The Uncool and Immoral Fight for $15

By Stephen J. K. Walters

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Our lecturer-in-chief recently informed the class that “it’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about.” Great. Now if only Mr. Obama would take that message to his comrades on the left advocating a minimum wage of $15.

For these legions, it seems to be an article of faith that public policy is best guided by magical thinking, facts and logic be damned. But, of course the president is marching to the same drummer — just leading from behind.

The propaganda supporting the Fight for $15 — or $12 or, before that, $10.10 — is as duplicitous as it is abundant. The campaign is built on three myths:

1. “It’s a free lunch.”

If any businessperson told you, “I’m gonna double my prices, and everyone will continue to buy exactly the same amount of my product,” you would laugh heartily and/or edge away nervously. We’re all familiar with what economists call the First Law of Demand: Raise hamburger prices, and we will Eat Mor Chikin, even without prompting from cows.

In progressive fantasyland, however, the laws of economics do not apply. According to the Left, we can more than double the cost of entry-level or unskilled labor from $14,500 to $30,000 annually (not even including employer-paid payroll taxes), and no one will lose his or her job. Apparently it would never occur to any employer to substitute cheaper capital (automation? humbug!) for labor. And cost increases will never be passed through to consumers, so we won’t see any reductions in demand that would otherwise provoke layoffs.

How can progressives spout such nonsense? Because they have . . . studies. Labor unions (about whose motives more will be said later) have paid for innumerable “reports” that examine small increases in state or local minimum wages and — surprise! — claim to find no or only trivial job losses.

Some of these papers even made their way into academic journals. The most prominent, based on a carelessly conducted telephone survey of New Jersey fast-food franchises’ employment practices following an increase in that state’s minimum wage in 1992, has been utterly eviscerated by the eminent labor economist Finis Welch.

When David Neumark and William Wascher looked at those franchises’ actual payroll records, they found that New Jersey’s 18.8 percent minimum-wage hike reduced employment at affected establishments by a non-trivial 4.6 percent. Would the 15ers’ proposed 107 percent wage hike have a (proportional) 26 percent negative effect? More? Less?

In reality, no one really knows how much employers would cut labor — because the ridiculous magnitude and coverage of this proposal would put us in uncharted waters. When the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the employment effects of a $10.10 federal minimum, their best guess was a half-million lost jobs — with the upper range at a full million. There are some truly scary predictions about the carnage that could result from the fight for half again more, but the only thing we can say with certainty is that there will be pink slips, and a lot of them. To which the progressives reply, essentially, “so what?”

2. “No one can live decently at the current minimum wage, so we’ve got to do something.”

This is a clever lie because it’s so plausible. The image of a single mom “playing by the rules,” scrimping to pay rent and feed her child while working full-time for a mere $14,500 a year (at the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour) tugs at the heartstrings.

But the truth is, we already do a great deal to help her. First, there’s the Earned Income Credit (EIC), a tax credit that is brilliant and effective because it rewards that single mom for her work without risking her job — as we would by inflating how much her employer must pay her relative to her productivity.

The EIC’s value for the working poor varies according to family size and state, but it would mostly evaporate if the 15ers get their way: In my home state of Maryland, our hypothetical mother of one (working at the state minimum of $8.25) increases her after-tax income by $4,930 thanks to federal and state EIC-related refunds. That’s an effective $2.47 per hour raise — without threatening her job. Force her employer to pay $15 an hour, however, and (assuming she’s not laid off) her tax refunds plummet to $864 — while her payroll taxes go up by $1,033. All told, our Maryland mom’s gross raise of $13,500 would raise her after-tax income just $8,401, an effective marginal tax rate of 38 percent.

But wait, there’s more. At the old minimum, mom and child would qualify for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), to the tune of $3,048 per year. At the new minimum, she’d lose $2,928 of that. That’d reduce her annual net gain from the Fight for $15 to just $5,473. If you’re keeping score, that’s an effective tax rate of 59 percent, leaving our Maryland mom with a raise of not $6.75 but just $2.74 per hour.

And we’re still not done. At the old minimum, our mom qualifies for Medicaid; at the new one, she’d qualify for Obamacare subsidies but likely pay an estimated $147 monthly premium. That reduces her net another $1,764. Then there are the possible losses of child-care subsidies and — perhaps the biggest hit of all — Section 8 housing grants, the loss of which would raise our mom’s effective rent 70 percent.

