by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The qualifications of a Tommy \u201cDude\u201d\u00a0Vietor\u00a0or Ben Rhodes that placed them in the Situation Room during Obama-administration crises were not years of distinguished public service, military service, prior elected office, a string of impressive publications, an academic career, previous diplomatic postings, or any of the usual criteria that have placed others at the nerve center of America in times of crisis. Their trajectory was based on yeoman partisan PR work, and largely on being young, hip, and well connected politically. I don\u2019t think either of these operatives has a particular worldview or competency that would promote the interests of the United States. But they do talk well, know the right people, and are hip. Again, they have no real expertise or even ideology other than that.<\/p>\n Al Gore is said to be our leading green activist, and the Steyer\u00a0brothers the most preeminent green political donors. But do they really believe in reducing carbon emissions to cool down the planet?<\/p>\n Not really. The latter made much of their fortune in the sort of high-stakes speculations that the Left supposedly despises. Many of their financial payoffs derived from promoting coal burning abroad, of the sort most liberals wish to stop.<\/p>\n As for Gore, he cannot really believe in big green government or he would not have tried to beat the capital-gains tax hike when he peddled his failed cable network to a petrodollar-rich Al Jazeera, whose cash comes from the very sources of energy that Gore claims he hates. Do you make millions, and then in eleventh-century fashion repent so that you can enjoy them all the more? Gore certainly in the past has not lived modestly; the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore going \u2014 housing, travel, and tastes \u2014 is quite stunning. Both the Steyers and the Gores of our human comedy know that it is lucrative business to appear green, and that by doing so one can keep one\u2019s personal life largely exempt from scrutiny in general and charges of hypocrisy in particular. For them, 21st-century liberalism is a useful badge, a fashion not unlike wearing good shades or having the right sort of cell phone.<\/p>\n The 1 percent fetish is also not really ideological. Elizabeth Warren, one of its greatest supporters, is not just a 1 percent but a\u00a00.1<\/em>\u00a0percent grandee. Her house, habits, household income, past corporate consulting, and net worth all reflect a desire for profits and refinement not accorded to most Americans. Her life is about as much a part of the 99.9 percent as she is Native American. She is not worried about welders getting some work on the Keystone Pipeline or farmworkers put out of their jobs in Mendota, Calif., over a baitfish.<\/p>\n Ditto Paul Krugman. He is eloquent about inequality and about the sort of insider privileges that give so much to so few. But nothing about his own circumstances suggests that he lives the life he professes, as opposed to professing abstractions that psychologically make the quite different life he lives more palatable. Certainly, Krugman\u2019s liberalism means that few care that he once worked in the Reagan administration, that he was a paid adviser to Enron, or that he has just taken a part-time $225,000 post-retirement job at City University of New York \u2014 one that, at least initially, requires no teaching. Given what CUNY is said to pay its exploited part-timers, the university could have offered 75 courses with the salary it will be paying Krugman. Or, put another way, Professor Krugman will make the same as do 75 part-timers who each teach one class \u2014 and thus one class more than Krugman will teach. Bravo for Professor Krugman to have marketed himself so well and to have earned all the compensation that the market will bear \u2014 and too bad for the part-timers, who don\u2019t understand market-based economics, where there are winners like Krugman and losers like themselves who can\u2019t earn commensurate hanging-around money. One last question: Is part-time teacher Krugman going to study the inequality inherent in the modern university\u2019s exploitation of part-time teachers?<\/p>\n Such hypocrisy taxes Krugman\u2019s supporters to find ingenious arguments for the idea that noble ends justify almost any means, and so they argue that Krugman\u2019s advocacy for research into income equality trumps this minor embarrassment, or that he can be very rich and still fight the 1 percent, or that the salary in the metrosexual world of the Boston\u2013New York\u2013Washington corridor is not all that high. Of course, the CUNY billet is likely just a small stream that feeds into Krugman\u2019s other sizable income rivers. Indeed, he more likely belongs not just to the 1 percent, but to the same 0.1 percent as Senator Warren, which he so castigates. When President Obama exclaimed that at some point one needs to know when one has made enough money, Krugman would have agreed. He could now put that agreement into action by donating his salary to double the meager wages of 75 part-timers, who, unlike himself, are contracted professors who really do teach and are not \u201cgenerously\u201d compensated.<\/p>\n Does the NAACP stand as our watchdog over racism? In theory, yes; in fact, not so much. The L.A. branch was quite content to overlook Donald Sterling\u2019s sterling racialism, given his donations. Sterling apparently thought that supporting the local NAACP either was not antithetical to his racist sloppy talk and rental practices, or was a wise investment in progressive insurance.