Revisiting David Brooks

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side.

Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing.

I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it came out, and my memory of it is a troubling cognitive dissonance -- how could someone who, about the year 2000, was so respected, write such a silly book? For those who haven't read it, its premise is that after World War II, elite universities dropped their Jewish quotas, began using the SATs. adopted selective admissions, and became true meritocracies, which they continue to be today. As evidence of this, we need look no farther than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family, who made it into the University of Chicago on merit.

This is a self-congratullatory premise that also flatters its audience, the Ivy-educated book buying public. Brooks makes it plain that by bobos -- bourgeois bohemians -- he means principally suburban Jews. But this contradicts Alan Dershowitz, a much more prominent figure, who maintained in Chutzpah that Jewish quotas still exist, along with more recent quotas for Asians, that serve to limit the rise of talented and hard-working groups in favor of -- wait for it -- existing elites.

Indeed, admission of "Episcopalian Jews" into upper-crust society was a phenomenon that took place decades before the postwar period, and families like the Guggenheims worked in close colaboration with the Morgans. They were elites and had full admission to elite schools on that basis. Quotas always apply to a different group.

Last August, Brooks revisited Bobos in Paradise in The Atlantic, "How the Bobos Broke America".

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

. . . [W]e’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. , , , the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

In other words, nothing changed, the bobos as some sort of new creative class that rose on its merits is a chimera. But Brooks clings to his theory and sees the Trump phenomenon as primarily a reflexive working-class rebellion against the bobo meritocacy:

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.

At the start of his essay, he cites boat parades of Trump supporters as a key indicator:

During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: don’t tread on me, no more bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.

. . . How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden?

He clearly views such people with contempt. And his essay just published in the current Atlantic expands on this:

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

This is what Brooks finds "terrifying": the fact that Trump hasn't gone away. The specter Brooks sees is what commentators are slowly recognizing: the Biden counter-revolution against Trump has been a disaster, and Trump is still hovering in the wings. Brooks is effectively acknowledging that the new elite is the old elite, and now they're frightened.

"The Speaker Is Burning Down The House On Her Way Out The Door"

These remarks by Leader McCarthy on the occasion of the House censuring Rep Gosar for posting an anime indicate that at least some people are beginning to catch on to what's happening. The Speaker's world is effectively coming to an end. This ties in with another guiding principle I've been relying on in recent weeks, Stein's Law, That Which Cannot Continue Must Stop.

If we begin with the question of Speaker Pelosi's future, we've inevitably got to come to the question of President Biden's plans. My view continues to be that he isn't suffering from dementia, and thus he must have some understanding of his political predicament. This story gives some suggestion of what that predicament is and what must be effective cooperation with his handlers:

We reported Wednesday on the embarrassing story of how President Joe Biden’s handlers had scrapped a so-called “Three Amigos” press conference that had been scheduled to take place today between him, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after meetings in Washington, D.C.

That traditional press conference would be scrapped in favor of allowing the reporters to shout questions that the president might or might not answer. Speculation followed a question from a Bloomberg reporter on Tuesday, ". . . you guys had to clean up not only this Olympic comment but his comment on the timing for the Fed and his Taiwan comment, is the worry that you don’t want the President taking questions?"

Unfortunately, the update to this story just makes it all so much worse. CBS News White House reporter Kathryn Watson, who has criticized the White House in the past over accessibility issues involving Biden, noted on her Twitter feed this morning that unlike Biden, Trudeau would be holding a presser later this afternoon[.]

. . . And in a report she filed, Watson noted that Biden bailing on the scheduled presser would mean he would get to avoid some potentially uncomfortable questions about the border crisis and his handling of it[.]

If Biden didn't want to go along with this, he wouldn't. And if he didn't have some clear idea of what the program was, he wouldn't be following his cues -- he'd just be wandering around the room holding disjointed conversations with whomever, visible or not. That's not the big guy, at least not so far. He functions, just not very well. This goes again to my view that he's impaired, not senile.

