{"id":9419,"date":"2016-08-22T12:46:04","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T19:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9419"},"modified":"2016-08-22T12:46:04","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T19:46:04","slug":"the-betrayal-of-the-intellectuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-betrayal-of-the-intellectuals\/","title":{"rendered":"The Betrayal of the Intellectuals?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

After nearly eight years of aiding and abetting Obama, leftists now fear the possible constitutional overreach of our next<\/i> president. <\/span><\/p>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

P<\/span>eter Beinart writes\u00a0angrily in The Atlantic<\/em> of the supposed Trump intellectuals, apparently on the premise of not whether one has endorsed formally the Trump candidacy, but whether one has been critical of the existing administration. He suggests that I am guilty of suggesting that \u201cAmerica\u2019s current leaders\u201d are \u201cpredatory and decadent\u201d and as one of \u201cTrump\u2019s intellectuals\u201d\u00a0have wrongly warned that \u201cthe natural arc of Obama-style progressivism is always anti-constitutional fascism.\u201d (The quote is taken from a June NRO essay entitled \u201cA Long Trump Summer<\/a>\u201d that lamented two \u201cunprincipled candidates.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I and many others, long ago in the pre-Trump age, cited the quite dangerous trajectory of Obama\u2019s constitutional overreach. That worry is now shared apparently by the New York Times<\/em>. Suddenly in year eight, its editors fear that someday another president, perhaps one less sensitive,\u00a0more uncouth\u00a0than Obama, might find his exemplar useful, but for less exalted progressive purposes. Thus the Times <\/em>has characterized Obama\u2019s overreach as \u201cbureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.\u201d And more\u00a0ominously it notes, \u201cBut once Mr. Obama got the taste for it, he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long before the arrival of Donald Trump on the current election scene, many noted with alarm efforts to circumvent the Congress with Obama\u2019s \u201cpen and phone\u201d executive orders and\u00a0nullification of existing law \u2014 whether the executive-order amnesties and\u00a0non-enforcement of the border that he had warned he could\u00a0not do before his reelection, given that they would be the work of an autocrat, or his allowance of sanctuary cities\u2019 Confederate-like nullification of existing federal law, or his arbitrary reelection-cycle, non-enforcement of elements of his own Affordable Care Act, or\u00a0virtual rewriting of laws in federal\u00a0bureaucracies such as the EPA, or the quite dangerous politicization of agencies such as Lois Lerner\u2019s activity at the IRS or the Eric-Holder\/Loretta Lynch Justice Department or his divisive Chavista braggadocio (\u201cget in their faces,\u201d \u201cpunish our enemies,\u201d \u201cbring a gun to a knife fight,\u201d \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that,\u201d etc.).
\n<\/p>\n

Obama understandably grew confident that he could nullify or ignore existing federal law, on\u00a0the assurance he was doing so on\u00a0transformative\u00a0grounds and thus would be\u00a0largely exempt from press scrutiny. And he was largely proven right in his reliance on media collusion.<\/p>\n

So Beinart misses entirely what has angered the proverbial people about the so-called Washington\u2013New York corridor\u2019s political-media-academia elites. The people are not angry nativists opposing legal immigration, but they object to massive, illegal immigration that is neither diverse nor liberal, and whose architects never seem to experience firsthand the consequences of what they created.<\/p>\n

It is not just the Iraq War per se that angered the people, but the elites who had urged the war and then by 2006 had\u00a0largely and conveniently opted out from their preemptive advocacy (my brilliant three-week removal of Saddam; your messed-up years-long occupation) \u2014 while thousands of youth were still fighting for their lives in the places they had once been ordered into. And it was not anger at the wealthy per se, but at the well-connected elites whose lives are graced with cultural and social privileges, characterized by insider influence and generationally embedded connections that blind them to how life is lived outside their often ridiculous\u00a0embryos \u2014 given that so often they never experience the direct results of\u00a0their own ideological agendas.<\/p>\n