The point here is not that a $15 minimum would make low-skilled workers absolutely worse off — though it is certainly possible that some would be — but that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. A sizeable number of jobs would be lost, reducing economic opportunities and spreading poverty, and in exchange those who avoid layoffs would improve their standard of living far less than is being advertised.

This fact also puts the lie to the 15ers’ spin that this is “bubble-up economics,” in which greater purchasing power for the working poor will magically stimulate the economy. This ignores the inevitable dis-employment effects, the higher labor costs that reduce incomes for employers, and the high effective tax rates faced by those lucky enough to avoid getting laid off.

In the Earned Income Tax Credit, we have a far more effective way of alleviating poverty than wage controls; ignoring that fact is not only not a virtue, it is destructive and self-defeating.

3. “The $15 minimum wage is a moral imperative.”

When Governor Jerry Brown put California on the $15 tollway to perdition, he admitted that “economically, minimum wages may not make sense” but nevertheless argued that the issue is “a matter of economic justice.”

Wait — what? How can justice be served by something that is so damaging to the working poor — especially when a better way to raise their standard of living (the EIC) is readily available? The most charitable explanation might be that the 15ers assume good results from good intentions, and in our current populist mood we judge intentions by tribal affiliation. Is this policy attempting to help those with whom we identify? Check. Would it hurt those (the evil millionaires and billionaires) we now consider public enemies? Double check.

But the Fight for $15 was not undertaken to actually help the poor. It was, from its initiation in 2012, a devilishly clever plot by the labor cartels — chiefly the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — to enhance their bargaining power and prop up dwindling membership by pricing rival labor out of the market.

Unions mainly represent more-skilled workers; nationally, members average about $28 per hour (before benefits). Doubling the price of less-skilled workers will naturally divert labor demand toward unions in exactly the same way that higher hamburger prices would induce growth for substitutes such as chicken sandwiches.

Thus, the unions’ generals don’t even believe their own propaganda about negligible job losses to the less skilled. Those losses are necessary collateral damage that advance the interests of their rank and file, whose dues — the tens of millions of dollars funneled to fake “grass roots” outfits and lapdog advocacy groups — are fueling the Fight for $15 campaign.

The best evidence that unions really do understand the destructive effects of wage controls is that they lobby to be exempt from them whenever possible. Diana Furchgott-Roth has documented how in cities from San Francisco to Seattle to Chicago, local minimum-wage requirements “may be waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement.”

Could there be anything more corrupt and cynical than devising a policy to handicap your competitors — especially when they are likely to be disproportionately poor — and selling it as morally correct and upright? Yet one union leader justifies these exemptions as giving employers and unions “the option, the freedom” to negotiate “an agreement that works for them both . . . and that is a good thing.”

That sure looks like freedom for thee and not for me, bro. Not cool. Not cool at all.

Socialism for the Uninformed

By Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists’ exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the Left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

When Senator Sanders cries, “The system is rigged!” no one asks, “Just what specifically does that mean?” or “What facts do you have to back that up?”

In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.

But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political Left.

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers — sometimes known as “everybody,” with their assumptions being what “everybody knows.”

Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16- to 17-year-old black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent.

The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can’t move up the ladder if you don’t get on the ladder.

The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today’s dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should — and will — be paid by raising taxes on “the rich.”

Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.

In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think — and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.

The Liberal Hypocrites Fighting the Koch Brothers on Campus

By Ian Tuttle

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

The success of America’s institutions of higher learning is thanks in no small part to the largesse of America’s most generous citizens — persons with names such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. That tradition continues today. But one of the names has left-wing groups in a fit.

According to UnKoch My Campus (UKMC), a group of “students and activists” dedicated to exposing “the Kochs and their vast network of front groups,” the brothers have donated to more than 300 colleges since 2005. Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times estimated the total amount at $68 million as of 2013. UKMC alleges that these donations are intended “to undermine the issues many students today care about: environmental protection, worker’s rights, healthcare expansion, and quality public education, to name just a few.”

Supposedly in the interest of “accountability,” UKMC has been using open-records laws to intimidate professors and administrators involved in any academic work associated with Koch donations.

Last year, Ross Emmett, co-director of Michigan State University’s Center for Innovation & Economic Prosperity, who used Koch money to found a seminar — the Koch Scholars — that studies political economists such as F. A. Hayek and Karl Marx, was forced to release documents to student activists. In 2014, the head of the University of Kansas’s Students for a Sustainable Future filed a state records request demanding a decade’s worth of private correspondence from Professor Art Hall, director of the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business. Hall, who had received a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation and testified against green-energy quotas before the state legislature, sued, alleging a “fishing expedition.” A year later, he reached a settlement with the university.