The question is how much longer this can go on. Has he lost the New York Times?

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

. . . But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

I note that over the past few days, the conventional wisdom has been shifting from "Biden plans to run in 2024" to "Despite what he's said, he may not run in 2024". I think it's increasingly likely that he may not even make it to then. The problem is that he isn't senile, so the 25th Amendment probably can't be used to get him out. I would imagine that his closets are full of Agnew-style skeletons, but impeachment has been reduced to a feckless exercise, and he's a very stubborn guy who won't easily be led into a Nixon style resignation, especially if Harris can't be eased out herself.

The difficulty I continue to see is that as the border, inflation, and COVID continue as very serious problems that Biden can't solve, something worse is sure to come along. But if this happens, finding some way to put a different, competent handler behind the scenes or directly forcing both Biden and Harris out a la Nixon-Agnew would require a major change in political alignment following the 2022 midterms, still a year away. We have challenging times ahead.

Yeah, Don't Rule Out The Agnew Scenario

Via Gateway Pundit, which I don't normally trust, I nevertheless found a transcription of a Fox reporter's remarks on Bret Baier's podcast:

Just to kinda let you guys in on a little secret here. I was told, you know, about two to three weeks ago–maybe this pertains to the Supreme Court, maybe this pertains to, you know, changing the ticket before you get into 2024. You know, FDR, seemingly, he burned through a vice president almost every, every time he was up for office. But I got an email from somebody who really knows this place very well who said, “Chad, start to familiarize yourself with the confirmation process just not in the Senate but the House for a vice president.” Of course, we’ve not gone through that since, you know, President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller. Again, as you know, Bret, I’m always playing defense and preparing for things like that, but I was very surprised to get that very cryptic email just a couple of weeks ago.

Chad Pegram's bio appears here, which suggests he's neither a conspiracy theorist, nor a fabulist, nor a flake. The only correction I would make to his account is that it's not "we’ve not gone through that since"; we simply never went through that before then, since the 25th Amendment was ratified only in 1967. Before that, there was no provision for filling a vacancy in the vice president's office.

While Kennedy's assassination was the clear impetus for adopting the amendment, when it was envisioned that a president could lie in an indefinite coma under some circumstances, Agnew's resignation has been the only non-trivial invocation of its provisions. Most vice presidents since Agnew have had enough substance that nobody's seriously contemplated edging them out before their term expires, and in fact it's hard to think any veep ever has been so without sin (possibly excepting Coolidge) that some hidden flaw couldn't be found in his record to warrant removal should this become convenient.

Indeed, had circumstances been otherwise, nobody would have bothered with Agnew's Baltimore baksheesh, and he would have stayed in office until 1977. Certainly this was Agnew's own belief, and it's hard to fault. Agnew was caught up in Nixon's dilemma, and it was simply convenient to remove him in order to facilitate removing Nixon. I can't imagine that Gerald Ford had no similar blemishes; it just wasn't convenient to go looking for them at the time.

By trhe same token, I don't think such discussion would be taking place about Harris, even on a completley unofficial, without-attribution basis, if the actual problem were not with Biden. And despite vague speculation a year ago that the 25th might be invoked against Biden, I think it's significant that the only non-trivial historical use of it was with Section 2 and the vice presidential succession, the same one being mooted now, if even not quite seriously.

As with Agnew, Vice President Harris is simply a surrogate for President Biden. I've been saying here that Biden's lack of coherence and engagement is simply not the result of a medical condition other than chronic alcoholism, and he's not the first to suffer fom it without being removed. If you ask me, Biden's problem is neither his own polls nor Harris's; the problem right now is Trump's polls. At minimum, the lizard people are figuring the 2024 ticket needs a makeover well before campaign season.

So far, this leaves aside the problem of 2022 and the bigger problem that the issues that are hurting Biden now on one hand aren't likely to go away, and on the other, aren't likely to be the worst he, and we, will need to face before the lizard people can ease him out. I have a sense that the lizard people are still working this through, but the Agnew scenario has clearly at least reached the spitball stage.

