Mark Steyn - After America

In such a world, the Conformicrats think of themselves as a meritocracy, a term coined by the sociologist Michael Young in 1958 for a satirical fantasy contemplating the state of Britain in the year 2032. 26And, as with “brains trust,” a droll jest got taken up by humorless lefties for real. By the time Tony Blair started bandying the word ad nauseam as a description of the bright new talents running the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century, Lord Young felt obliged to object. Six decades earlier, he had written the party manifesto that swept the Labour Party to power in 1945, and he reminded the Blairite generation of two of the most powerful members of that government: Ernie Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, and Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council (and deputy prime minister). Morrison had left school at fourteen and become an errand boy, Bevin at eleven to work as a farmhand. Against considerable odds, they rose to become two of the most powerful men in the land. There were no such figures in Tony Blair’s “meritocratic” cabinet—nor in Barack Obama’s. But there used to be, even in the Oval Office.

Yet today, whene’er such a person heaves on the horizon, the so-called meritocrats recoil in horror. Remember the early sneers at Sarah Palin? Not for her policy positions or her track record as governor but for her life, where she came from, where she went to, her frightful no-name schools: My dear, who goes to North Idaho College? Or Matanuska-Susitna College, wherever and whatever that is. “Celebrate diversity”? Well, yes, but good grief, there are limits…

Imagine what the new Condescendi would have made of candidates from Allegheny College (William McKinley, for one term), or, despite its name, Clinton Liberal Academy (Grover Cleveland, but he left to support his family). Why, Truman didn’t even have a degree! And Van Buren left school at fourteen! And Lincoln only had eighteen months of formal education! And Zachary Taylor never went to school at all! Since the departure of Ronald Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), America, for the first time in its history, has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League—less a two-party than a two-school system: Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In an America ever less educated but ever more credentialed, who wants to take a flyer on autodidacts like Truman or Lincoln? And, even if you went to the right schools and got higher scores than John Kerry, as Bush Jr. did, the slightest departure from the assumptions of the conformocracy will earn you a zillion “SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT” stickers. 27

Our new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was “in trade,” so today’s rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin’s executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts? In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn’t want to fill it up with “mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk.” 28But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have government by men who’ve done nothing but “think and talk.” 29There was less private-sector business experience in Obama’s cabinet than in any administration going back a century. 30

If you sit around “thinking and talking,” the humdrum responsibilities of government are bound to seem drearily earthbound. Hence, the political class’ preference for ersatz crises, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans 31or the Prince of Wales saying we only have ninety-six months left to save the planet. 32 Time magazine ran a fawning cover story on Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, and Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York: “The New Action Heroes.” 33So what action were they taking? Why, Bloomberg was “opening a climate summit” and “talking about saving the planet.” All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was “talking about eliminating disease.” All of them. “I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses,” he announced.

As Madame Cornuel observed, no man is a hero to his valet. But fortunately it’s a lot easier to be a hero to your typist, especially when it’s Time ’s Michael Grunwald. These action heroes are “doing big things.” Bloomberg, cooed Grunwald, “enacted America’s most draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban.”

Wow!

Back in the real world, a couple days after Christmas 2010, a snow storm descended on New York, and the action-hero mayor, relentless in his pursuit of trans-fats, was unable, for more than three days, to fulfill as basic a municipal responsibility as clearing the streets. 34His Big Nanny administration can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger, but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue. Perhaps, if New Yorkers had appeared to be enjoying the snow by engaging in unregulated sledding or snowballing without safety helmets, Nanny Bloomberg could have scraped the boulevards bare in nothing flat. But, lacking that incentive, he let it sit there.

In Governor Schwarzenegger’s state, over one-third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they’ve overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed after degenerating into a de facto Mexican health-care network. 35If you’re a legal resident of the state of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade’s time. Fortunately, by then your now retired action-hero governor will have cured “all these terrible illnesses” and there will be no need for California’s last seven hospitals.

The illegal immigration question is an interesting test of government in action, at least when it comes to core responsibilities like defense of the nation. Enforcing the southern border? Too porous. Can’t be done, old boy.

Cloud-cuckoo stuff. Pie-in-the-sky.

But changing the climate of the entire planet to some unspecified Edenic state? That we can do. Politicians incapable of clearing snow from city streets three days after a storm are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough.

On the eve of the 2010 Massachusetts election to fill what the Democrats insisted on referring to as “Ted Kennedy’s seat,” the president came to town to help out his candidate, a party hack named Martha Coakley. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Ms. Coakley was his peculiar obsession with the emblem of Scott Brown’s campaign—the Republican candidate’s five-year-old pickup: “Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads,” President Obama, standing alongside John Kerry, told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.” 36

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama’s line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown’s pickup was a prop—like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the “Iron Chef” TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama’s “kitchen garden”: the cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the First Lady and wandering with her ’midst the beds picking out choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then for the actual cooking the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. 37Viewed from Obama’s perspective, why wouldn’t you assume the truck’s just part of the set? “In his world,” wrote the Weekly Standard ’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.” 38