<\/p>\n Al Sharpton receiving a \u201cperson of the year\u201d award from the same branch of the NAACP is no less absurd than Donald Sterling\u2019s \u201clifetime-achievement award\u201d \u2014 given that Sharpton is on record as an anti-Semite, homophobe, inciter of riot, former FBI informant, tax delinquent, and convicted defamer of a district attorney. But the NAACP brand nowadays functions much like our green culture, as a sort of way to display correct coolness. It surely would not go after Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonya Sotomayor \u2014 or Barack Obama \u2014 for either using racialist speech or denigrating others on the basis of race or tribe. Such a fact is widely accepted because it is just as widely assumed that the NAACP has become something fossilized, like Betamax in its waning days, as it existed for a bit longer because it had once thrived.<\/p>\n Too many modern liberal fetishes are predicated on the medieval notion of exemption, and should not be taken as anything much other than useful pretensions or smart career moves \u2014 something like joining the Masonic lodge in the 1920s in small-town America. Charter schools are bad, and troubled public schools are noble, but the coastal elites, whether at Sidwell Friends or the Menlo School, assume that they should not sacrifice their children on the altar of their own ideology. Diversions of Central Valley canal water from agriculture to fish are good, but diversions of Hetch Hetchy canal water from San Francisco to fish are bad. Dreaming about salmon jumping in a hot Central Valley river is a lot easier than bathing with recycled grey water three times a week.<\/p>\n Concern for the Sierra toad and frog should stop logging-road and mountain development, but incinerating fauna with solar mirrors or grinding up eagles and hawks in wind turbines is the necessary price of green membership.<\/p>\n The Koch brothers have allegedly polluted politics with their ill-gotten cash; the Steyer\u00a0brothers have not with their coal money. The revolving door is what right-wing operators do, not what a Tommy Vietor or Peter Orszag does. Affirmative action is necessary to stop \u201cold boy\u201d hiring and power wielding, but the sort of incestuous D.C. relationships that the Carneys or the Rhodes brothers have (Jay Carney\u2019s wife, Claire Shipman, is a senior correspondent for ABC News; Ben Rhodes\u2019s brother, David, is the president of CBS News) are not what we are talking about.<\/p>\n The issues per se are not so important. No prominent progressive really believes that his children belong in a public school with the \u201cother.\u201d He does not wish to live in an integrated neighborhood in order to promote his notion of high-density, non-suburban racial assimilation. A Che poster does not mean you want to live somewhere like Venezuela and wait in line for toilet paper.<\/p>\n The liberal is not immune from the material allurements of the 1 percent. Whizzing off on a private jet or climbing into a huge black ten-mile-a-gallon SUV limo is no problem. You do not necessarily denounce all racist stereotyping, given that sometimes attacking friendly bigots could be a headache. Taking the Google bus with like kind instead of the messy public bus or the uncertainties of the commuter train does not mean you are against mass transit for \u201cthem.\u201d You surely don\u2019t want the Coastal Commission enforcing beach-access rights for hoi polloi when who knows how many of the 99 percent wish to walk right by your deck in Malibu. It would be like ruining your beach view with a wind farm.<\/p>\n Liberalism offers a wise investment for a politician, a celebrity, an academic, or a journalist, by letting him take out inexpensive insurance against a politically incorrect slip of the tongue. Donald Sterling almost achieved exemption by his donations to Democratic candidates and the NAACP and his trial-lawyer billions; he lost it by keeping his ossified Republican registration while being an old, sick white guy who said the sort of reprehensible racist things that one hears sometimes in bits and pieces from some NBA players.<\/p>\n So, in medieval fashion, liberalism serves as a powerful psychological crutch: You can be noble in the abstract to assuage worries of not being so at all in the concrete. It adds a hip flourish to the otherwise mundane pursuit of power, lucre, and influence that plays out on the golf course, at the Malibu party, in front-row seats at NBA games, or in the tony Martha\u2019s Vineyard summer home. About three decades ago, sipping a fine wine at a Napa bed and breakfast, or getting the right Italian-granite and teak flooring, became a force multiplier of being loudly liberal.<\/p>\n If a liberal has a really nice Chevy Chase estate or Upper West Side brownstone or Tahoe summer home, it is important to sound all the more liberal. Or maybe it is just the opposite: You cannot sound credibly liberal unless you first have the correct liberal address and square footage. The joke is on us. Having lots of stuff and lots of money, while deriding the system that provides it, is perverse, but perverse in a postmodern sense: You fools love the free market, where you didn\u2019t do too well; we whose parents or selves did very well in it don\u2019t like it all that much. How postmodern \u2014 like guffawing that lots of smoke came out of that Gulfstream ride, or lecturing about inequality from Rancho Mirage or the back nine at Augusta.