Other examples abound. This is UKMC’s m.o. “File [an] Open Record Request to connect the missing pieces in your research and get the documentation needed to PROVE undue Koch influence if it exists,” UKMC advises in its “Campus Organizer’s Guide,” which also dedicates several pages to listing groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council that are “part of the Koch-funded climate denial efforts.”

The latest salvo in UKMC’s efforts to clamp down on competing opinions is what it calls “Kochileaks,” the publication of “exclusive audio recorded during the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education” in Las Vegas in April. Here’s UKMC’s breathless description of its exposé:

In the recordings, professors from Koch-funded schools . . . speak frankly about attempts to dodge transparency requests by their students and faculty, mention their cozy relationships with high-level university administrators, mock journalists and portray anything other than their own free market teachings — including humanities, social sciences, gender studies and diversity initiatives — as laughable.

It’s damning evidence of the lengths to which the Charles Koch Foundation is going to turn both public and private universities into incubators for its free market ideology, and destroying academic freedom in the process.

Actually, it’s not. UKMC released approximately 90 minutes of audio from four APEE Conference panels, along with full transcripts, and the record reflects almost none of what the above claims. Instead of conniving faculty plotting to advance Charles Koch’s corporate interests, audience members were treated to statements such as the following, from economist Peter Boettke of George Mason University (“ground zero for Koch influence in higher education,” UKMC has said):

You simply cannot neatly divide the world into those who are stupid, those who are evil, and those who agree with you, and have a healthy and vibrant existence as a lifelong learner. And that, ultimately, at the end of the day, is what we all want to do. That’s why we’re in this business. We get excited about ideas, we want to continually learn about ideas throughout our life, and continually improve our understanding of the human condition.

That’s less than three minutes into the first recording.

Throughout the transcripts UKMC highlights what it clearly believes are the most nefarious statements. For instance, Brennan Brown, a program officer with the Koch Foundation, is quoted as arguing that, “It’s also about important research that a lot of you are doing that’s timely, that’s relevant, that’s focused on a particular issue, that’s rooted in a ​republic of science,​ and it’s also too about mentorship. Academic and professional mentorship.” UKMC failed to excerpt the harrowing sentence immediately prior: “This is about being an entrepreneur, an intellectual entrepreneur, or an edu-preneur, and focusing in on ways in which you can engage students in meaningful conversations about a marketplace of ideas, a diversity of thought.” Eek!

UKMC also underscores an anecdote from Troy University economics professor George Crowley:

This one student we had never heard of, poli-sci major, showed up, literally sat there silently throughout the entire, like, ten weeks of the class, didn’t make a comment the whole time. We had them write little essays at the end, and he basically wrote an essay that said “I am a socialist, but now that I’ve been finally been exposed to some of these ideas, I’m very interested in taking economics.”

A student at a university is being exposed to alternative perspectives! The humanity!

This is what UKMC calls “damning evidence” that the Kochs’ “corporate interests” have poisoned American academia.

Those on the right wing of the political spectrum will find little objectionable in free-marketers trying to create space on college campuses for their perspective. The dominance of left-leaning thinkers — in almost every discipline, not just economics — on American campuses has been a fact for more than 50 years. If UKMC were actually in favor of “academic freedom,” as it purports, shouldn’t that mean encouraging the free and vigorous exchange of conflicting ideas? Shouldn’t a socialist be able to read Milton Friedman?

But even if UKMC does not accept the fact of liberal hegemony in academia, its sanctimonious mission to guarantee “accountability, transparency, and academic freedom” rings hollow, given that its sole target is the Kochs — who are far from the only politically motivated donors to institutions of higher learning.

Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer is responsible for the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, which expressly aims to influence energy policy. The Center cost Steyer $40 million.

In 2012, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave a grant to MIT’s “DREAMtech, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media and the United We DREAM Network (UWD), to provide support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy implementation,” President Obama’s executive amnesty of dubious constitutionality. In 2014, a donation to the Media Lab was used to bring Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson to campus to help chronicle police violence. Mckesson is hardly an unbiased observer. According to Kelly Riddell, Soros’s OSF gave $26.4 million to universities in 2013 alone.

