VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Our Bankrupt Nomenklatura. “Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced or diminished such inheritances.”
Plus:
What explains the bankruptcy of the elite?
We have confused credentials with merit—as we learned when Hollywood stars and rich people tried to bribe and buy their mostly lackadaisical children into named schools, eager for the cattle brand BAs and without a care whether their offspring would be well educated.
Graduating from today’s Yale or Harvard law school is not necessarily a sign of achievement, much less legal expertise. Mostly, entrance into heralded schools is a reminder of past good prep school grades and test scores winning admittance—or using some sort of old-boy, networking, athletic, or affirmative action pull.
Being a “senior” official at some alphabet government agency also means little any more outside of the nomenklatura. Academia, the media, and entertainment industries are likewise supposedly meritocratic without being based on demonstrable worth. Otherwise, why would college graduates know so little, the media so often report fantasies as truth, and Hollywood focus on poor remakes? . . . To paraphrase an assessment found in Tacitus’s Agricola, the current American nomenklatura has all but ruined our institutions and branded all that success.
As I say, credentialed, not educated. Related: The Suicide Of Expertise.
Also, flashback:
Here’s a question, and it’s a fair one. What has the ruling class done right in the last 20 years?
Come on, betters, “wow” us with your mad society-running skillz.
We know what America achieved under the old ruling class. It beat the Nazis – the real Nazis, not the fake bugaboo “Nazis” that the left labels everyone to the right of Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. It fought through the Depression. It trashed the Democrat’s Jim Crow regime. It designed the ’65 Mustang, created the Big Mac and put a man on the moon. It crushed the dirty commies in the Cold War. The old elite was not perfect, but at least you can point to some ticks in the “WIN” column.
Not so with the coterie of half-wits running our institutions today. It’s all check marks under “LOSS.” Iraq. The Wall Street Meltdown. Obamacare. Obama himself.
Oh, and then there’s Jeffrey Epstein.
Do you see a lot of successes? Do you see any? Have I overlooked some tremendous victory this generation of our betters pulled off? I can’t think of any offhand – gee, how about social media? Yeah, there’s progress.
Like I said.