By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
“Cleverness is not
wisdom.”
— Euripides, Bacchae
What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy — our
overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the
universe?
Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of
physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal
education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance
of life outside the Boston–New York–Washington corridor? Political correctness
as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and
apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production,
agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The
reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place
to learn?
During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC
Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a
young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid
children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing
expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate.
Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in
the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot
chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think
they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in
debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl
Harbor.
In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the
Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of
himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.”
“A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political
data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while
making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every
argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents
feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind
rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or
electrician.
The ad was no right-wing caricature of an urban twerp.
Through photo, text, and commentary, Krupp confirmed the self-portrait of an
in-your-face adolescent who somehow ended up with his 15 minutes of notoriety.
Krupp is emblematic of an entire class of young
smart-asses found in Silicon Valley, on campuses across the nation, and in
Hollywood, and now ensconced at the highest levels of American government and
journalism. Do we remember Jonathan Gruber, the conceited MIT professor and
architect of Obamacare, who bragged that he had hoodwinked a supposedly far
dumber America in order to ram the Affordable Care Act down its collective
throat — while he was paid nearly $300,000 to talk the bill through Congress as
a contract analyst for the Department of Health and Human Services? After
President Obama had assured the American people that they could keep their
doctors and their health plans, while seeing their premium costs decrease,
Gruber high-fived that voters were too stupid to figure out how they had been
misled:
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO
did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber crowed. “If CBO scored the mandate
as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. . . . Lack of
transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the
stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really
critical for the thing to pass.”
Note Gruber’s disdain for the public. Like Pajama Boy, he
exhibits a visceral contempt for the supposedly less educated whom he helped to
deceive. Were supposedly stupid voters who lost their health coverage to this
government-run con to feel, in the words of Pajama Boy, “terrible about
themselves” once they heard Gruber’s boast?
For the Pajama Boys, rhetoric is everything, reality
nothing. Fooling the lower middle classes is the stuff of sarcastic comedy, as
in the joshing of two young former Obama speechwriters on a recent Charlie Rose
show:
Jon Lovett: I
really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But
the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think.
Health care, economic speeches.
Jon Favreau:
Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
Lovett: How
dare you!
Millions losing their health insurance ends up with
Pajama Boy banter — “How dare you!” — with Charlie Rose.
In 2013, a few years after Lovett wrote, “If you like
your insurance, you can keep it,” he gave a Pajama Boy graduation address at
Pitzer College, in which the 30-year-old sage unknowingly seemed to be warning
graduates about people like himself: “One of the greatest threats we face,
simply put, is bullshit. We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan
rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored
research, in social media’s imitation of human connection, in legalese and corporate
double-speak; it infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse,
wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth,
and making it harder to achieve anything. . . . Know that being honest, both
about what you do know and what you don’t, can and will pay off. Up until
recently I would have said that the only proper response to our culture of B.S.
is cynicism, that it would just get worse and worse. But I don’t believe that
any more.”
We see the Pajama Boy adding of insult to injury in
now-multimillionaire former Wall Street intern Chelsea Clinton — whose
husband’s Greek hedge fund just collapsed, and who is the heir to the $100
million Clinton shakedown fortune — sighing that “I tried to care about money
but I couldn’t.” Perhaps those who invested in her husband’s disastrous fund
still can care about the money they lost. Or note amnesty and open-borders
advocate Mark Zuckerberg, who sends his security forces to expropriate parking
spaces around his San Francisco digs and buys up neighboring homes around his
Palo Alto estate to create his own private border zone.
Recently Ben Rhodes — “Assistant to the President and Deputy
National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting,” and
author of the president’s Cairo speech and the Benghazi talking points —
confessed to the New York Times that
he salted bogus talking points about the Iran deal among the field of novice
wannabe Washington–New York foreign-policy “experts,” on the expectation that
Pajama Boy journalists on the make (“The average reporter we talk to is 27
years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around
political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing”) would
lazily draw on these pseudo-experts to complete the circular con (“We created
an echo chamber. . . . They were saying things that validated what we had given
them to say”). Because the postmodernist Rhodes (who says he drives a “Beamer”)
is cynical and contemptuous of the value of traditional first-hand experience
and classical education, he feels he can construct almost any reality he
wishes, such as a manufactured reformist Iranian wing reaching out to the U.S.
to offer concessions on a nuclear deal:
“In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to
discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he says. “We had test drives to know
who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use
outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we
knew the tactics that worked. . . . We drove them crazy.”
Ben Rhodes gloats over misleading the American people
about the conditions that led to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and how the
Obama administration sold the “We drove them crazy” deal as a non-treaty that
could be rerouted around Senate approval. But after Rhodes follows other
30-something Obama speechwriters to Hollywood, who cleans up the mess of an Iran
blackmailing the Middle East with nuclear-tipped missiles?
Who hires and promotes Pajama Boys? Why, of course,
Barack Obama, the Pajama Boy in Chief.
Pajama Boy
arrogance? “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I
know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And
I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director
than my political director.”
Pajama Boy
condescension? “It’s not surprising then they get bitter — they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations.” Or the prep-school graduate talking down to the elite-forces
combat veteran: “Bibi, you have to understand something. . . . I’m the
African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live
in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States.
You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”
Pajama Boy
cynicism? From the Jeffrey Goldberg interview: “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet
the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had
wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire
infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama
said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way
that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” The president gloats
to the obsequious press that the French president is reduced to a clueless
glory hog, bought off by the cynical U.S?
Or maybe this is a better example of cynical
dissimulation: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like
your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”
Or maybe the locus classicus of Pajama Boy cynicism was
the president supposedly ruling out amnesties and open borders: “Again, I just
want to repeat, I’m president, I’m not king. If Congress has laws on the books
that say that people who are here who are not documented have to be deported,
then I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources,
to focus on people who are really causing problems as opposed to families who
are just trying to work and support themselves. But there’s a limit to the
discretion that I can show because I am obliged to execute the law. That’s what
the Executive Branch means. I can’t just make the laws up by myself. So the
most important thing that we can do is focus on changing the underlying laws.”
Note the Pajama Boy phrase “I can’t just make the laws up
by myself,” which is of course precisely what Obama planned to do and did.
Pajama Boy
pop-psychoanalyzing? Of Putin: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back
home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” He has “got that kind
of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.”
Pajama Boy
arrested-development references? “I’m LeBron, baby.” Or of ISIS: “The analogy
we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts
on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Or of Michael Jordan:
“There is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course, if I
was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the
case.”
Pajama Boy
ignorance? If you forget that the politically correct version of the
Falklands’ name is “Malvinas,” then just plug in “Maldives,” another
non-Western-sounding, exotic-M island group somewhere or another — and assume
that journalists “know nothing.” Don’t worry who speaks what language in
Austria, or where the death camps were or who liberated them, or whether
“corpsmen” is pronounced as if the Marines in question were zombies. There is
no need to worry about such things — when hip, cool, sarcastic, and cynical all
trump intelligence, experience, and humility every time.
When Euripides in his Bacchae unleashed the reaction to
the young Panama Boy prig Pentheus, it was not something measured and rational,
but rather the wild maenads. So too is the growing pushback today to the Pajama
Boy aristocracy.
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