What's Happening ToThe Götterdämmerung?

There's a lot of gossip about a rift between the White House and Vice President Harris, to the extent that a trial balloon is being floated about kicking Harris over to the Supreme Court, to replace her under the 25th Amendment. Up to last weekend, of course, the 25th Amendment scenario had been intended for the big guy himself, not Kamala, who in the received scenario would replace him.

To me, this says we're edging closer to the Spiro Agnew solution, the two-shoe drop, where the non-entity veep is replaced under the 25th Amendment by someone with gravitas who can credibly succeed a Nixon once he's forced out. Nixon, recall, simply resigned. Nobody needed either impeachment or the 25th.

The only remotely perceptive commentary I've seen on the developing situation is from Chris Cillizza:

Remember that when Biden ran for president, he purposely cast himself as a sort of bridge candidate for Democrats -- holding the office until some of the party's younger stars, several of whom ran against him, were ready to take on the mantle of leadership.

"Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said in March 2020 as he campaigned with Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."

When Biden picked Harris as his vice president, the message was clear: She was the future of the party.

This was the upbeat, happy talk version of the agenda. After Biden's win in November, an initial progressive laundry list was quickly added to the pre-election happy talk: statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster. No matter this would need to be done with a four-vote Democrat margin in the House and a tied Senate, Harris as veep would break the tie. By early 2021, these all quietly disappeared, with only Harris remaining as a sort of aspirational totem. Except that her public crediblity over the course of the subsequent year has self-immolated.

What replaced that extreme Great Reset agenda was what became the BBB, although exactly what the BBB comprised has never been completely clear, and as of now, it's more uncertain than ever. As a practical matter, this was put together by an alliance of the House progressives, Sen Sanders, Speaker Pelosi, and President Biden. At this remove, it's plain that it had the opposition of Senate centrists of both parties, who put together and passed the the bipsrtisan infrastructurre bill, BIF, in the Senate.

I think this was from the start intended as an option to head off the BBB. Sen Sanders and the House progressives recognized this for what it was and intended from the start to hold the BIF hostage to the BBB. The argument in favor of the BBB was always Götterdämmerung, the Democrats would inevitably lose their majority in the 2022 midterms, the only effective strategy would be to run up the credit cards before the world ended.

Sen Manchin tacitly allied with the Republican leadership in both houses, and by November 5 with the passage of the BIF individually in the House, he was able to pry the Götterdämmerung agenda loose from Speaker Pelosi's hands, effectively turning her into a lame duck. There's been a lot of criticism of Leader McConnell and the moderate House Republicans for enabling Manchin's strategy, but I think it's proven an effective rope-a-dope, especially given the lack of other Republican options.

The other factor now in play is the effect of rhe Virginia election and subsequent polling. The idea of a Democrat loss in the 2022 midterms up to now had been mostly a vague talking point and little more than an argument in favor of the BBB and Götterdämmerung. But post-Virginia, Trump doesn't seem to be fading in the polls -- to the contrary, he's so far favored in primaries, he's beating Biden in a head-to-head 2024 matchup, and he's looking like a 2022 kingmaker as well.

Meanwhile, Biden appears to be stuck on Götterdämmerung. He's stubbornly sticking with policies deliberately intended to increase gas prices. The best he can say about inflation is it's actually good for you, suck it up. The border is still out of control. He now seems to be sending up smoke signals that he may not run in 2024, but this would basically mean three years of passive-aggressiveness, Biden stubbornly refusing to change course while saying as little as possible. This isn't how things were supposed to turn out a year ago last March.

Worse, this scenario assumes nothing else bad, or indeed worse, happens over the next three years. Biden is proving he can't handle what's come up so far. I don't want to think about how anything new will turn out. I doubt if I'm the only one who feels this way.

The problem there is that even some Democrats don't believe the world is simply going to end a year from now, and they'd like to have lives to live past that date. They haven't figured out a clear strategy yet, but if they can pull the Agnew move on Harris, they're at least a step ahead. Stay tuned.