And at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one can find the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research — both funded in large part by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose post-mayoral activities have focused on restricting Second Amendment rights. In total, Bloomberg has given more than $1 billion to Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, there is conspicuous evidence that academics stand to profit handsomely by turning out work friendly to prominent left-wing causes. At the very same, notoriously Koch-funded, George Mason University, Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics, has pocketed $5.6 million in compensation since 2001 from his Institute of Global Environment and Society, a nonprofit whose “business manager” is Shukla’s wife, Anastasia, and whose “assistant business manager”/”assistant to the president” is their daughter, Sonia. This is of no interest to UnKoch My Campus — who, coincidentally, count among their “partners” Greenpeace and ClimateTruth.org, both of whom have long been engaged in a concerted campaign against “climate deniers.” ClimateTruth.org describes ALEC, one of UKMC’s targets, as “a climate denial group . . . [that] spreads climate misinformation.”

The transformation of colleges into billion-dollar research institutions made inevitable the jockeying for influence that is now part and parcel of university life. Everyone wants to give their cause a leg up. Charles Koch and Tom Steyer have philosophical commitments that they want to promote in the academic world, and UnKoch My Campus and similar groups are within their rights to push back.

But there’s a crucial distinction to be made between pushing back against actual pernicious influence, and trying to silence opinions with which one disagrees. Under the guise of promoting “academic freedom,” UnKoch My Campus is clearly only interested in the latter.

Class, Trump, and the Election

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Donald Trump seems to have offended almost every possible identity group. But the New York billionaire still also seems to appeal to the working classes (in part no doubt precisely because he has offended so many special-interest factions; in part because he was seen in the primaries as an outsider using his own money; in part because he seems a crude man of action who dislikes most of those of whom Middle America is tired). At this point, his best hope in November, to the extent such a hope exists, rests on turning 2016 into a referendum on class and a collective national interest that transcends race and gender — and on emphasizing the sad fact that America works now mostly for an elite, best epitomized by Clinton, Inc.

We should not underestimate the opportunities for approaching traditional issues from radically different perspectives. The National Rifle Association is running the most effective ads in its history, hitting elites who wish to curtail gun ownership on the part of those who are not afforded the security blankets of the wealthy. Why should not an inner-city resident wish to buy a legal weapon, when armed security guards patrol America’s far safer gated communities? For most of the Clintons’ adult lives, they have been accompanied by men and women with concealed weapons to ensure their safety — on the premise that firearms, not mace, not Tasers, not knives or clubs, alone would ultimately keep the two safe.

Fracking provides jobs and cheaper fuel; the elites of the Democratic party care about neither. Indeed, Barack Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu proclaimed their desire for spiraling gas and electricity prices. Boutique environmentalism is a losing issue for the Democrats. The very wealthy can afford to be more concerned for a three-inch smelt than for irrigation water that will ensure that there are jobs for tractor drivers and affordable food for the less-well-off. When Hillary Clinton talks about putting miners out of work, she’s talking about people she has no desire to see unless she needs their votes.

Illegal immigration is another issue that offers class leverage. Middle-class Mexican-Americans cannot afford to put their kids in private schools when local districts are overwhelmed with non-English-speaking students. Trying to provide parity for 11 million or more illegal aliens naturally comes at the expense of fewer safety-net protections for minority citizens, just as driving down wages is good for the employer but hardly for the citizen who competes with illegal aliens for entry-level jobs. And what about lower-middle-class communities that are overwhelmed with foreign nationals whose backgrounds were never checked.

Outsourcing jobs affects predominantly the lower middle classes; no pundit, D.C. staffer, or New York lawyer is replaced by some cheaper English-speaker from the Punjab. Obamacare follows the same pattern. Elites who praise it to the skies either have the money or the Cadillac plans to navigate around it. I doubt that Rahm Emanuel and his brothers queue up at a surgery center, hoping to win five minutes with an ophthalmologist who now treats 70 patients a day to survive under Obamacare.

Donald Trump is unlikely to defeat Hillary Clinton unless he, an insider billionaire with little political knowledge, can appeal to the concerns of millions that cut across the Democratic firewalls of race and class. If a mom in Orange County thinks that Benghazi did make a difference and ISIS is a murderous Islamic terrorist enterprise, if an African-American youth believes that someone should try to hire him on a building site in preference to an illegal alien, and if a cosmetician believes that one violation of a federal law will land her in jail while many violations may land Hillary in the White House, then class trumps identity politics.

The entire establishments of both political parties are losing the illusion that they are clothed. The Clintons and their appendages famously became rich by monetizing their public positions through shakedowns of the international corporate set, under the patina of egalitarian progressivism. No one in the media for a decade has said a word about their criminal enterprise; commentators were more likely to donate to the Clinton Foundation as a sort of business investment or indemnity insurance. And how in the world does a middle-class ex-teacher and congressman with a 20-year tenure like Dennis Hastert end up with millions to pay hush money to the victims of his alleged pederastic assaults? How did a Harry Reid become a Nevada multimillionaire? How many middle-class workers’ annual incomes does Hillary Clinton trump in a single 20-minute Wall Street speech, whose content is vacuous? Where, then, is Occupy Wall Street?

Why the NeverTrump movement has so far failed is in part a matter of class as well, defined not so much in terms of cash, as of influence, education, and lifestyle. In 2008 it was gauche to bring up the vicious racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose trite cast-off slogan “audacity of hope” inspired the title of Barack Obama’s campaign primer. In 2012, it would have apparently been rude for Mitt Romney to have fired back at Candy Crowley, “How dare you hijack a presidential debate!” Yes, Trump may be creepy, but the reluctance to challenge our present naked emperors is just as creepy. Is the so-called establishment going to warn us that Trump would be capable of running up $10 trillion in debt, socializing our medical system, unleashing the IRS and EPA on perceived enemies, and weakening friends and empowering enemies abroad, as he offers the world historically challenged pop riffs on Islam, Hiroshima, and global geography? For each take-down of NeverTrump, can we at least have commensurate analysis of how and why a monstrosity like the Clinton cash operation was allowed to thrive without audit; or how it is that the secretary of state and her minions snubbed the law and behaved in a fashion that would have put any other federal employees in jail; or how it is that 155 years after the start of the Civil War over 300 cities, counties, and states have declared federal law null and void in their jurisdictions — and with complete impunity?

Turn on an evening cable show and ask which interviewer is married to which anchor on another channel, or which of the pundits are former politicos, or how many in the White House worked for Big News or are married or related to someone who does. How many pundits were advisers to political candidates or related to someone who was? How does Ben Rhodes do an interview on CBS News or George Stephanopoulos interview Hillary Clinton or a writer expound on the primaries when he is also an adviser to a particular campaign? The problem is not just that all this is incestuous or unethical, but that it blinds a tiny elite to what millions of quite different Americans value and experience.

Charles Murray recently wrote in anger, addressing those who would vote for Trump because “Hillary is even worse”: “I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.”

I wish that the high IQs of the establishment class had taken Murray’s sage advice eight years ago and just listened to what Obama had said in denigration of the Pennsylvania working classes or the “typical white person” grandmother who raised him; or to his pseudo-macho references to guns and knives, and “get in their face”; or to the hokey promises to lower global temperatures and stop the seas from rising; and all the other Vero possumus tripe. Or that they had used their presumably formidable mental powers to review Obama’s public record as a state legislator and a U.S. senator — which presaged everything from Obamacare and the unconstitutional undermining of federal law to the apology tours and the near-destruction of 70 years of bipartisan foreign policy.

Murray has a point that Trump’s crudity and buffoonery should be taken seriously, but when he says establishmentarians have “high IQs,” what exactly does he mean? Did a high IQ prevent an infatuated David Brooks (whom he quotes approvingly) from fathoming presidential success as if he were a sartorial seancer, from the crease of Senator Obama pants leg? What was the IQ of the presidential historian who declared Obama the smartest man ever to be elevated to the White House? Or the Newsweek editor who envisioned an apotheosized Obama? Or the MSNBC host who motor-mouthed about the tingle in his leg at the sound of an Obama speech? Or, yes, the conservative policy analyst (and self-confessed “Starry-eyed Obama groupie”) who wrote approvingly (“flat-out plain brilliant”) of the Obama race speech in March 2008, in which Obama revealed to the world that his own grandmother — the sole steady working breadwinner of Obama’s extended family, whose labors sent him to prep school — was a supposedly “typical white person” in her prejudices, while he further contextualized the abject racism and anti-Semitism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — a speech renounced by Obama himself when Wright later felt empowered to double down on his racism. Or perhaps the conservative wit who once wrote that Obama has a “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” and that he is the rare politician who “writes his own books,” which were “first rate”?

Establishmentarian high IQs? The point is not to castigate past poor judgment, but to offer New Testament reminders about hubris and the casting of first stones — and why hoi polloi are skeptical of their supposed intellectual betters.

So how did a blond comb-over real-estate dealer destroy an impressive and decent Republican field and find himself near dead even with Hillary Clinton — to the complete astonishment, and later fury, of the Washington establishment?

Simply because lots of people have become exhausted by political and media elites who have thought very highly of themselves — but on what grounds it has become increasingly impossible to figure out.