Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness<\/p>\n
T<\/span>hose damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:<\/p>\n Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what\u2019s going on.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican \u201cstrategist,\u201d and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.<\/p>\n Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Republicans \u201ctrust\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cElite\u201d is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.<\/p>\n The frustration with chronic elite incompetence was a theme in the 2016 election. \u201cExpert\u201d pollsters assured us of a Clinton landslide. The media could not follow undergraduate rules of decorum and truthfulness. \u201cBrilliant\u201d Ivy League trained pundits preached that the Trump administration\u2019s first year would be disastrous and without accomplishment. Televised legal eagles insisted that Robert Mueller by now would have indicted Team Trump on charges of Russian collusion.<\/p>\n Half the country no longer believes these self-appointed authorities, largely because there is no visible connection between what the self-congratulatory say and do and any commensurate discernable accomplishment.<\/p>\n After a half-century of \u201cwhiz kids,\u201d \u201cthe best and the brightest,\u201d and \u201cwe are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for,\u201d Americans finally yawned and are moving on.<\/p>\n Deplorables, Clingers, and Those Not Worthy of Worry You could put half of Trump\u2019s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They\u2019re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic\u2014Islamophobic\u2014you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that\u2026 Now, some of those folks\u2014they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.<\/p>\n Clinton all but wrote off 25 percent of America as \u201cnot America\u201d\u2014this from the 2008 primary challenger to Barack Obama who was blasted by progressives for pandering to just such a white gun-owning consistency.<\/p>\n Or as Barack Obama once said, Hillary Clinton is \u201ctalking like she\u2019s Annie Oakley . . . Hillary Clinton is out there like she\u2019s on the duck blind every Sunday. She\u2019s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.\u201d<\/p>\n Or as Clinton herself once put it, \u201c[I\u2019ve] found how Senator Obama\u2019s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There\u2019s a pattern emerging here.\u201d<\/p>\n It is hard to image the Yalie feminist Clinton having any sort of political career without attachment to president emeritus and spouse Bill Clinton, whose serial sexual harassment and assault she not only contextualized over four decades, but by serial defense fueled.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe Wall Street Journal\u201d\u2014about as a believable yarn as claiming 30,000 deleted emails on an illegal home-brewed server under government request concerned a wedding and yoga.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Thus spoke candidate Barack Obama about another \u201cthey.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n On what criteria of excellence did Obama in 2008 justify separating himself from the objects of his stereotyped condemnations?<\/p>\n His stellar Columbia undergraduate transcript? His landmark editorship of the Harvard Law Review? His dynamic career as a state legislator and U.S. senator? The ethical manner in which he conducted his Illinois senate campaign? His savvy business deals with Tony Rezko? His limitless knowledge of geography?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s an entitlement . . . my job is not to worry about those people. I\u2019ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n Romney\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cour\u201d rather than \u201cI,\u201d 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 \u201cour<\/em>\u00a0miners,\u201d \u201cour<\/em>\u00a0farmers,\u201d \u201cour<\/em>\u00a0vets,\u201d and \u201cour\u00a0<\/em>workers\u201d?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n
\n<\/strong>One symptom of such a played-out elite is its blanket condemnation of the supposed blinkered middle-class\u2014usually evident in their virtue-signaling outrage and in their inclination to contrast their own supposed enlightenment to the supposed ignorance of everyone else.<\/p>\n\n