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like cheeseburgers.
Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes.
Still, we have reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all into a basket of deplored elites.
It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.
If the elites go down, we’re all in trouble - The Boston Globe
