After America - Mark Steyn [25]
That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives. You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”14 He subsequently “apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.”15
“Everybody”? Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the New Yorker, that nobody she knew voted for Nixon. Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,”16 so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something everybody knows is true.
“Everybody” knows this stuff, especially if he reads the New York Times or listens to National Public Radio. “Everybody” knows that raising taxes is responsible, and “everybody” knows that cutting spending is just crazy talk. “Everybody” knows that the governmentalization of health care—the annexation of one-sixth of the economy, the equivalent of the U.S. taking over the entire British or French economy, or the Indian economy twice over—“everybody” knows that that’s sober, prudent, technocratic, reasonable. And “everybody” knows that wanting to repeal ObamaCare is extremist, radical, dangerous. “Everybody” knows that serious proposals to address a looming shortfall in obligations of tens of trillions of dollars puts you in wide-eyed nut territory, just as “everybody” knows that massively increasing government spending is a moderate, centrist approach to stimulating the economy. Why, it’s in the Washington Post! As the paper reported, after yet another anemic quarter:
Another big rise in growth came from the federal government, which rose at a 9.2 percent annual rate, including a 13 percent pace of gain in nondefense spending. That reflects in part the fiscal stimulus action that was enacted last year....17
So the establishment newspaper of the capital city of the so-called hyperpower thinks economic growth and government growth are the same thing? Maybe if we’d had a 20 or 30 percent “big rise in growth” of government, the economy would really be roaring along.
Who are these everybodies who know instinctively what’s true and what isn’t? The idea of a technocracy—a “central syndicate of gray matter”—is vital to Big Government’s sense of itself. It’s not about tired outmoded concepts of left or right, it’s about “smart solutions” from smart guys—starting with the president. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” said Michael Beschloss the day after Obama’s election.18
Really? Other than demonstrate a remarkably focused talent for selfpromotion, what has he ever done? Even as a legendary thinker, what original thought has he ever expressed in his entire life? And yet he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president” says Beschloss—and he’s a presidential historian so he should know, ’cause he’s a smart guy, too.
Lending a hand, another smart guy, the New York Times’ house conservative David Brooks, cooed over the credentialed-to-the-hilt smarts of the incoming administration: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”19
He’s right. Over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent