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July 26, 2010
The Best and the Brightest, Part II?
A rather surprising opinion piece in the Boston Globe yesterday, comparing Obama and his merry band to JFK and the Ivy League braintrust that ever-so-confidently bollixed things up.
Media critic Neal Gabler penned the piece; he begins by reminding us of the origins of "the best and the brightest," a phrase given ironic significance by the late author David Halberstam.
WHEN ... Halberstam wrote his account of what got this nation into Vietnam, he didn’t find that the architects of the war were obtuse or illogical or commie-obsessed or infatuated with American might. Instead, in Halberstam’s now iconic term that became the title of his best-selling book, they were “the best and the brightest’’ — a superior governing class that was the product of America’s best families, its most prestigious prep schools and universities, and most august law firms and investment banks. The irony is that these geniuses turned out to be so dangerously wrong that the very term “best and the brightest’’ became a sarcastic euphemism for a hubris that leads to disaster.
Do you begin to get a sense of where Gabler's critique is heading? If you know anything about Gabler's political predilections, that opening was like storm clouds on the liberal establishment's horizon.
Gabler explains:
One might have thought, then, that the “best and the brightest’’ would have been eternally discredited like the war they promulgated. But Barack Obama has such a strange, almost reverential faith in the very sorts of folks Halberstam flayed that the president threatens to lead his administration and the country down the same hubristic path.
[...]
Above all, the best and the brightest believed in their own infallibility. They distrusted politics almost as much as they distrusted the proletariat because politics was about compromise and satisfying ninnies (us) who they felt were much beneath them. They were cold, logical, bloodless, and deeply pragmatic. They considered liberal idealists fools, and emotion a weakness. They knew best, which made them extremely intimidating. They failed because they didn’t think they could possibly be wrong.
In many ways, Obama was a sucker for this kind of coldblooded, upper-crust approach to policy and the elitism that went with it ... [s]o it is really no surprise that he has packed his administration with what one might call The Best and the Brightest 2.0 — people who are as dispassionate and rational and suspicious of emotion as the president prides himself as being: a bunch of cool, unflappable customers. (The exceptions are Vice President Joe Biden and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.)
[...]
The difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that 2.0 are not all Protestant, white males sprung full-blown from the Establishment as 1.0’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers were. Like Obama himself, they are by and large onetime middle-class overachievers who made their way into the Ivy League and then catapulted to the top levels of class and power by being . . . well, the best and the brightest. But in elitism as in religion, no one is more devout than a convert, and these people, again like Obama, all having been blessed by the Ivy League, also embrace Ivy League arrogance and condescension. On this, the Republican critics are right: The administration exudes a sense of superiority.
So what difference does it make if our policy-makers think they are above criticism? As Halberstam shows in “The Best and the Brightest,’’ people who are concerned not with the fundamental rightness of something but with its execution, because the rightness is assumed; people who see what they want to see rather than what is; people who see things in terms of preconceptions rather than of human conduct; people who are incapable of admitting error; people who lack skepticism and the capacity to grow beyond their certainties are the sorts of people who are likely to get us in trouble — whether it is an ever-lengthening war in Afghanistan or ever-deepening economic distress here at home. After all, we’ve been there once before.
Gabler is no one's right-wing ideologue; until a few years ago he was the resident lefty on Fox News Watch (a weekly critique of the media), before moving on to teach at U.S.C., and is currently a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., a think tank that features global warming and carbon trading propaganda front and center on its website.
Let me be clear: I don't buy Gabler's entire premise. I do not think the current administration features anything approximating the best and the brightest, in either an ironic or irony-free sense. But Obama and his advisors do embody the Ivy League elitism and arrogance of the JFK-era crew, coupled with an unalloyed hardcore, left-wing ideological underpinning, something that was notably absent from Kennedy's advisors, many of whom were dedicated anti-communists and World War II veterans.
What I find most significant about the piece is the source of the critique, and the recognition that hubris may be the defining characteristic of this administration.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 26, 2010 08:42 AM
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Comments
methinks you're perhaps setting too much store in that criticism, and its source. consider if you will the clintons: when they finally left the white house after their 8 long tawdry years of depredation, they did so in a blaze of dishonor, no? stolen white house silverware; vandalized WH computers; the o-so-presidential 'pardons' auction they put out on EBAY.....it's a long list.
the liberal establishment (said they) were appalled. "tacky", "disgraceful", all that. even that sanctimonious halfwit windbag david broder got in on the act, pompously bemoaning how they'd trashed the WH, and "it wasn't theirs to trash". tut tut! all very high-minded and (apparently) righteously outraged, blah blah blah.
then, about 10 seconds after bush moved in, they started in on him with the most vicious lies they could think of, attacking him and his family in ways they'd NEVER gone after bubba and morticia, and....all that feigned outrage at the clintons was gone gone gone.
they'd performed their little show, safe in the knowledge A) they and all their crowd knew they didn't mean it and B) now they could cling to the decades-old lie of "impartiality". "we criticized the clintons, too!!"
it's all kabuki theater, sound & fury meaning.....well, you know. see if you see ANY criticism of bambam and his crew anytime after september. see if you EVER see any article critical of mrs. bambam, in the snide tones they used when writing of laura bush or nancy reagan. won't happen. the ministry of truth won't stand for it.
Posted by: el coronado at July 27, 2010 12:15 AM