<\/p>\n We are told that the Kennedys, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, and others like them are noble because they vote against their class interests. But they really do not; they vote for them. Liberalism is now the domain of the elite, and antithetical to the aspirations of the upper middle class that lacks the capital and tastes of the 0.1 percent. The higher the taxes, the more numerous the regulations, the greater the redistribution, so all the more the elite liberal distances himself from those less cool who breathe down his neck, and the less guilty he feels about the growing divide between him and the poor he worries about, but never worries about enough to associate with.<\/p>\n Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief.<\/p>\n NRO\u00a0contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the\u00a0<\/em>Hoover Institution<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It doesn’t matter if you belong to the 0.1 percent as long as you say\u00a0the right things. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The qualifications of a Tommy \u201cDude\u201d\u00a0Vietor\u00a0or Ben Rhodes that placed them in the Situation Room during Obama-administration crises were not years of distinguished public service, military service, prior elected office, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,187],"tags":[56,322,165,360,269,9,242],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1TD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1749,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/in-the-end-there-is-only-the-debt\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":0},"title":"In the End, There Is Only the Debt","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Amid all the fighting over healthcare, Obama's new promises, the Israeli spat, the Frum controversy,\u00a0et al., looms the national debt. We can ignore it; get angry at it and say, \"What the hell, I'll quadruple it!\"; have our \"experts\" write sophistic treatises about how\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2010"","block_context":{"text":"March 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/march-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11499,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/cnns-existential-war-with-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":1},"title":"CNN\u2019s Existential War With Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 5, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of \u201cfake news.\u201d And the constant refrain \u201cenemy of the people\u201d should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN. Yet Trump\u2019s obsessions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "CNN"","block_context":{"text":"CNN","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/cnn\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10494,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10494-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":2},"title":"Questions","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: If you publish my letter on your website, it may best be placed in the \u201cAngry Reader\u201d category. I only agree with you 10 percent of the time, but I\u2019m not angry. You are one of the two or three best conservative commentators, in my view.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3209,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/soft-neocons\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":3},"title":"Soft Neocons","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 26, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"With Iraq improving, will Neocon ideas return? by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services More than seven months ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., claimed that Iraq was \"lost.\" But that was hardly the case. In fact, Sunni insurgents were just beginning to turn on al Qaeda and join\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2007"","block_context":{"text":"November 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/november-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3523,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/winning-ugly\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":4},"title":"Winning Ugly","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Iraq doesn't need to be a Kodak moment. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is no need to review the now common judgment on the Iraqi war as a fiasco, quagmire, or \u201cworst\u201d something or other in American history. We have paid over four years, a high price\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2112,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/we-aint-seen-nothin-yet\/","url_meta":{"origin":7293,"position":5},"title":"We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services When it comes to the problems facing this country, an old slogan comes to mind: \"You Ain't Seen Nothin\u2019 Yet.\" High unemployment, the recession and a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan are bad enough. But there are a number of problems on the horizon\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7294,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293\/revisions\/7294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}