Mark Steyn - After America

“Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust…? Our various and sundry supplies of gray matter may as well be controlled by a central syndicate.” 13

That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives.

You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” 14He subsequently “apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.” 15

“ Everybody ”? Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the New Yorker , that nobody she knew voted for Nixon.

Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,” 16so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something everybody knows is true.

“Everybody” knows this stuff, especially if he reads the New York Times or listens to National Public Radio. “Everybody” knows that raising taxes is responsible, and “everybody” knows that cutting spending is just crazy talk.

“Everybody” knows that the governmentalization of health care—the annexation of one-sixth of the economy, the equivalent of the U.S. taking over the entire British or French economy, or the Indian economy twice over—“everybody” knows that that’s sober, prudent, technocratic, reasonable. And “everybody” knows that wanting to repeal ObamaCare is extremist, radical, dangerous. “Everybody” knows that serious proposals to address a looming shortfall in obligations of tens of trillions of dollars puts you in wide-eyed nut territory, just as “everybody” knows that massively increasing government spending is a moderate, centrist approach to stimulating the economy. Why, it’s in the Washington Post ! As the paper reported, after yet another anemic quarter:

Another big rise in growth came from the federal government, which rose at a 9.2 percent annual rate, including a 13 percent pace of gain in nondefense spending. That reflects in part the fiscal stimulus action that was enacted last year…. 17

So the establishment newspaper of the capital city of the so-called hyperpower thinks economic growth and government growth are the same thing?

Maybe if we’d had a 20 or 30 percent “big rise in growth” of government, the economy would really be roaring along.

Who are these everybodies who know instinctively what’s true and what isn’t? The idea of a technocracy—a “central syndicate of gray matter”—is vital to Big Government’s sense of itself. It’s not about tired outmoded concepts of left or right, it’s about “smart solutions” from smart guys—starting with the president. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” said Michael Beschloss the day after Obama’s election. 18

Really? Other than demonstrate a remarkably focused talent for self-promotion, what has he ever done ? Even as a legendary thinker, what original thought has he ever expressed in his entire life? And yet he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president” says Beschloss—and he’s a presidential historian so he should know, ’cause he’s a smart guy, too.

Lending a hand, another smart guy, the New York Times ’ house conservative David Brooks, cooed over the credentialed-to-the-hilt smarts of the incoming administration: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” 19

He’s right. Over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.” 20And yet we’re screwed anyway, with or without the Harvard-Yale game. If the smart guys are so smart, how come we’re broke? How come those Americans who aren’t tenured New York Times columnists or ex-legislators parlaying their Rolo-dexes into lucrative but undemanding “consultancies” or cozy “private-sector” sinecures as Executive Vice-President for Government Relations, are going to end their days significantly poorer? And how come those European social democracies that blazed the trail to Big Government are already poorer, and in several cases insolvent?

Unlike less sophisticated creeds, the statist ideology denies it’s any such thing. Why, they’re way beyond that: just as the political class are merely technocrats, so our educators are not leftist ideologues but impartial scholars, and the media establishment are objective reporters who would never dream of imposing their own biases even if they had any. Because, if you accept the idea that your worldview is merely that—a view—it implicitly acknowledges there are other views, against which yours should be tested.

Far easier to pronounce your side of the table the objective truth, and therefore any opposing argument is not a disagreement about policy or philosophy or economics, but merely evidence of Nazism, racism, or mental retardation. Contemplating a hostile electorate on the eve of the 2010 election, John Kerry bemoaned the ignorance of the voters: “Truth and facts and science don’t seem to weigh in,” he sighed. 21

Senator Kerry is so wedded to “truth” and “facts” that, like his fellow Massachusetts patrician Ted Kennedy, he spent the Bush years disseminating a fake Thomas Jefferson quote (“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”). 22Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”). 23Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar (“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor…” 24—poor Will must have been having an off day). Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from It Can’t Happen Here (“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”—er, no, as it happens that’s not in It Can’t Happen Here or any other Sinclair Lewis novel). 25But why quibble over the veracity of mere sentences? Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college ( I, Rigoberta Menchu ).

In a culture so convinced of its truth, facts, science, and smarts, even the Cliffs Notes are too much like hard work. As Shakespeare said to Sinclair Lewis at a Friars’ Club roast for Thomas Jefferson, when conformity comes to America, it will be wrapped in torpor and bent in the arc of portentous banality. The United States has not just a ruling class, but a ruling monoculture. Its “truth” and “facts” and “science” permeate not just government but the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the very societal air we breathe. That’s the problem, and just pulling the lever for a guy with an R after his name every other November isn’t going to fix it. If Hollywood’s liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn’t going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore’s allegedly rising sea levels.