Finally, given the anti-constitutional arc of the last eight years, it is rich for Beinart to warn the good intellectuals about their true (anti-Trumpian) duties: to warn Trump supporters about the consequences of their ignorance, given that \u201cAmerica is a democracy because the people\u2019s voices count,\u201d\u00a0as he writes. \u201cBut it is a liberal democracy because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law are not subject to popular vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should we laugh or cry at that doublespeak, given the Obama Justice Department\u2019s somnolence in\u00a0the matter of the Clinton violations of national-security protocols, or the president\u2019s own executive order circumvention of existing laws, or a free press that so often has chosen to become a\u00a0Ministry of Truth.<\/p>\n

Beinart worries about the corrosive effects of wealth on democracy; he should offer an extension course on how the Clintons accumulated a net worth of $150 million since Bill left the presidency, or on the methodologies by which once-convicted financial speculator and multibillionaire George Soros warps the democratic process. Or he might collate the political preferences of a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps he could recall who was the first presidential candidate in a general election to renounce public campaign funding in order to become the greatest recipient of Wall Street cash in election history.<\/p>\n

Beinart\u2019s second commandment for anti-Trump intellectuals is to hone \u201ctheir ability to push the American political system to address the combustible economic despair of the working-class white men who have powered Trump\u2019s campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note Beinart\u2019s pride in his and other intellectuals\u2019 supposed ability to \u201cpush the political system.\u201d But, alas, by his own admission, they so far have not pushed much of anything concerning the \u201cdespair of the working-class white men\u201d \u2014 raising the question of \u201cwhy not\u201d? \u00a0Certainly, for the last eight years, white privileged intellectuals have been keen to cite the apparent \u201cwhite privilege\u201d of others \u2014 often those who don\u2019t have much of any privileges \u2014 in a manner that seems designed to assuage their conflicted psyches about their own demonstrable advantages.<\/p>\n

Rather than answer in intellectual terms, I suggest that Beinart simply take a sabbatical: put his children for a year in an inner-city or rural, public unionized school, or conduct an anthropological field study by driving out for six months to Dayton or Modesto, or take up some work-study on a farm outside Delano. All that might be of far more value than searching for quotes in Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz\u2019s The Captive Mind<\/em> (whose warnings, after all, were focused on the allure for left-wing intellectuals of charismatic, hard-core Stalinism).<\/p>\n

In sum, violations of our constitutional freedoms could arrive in\u00a0the form of a crude and blustering populist on the 2017 horizon; but far more worrisome is the fact that the dangers are already here, having arrived insidiously in\u00a0the form of a suave constitutional-law lecturer, who assumed that because he was stamped as\u00a0progressive, familiar, and one of the cultural elite, a liberal press would willingly overlook the means he employed to obtain their shared ends. The press corps need not worry that their freedoms will be taken away by Trump, given that for some time they have been only too happy to give them up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After nearly eight years of aiding and abetting Obama, leftists now fear the possible constitutional overreach of our next president. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Peter Beinart writes\u00a0angrily in The Atlantic of the supposed Trump intellectuals, apparently on the premise of not whether one has endorsed formally the Trump candidacy, but whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":[1092,1091,1090,187,46,185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2rV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9546,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9546\/","url_meta":{"origin":9419,"position":0},"title":"Comment from an Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"Megan Ring","date":"October 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from an Angry Reader: Dear Sir, \u00a0Maybe if Trump wins, you can be one of his pet intellectuals, whom he will despise and humiliate. \u00a0Sincerely, Kurt Lipschutz \u00a0 Victor Davis Hanson's Reply: Dear Angry Reader Lipschutz, I voted against Trump in the primaries and am on record that he\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":9886,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/seven-days-in-february\/","url_meta":{"origin":9419,"position":1},"title":"Seven Days in February","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0Trumps\u2019 critics, left and right, aim to bring about the cataclysm they predicted. 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