More Unintended Consequences From COVID Social Engineering

I posted on Saturday about one unintended consequence of COVID social engineering, which is a labor shortage. It seems to me that conditions imposed by the government forbidding people to earn a living or perform other routine functions must inevitably have unintended consequences that are yet to be fully recognized. For instance, the lockdowns closed schools longer than they closed workplaces. The effects of this are only beginning to be felt.

So I saw in yesterday's Washington Examiner:

The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the desire for high school students to pursue higher education, a new study shows.

Less than 50% of high school students are interested in four-year colleges, a decrease of over 20% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, a new survey reported.

. . . Though 86% of students reported feeling pressured to attend university , most expressed concern about the cost. Six out of 10 respondents worried about how they would pay for college, and 65% said student loans are an important factor in their future education.

The subtext of every economics course I took in high school and college was that consumers are intelligent and able to make effective choices. But these choices aren't restricted to the price of bread. If the government says you must eat cake instead, your range of options isn't limited to what you're allowed to see on the supermarket shelf. Over the past two years, education producers modifed their product to provide largely remote learning in response to government action. How have consumers responded?

The effect of the revised higher education product was to keep students at home instead of on campus. This attentuated the product on one hand, removing in-person contact with instructors and fellow students, as well as athletics and other on-campus resources. But for this period, the price remained effectively the same. Even if the question didn't formally arise for all consumers, this must inevitably have focused their minds on the actual value of the product.

In addition, the product wasn't just attentuated, it was trivialized. Households kept paying bills in the mid five figures for one or more kids to sit home and still get college credit for courses that were reduced to webinars, Zoom meetings, and take-home exams. On the othner hand, this was a college experience that, while it lacked the depth of campus life, it actually had the advantage of coming without the parties, DUIs, date rapes, demonstrations, and drugs. Consumers appear to have factored this in as well. If the whole exercise can be replaced with webinars and take home exams, what's the point?

Thus we have the polling results given in the story above. Exactly how this will be reflected in coming years' actual enrollments remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it can't be encouraging to see what appears to be a decline in public perception of college education's value. Recognize that for the parents of the baby boom generation, the introduction of SATs and selective admissions created the impression that college education was a meritocracy and allowed the producers steadily to increase the real price of the product for well over half a century.

I can't avoid thinking this presages a major shift in social preference, which had already been promoted by the popular television figure Mike Rowe, who for some years has been stressing that people can find rewarding careers outside the college-educated bourgeoisie.

This trend comes at the expense of major administrative state clients, university faculties and administrators. But another unintended consequence of the lockdowns has been to hasten public dissatsfaction with K-12 education as well. If parents have been able to sit in on their kids' elementary school classes via the web, they get a clearer picture of what is and isn't being taught. This can only have been an important factor in the recent reassertion of parental control over local school boards, which hurts another client of the administrative state, the teachers' unions.

I'm sure we're only beginning to see the unintended consequences of COVID social engineering.

Occam's Razor And Biden's "Great Negro"

Back in August, I posted on my theory of President Biden's mental condition, based on a speech he gave at the time. A more recent speech, the Veterans' Day ceremony where he made his "great Negro at the time" gaffe, just confirms my thinking. He isn't suffering from dementia, he's just drunk all the time. It seems to me that this fits the available evidence without multiplying the entity of requiring a medical diagnosis.

A clip with the full context of his remarks about Satchel Paige is in the link above. The first thing to note about it is, as I noted last August, the slow and careful delivery to avoid slurring throughout. But when he gets to the "great Negro" part, he still can't follow the teleprompter. At about 0:37, he says, "the great Negro at the time" and immediately corrects himself, "pitcher in the Negro league", but in making that quick correction, he starts to slur. But at that point, he catches himself and returns to his slow and careful delivery. This confirms my view from a source I linked back in August on drunken speech:

The researchers also found a decrease in the subjects’ speaking rate as they become more intoxicated. There seems a specific point at which this slowing of speech occurs: men slow down the most at a blood alchohol level between 0.04 and 0.08; for women, this occurs between 0.08 and 0.12.

