Why Is Everyone So Angry?

I was originally going to title this post, "Why Is William Barr So Angry?" but after Thursday's Dark Brandon speech, I realized everyone's angry, not just William Barr. Still, just before I changed my title, I was searching the web for images of an angry William Barr, and I discovered there are a lot of them. A lot of them. Barr is basically a professional angry guy. Let's look at his background. According to Wikipedia,

William Pelham Barr (born May 23, 1950) is an American attorney who served as the 77th and 85th United States attorney general in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Born and raised in New York City, Barr was educated at the Horace Mann School, Columbia University, and George Washington University Law School. From 1971 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. He then served as a law clerk to judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. . . . . Before becoming attorney general in 1991, Barr held numerous other posts within the Department of Justice, including leading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and serving as deputy attorney general. From 1994 to 2008, Barr did corporate legal work for GTE and its successor company Verizon Communications, which made him a multimillionaire. From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.

Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. . . . An influential advocate for tougher criminal justice policies, . . . Under Barr's advice, President George H. W. Bush in 1992 pardoned six officials involved in the Iran–Contra affair.

So wait a moment. Up to some point, Barr was "a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority". Shouldn't that have been good for, er, President Trump? Apparently not. Over the past week, he's become one of the angriest of the angry never-Trump talking heads:

Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr said Friday on FNC’s “America Reports” that it is “unprecedented” that former President Donald Trump had classified material at his Florida estate and he “jerked around” the Department of Justice for a year while they tried to recover the documents.

. . . He added, “Now, let me just say, I think the driver on this from the beginning was, you know, loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this was unprecedented, but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put him in a country club. And how long is the government going to try to get that back? You know, they jawboned for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that. They feel and the record, the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around. And so how long, you know, how long do they wait?”

So Barr was tough on crime, but it appears that the crime he's toughest on these days is that committed by Donald Trump, who constructively possessed documents that were declassified the instant he took them from the Oval Office to the White House residence but were inadvertently packed up by the housekeepers and sent to Mar-a-Lago the day he left office. Trump's attorneys compare this to having overdue library books, which may be hyperbole, but it strikes me as a better characterization than jerking the whole Justice Department around -- which I don't believe is actually a violation of federal law in any case.

But I think there are explanations for this in Barr's background. Remember that one of the best class markers that observers of the US elites note is actually not an Ivy degree -- though Barr is a Columbia alum -- but attendance at an exclusive prep school -- Barr's is Horace Mann. And then he went to the CIA right after law school -- the CIA is another class marker, like it or not; William Buckley had a similar career path after Yale. But let's look at Barr's father, Donald Barr:

Donald Barr (August 8, 1921 – February 5, 2004) was an American educator, writer, and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer. He was an administrator at Columbia University before serving as headmaster at the Dalton School in New York City and the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. . . . His sons are former United States Attorney General William Barr and physicist Stephen Barr.

. . . He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time.

These are fascinating data points. The OSS, known at the time as "oh-so-social", was even more of a class indicator than the later CIA, and it's worth noting that the populist-leaning Harry Truman hated its director, "Wild Bill" Donovan (Columbia 1905), and ardently opposed establishment of its successor, the CIA. (It appears the lizard people won that particular round.) Donald Barr was a Columbia alum (1941) at a time when, before the introduction of SAT tests, the Ivies were not selective, and an Ivy degree was much more reliably a class indicator. (We may also assume that, like it or not, his son William was a legacy.)

That Donald should go on to make a career of headmasterships at elite prep schools is another class indicator, but that he should be among Jeffrey Epstein's earliest dupes also suggests he was largely an empty suit who relied on his contacts and his background to place him in prestigious but largely unproductive jobs.

But this is the environment that produced William Barr. That my Dad's backgound should give me a leg up in society, in the legal world, in corporate directorships, and in government, making me rich in the process, ought to make me a happy guy. Why is this man not smiling? Based on all the images I find on the web, William P Barr has got to be one of the saddest, angriest men in current public life. Is it because so many crooks are still out of jail? Is it because presidential authority remains insufficiently unfettered? The man is rich. He's respected. He's in demand as a talking head. No doubt his mere stroke of the pen will get any candidate into Dalton, Horace Mann, Hackley, whichever, not to mention Columbia.

But he's sad and angry. I think it's because of Trump. I think it's because Trump hasn't gone away. And Trump is a Republican, doggone it. Trump is the wrong kind of Republican, not like, say, Jeb Bush. And that has him awfully, awfully angry. Why did he ever agree to become Trump's attorney general? That's a good question, wouldn't you say?