Finally, the researchers found that the most striking impact of alchohol on speech was an increase in ‘nonfluencies.’ That is, people stammer, stutter, and trip on their words a whole heck of a lot more when they’ve had a few too many. Just how much does this intensify? The researchers found that in the severely intoxicated, the rate of these ‘speech errors’ nearly triples.

. . . Something that isn’t mentioned in the study is what I find to be the most salient feature of ‘drunken speech:’ hypercorrection. Drunk people, aware of their intoxicated state, often overcompensate by overenunciating evvvveerrry ccconnnsonnantttt and vowel. Perhaps this relates to the higher rate of stuttering and stammering: when you put such pressure on yourself to pronounce everything perfectly, you’re bound to trip up!

This hypercorrection immediately followed by a deliberate resumption of a slower pace is exactly what we saw in the "great Negro" gaffe.

How does this relate to the big guy's overall performance as president? Well, he's drunk all the time. I think this is reflected in his limited public schedule and his need to retreat frequently from the White House environment, where his personal life is more visible to domestic staff and the secret service.

I think an additional factor is that his conscience is bothering him about a range of issues -- the baksheesh, kickbacks, and corruption that flow to him via Hunter and his other family; the way his kids turned out; no doubt other issues in his personal life; and likely more. Rather than address any of this directly, he tries to bypass it by surrounding himself with hard leftists who serve as his handlers and, like other wealthy people with troubled consciences, he endorses leftist policies that he would never remotely apply to himself.

What's hard to avoid is that this current facade is turning out to be incredibly flimsy, and I'm not sure he's confident he can maintain it. Thus his intimates are starting to float the trial balloon that he may not run in 2024.

The Great Quit

I've kept thinking about the current headline that record numbers are quitting their jobs, while lower-level openings are harder to fill. The biggest thing I noticed last year was that once the lockdowns closed the barber shops, fewer of them reopened. I asked my barber about this when I went in for a haircut yesterday.

He noted that his shop has an empty chair, and they were trying to get someone in to take it over, but so far had been unable. I asked if this was due to the lockdowns. He said yes, he thought that once barbers were prevented from earning a living, they simply had to look for other options, and they wound up liking those options better. He cited a barber who'd worked in that shop but had a sideline of selling vintage clothes. He could keep running the sideline during the lockdown, and once he focused on it exclusively, he earned enough to quit working as a barber.

A local restaurant has had a NOW HIRING COOKS sign out for months. I read that restaurant workers, another group hit by the lockdowns, are in short supply. But I've got to think the reason people are quitting, changing careers, or retiring goes beyond that. According to CNN,

Workers are quitting in search for better pay or better jobs, representing a fundamental shift in America's labor market.

"Labor now has the initiative, and the era of paying individuals less than a livable wage has ended," said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. "This strongly suggests that rising wages are going to be part and parcel of the economic landscape going forward."

An additional factor that the stories don't mention is that the lockdowns prompted people to retire if they could manage it, especially if they found they didn't mind staying home and didn't relish the idea of going back to jobs they didn't like. Yet another is vaccine mandates, which appear to be forcing retirement decisions, especially among public safety and health care workers with the generous benefits that let them make that choice.

And I would imagine that not just lockdowns but work-from-home have broken the associations from habit that kept other people tied to their jobs and their networks of friends at work and changed the balance of factors that kept them from leaving.

Scott Adams has always made the point that it's never realistic to expect you'll get a major raise in your current job. If you want a realistic raise, especially one that pays the market rate for your current skills, you have to get a new job. This is another unintended consequence of the misguided social engineering behind the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It's raised the level of dissatisfaction with the current social contract across the board. Unfortunately, it's inflationary, especially in that it's effectively raised social, not just financial, expectations.