Swan Song Part I - The Club (Or, Why Do These People Keep Getting Hired?)

The short version is that I'm going to be headed out of the country very soon, which neatly cuts off my access to cheap and guilt-free sources of fisking fodder. In these last few idle days, I'd like to synthesize what I've learned from this little project of mine. As it turns out, it dovetails with some things the bloggerati have been discussing as of late.

For example...what the fuck is with all these rancorous assholes getting hired on at respectable publications?

Kevin D. Williamson

 

The most recent - and arguably most controversial - upward move was the hiring of angry dog and National Review writer Kevin Williamson to The Atlantic. Now, I don't have a lot of respect for this particular publication these days (that kind of faded out once they decided to host Megan McArdle's cooking videos), but it is still a masthead with a very long history in American politics and culture.

Williamson is an odd choice for The Atlantic. True, the #NeverTrump brand (Motto: "Just because you're destroying the country, it doesn't mean you have to be crass") is very valuable these days, but Williamson's selection is still a stumper. He's not very high profile, for one. He's also a jerk - a jerk in real life (as he amply demonstrated in that notorious cell phone throwing incident) and a bigger jerk in his writing. There is, of course, his comments on executing women who get abortions and his bizarrely racist bit of creative nonfiction concerning East St. Louis. Those are the pieces that have generated the most outrage and the most head-scratching, but there's a third piece that's also commonly referenced but doesn't generate as much of an emotional response.

Ostensibly, it's an anti-Trump piece, but most of the vitriol is aimed at poor rural whites. Here's one of the most frequently cited chunks:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization.... Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

Just before the election, he wrote another piece that followed in very much the same vein, but cut out any pretense of being about Trump at all:

...most likely, your problem is not that you are suffering from schizophrenia or (though this is more likely) a debilitating addiction. Maybe you had a rough upbringing. Maybe, like most of us, you’d be in a better place in life if you were a little bit smarter, taller, better-looking, disciplined, and oriented toward the future. But there isn’t a government program that is going to change any of that.

Free markets — which is to say, the economic networks that emerge when people are left free to pursue their own ends and interests — are good at many things, and one of the things they are terribly good at is sorting. Companies know who their most productive people are and which of the firms they work with provide the best results; and, though it is more art than science, they are pretty good at figuring out what characteristics those valuable workers and partner firms have.

In short: Sorry your life sucks, but there's nothing we can or should do.

Most commentators reading pieces like this are trying to come up with reasons why he was hired if this is what he was bringing to the table. They're asking the wrong questions, though. Williamson wasn't hired in spite of this content but because of it. In fact, it's my opinion that it was his bashing of poor folks that was what made him eligible to join the Serious Journalism Club in the first place.

A bold statement? Sure, but it explains pretty much all of them.

Megan McArdle

 

If you wanted to demonstrate just how dim, cruel and lazy Megan McArdle is, well, she's certainly given you plenty of material. Here's a whole article full of McArdle idiocy, written in honor of her promotion to the Washington Post. The author of that piece set aside plenty of space for McArdle's disdain of the poor and yet he didn't get all of it. He missed this classic take:

As I wrote in an op-ed for the Daily that came out today, it's all too common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more (where "stuff" includes anything from a college education to a marriage license to a home).  But this is not true.

Let's leave aside that, on other occasions, McArdle had pushed "marriage makes you rich" arguments that completely contradict this. This statement is absurd on its face. Being poor is the state of not having much money; if you acquire more money, then under this definition, you are no longer poor. Liberals gave her plenty of shit over this.

But the key here is under this definition. What if McArdle is following another definition, one under which wealth is not actually the principle component of class?

Unlike some other recent wingnut affirmative action hires like Williamson and Bret Stephens, I know quite a bit about McArdle because I've read her horrible book and analyzed it for this very blog. Those of you who followed that series might recall the advice given within was highly inconsistent. The premise of the book - as spelled out in no less than the title - is that people need to be encouraged to take big risks and fail and try again, and this is so important that society needs to entirely forgive these failures. However, this principle only describes about half of the book. In the other half, we learn that risk is very, very bad, and that people must be taught to avoid it at all costs through strict adherence to procedure and swift, harsh discipline when they deviate.

The only way to reconcile those two threads is to assume that they comprise two very different sets of advice intended for two very different sets of people. The first group - the one for which she prescribes freedom and forgiveness - are highly creative, motivated and intelligent, people whose ideas are needed to grow the economy. The second group - for whom she prescribes regimentation and punishment - are dull-witted, self-centered and impulsive, a servile and childlike people. The key point comes in the final chapter, in which McArdle sings the praises of easy bankruptcy law, but only for the first group:

Bankruptcy lawyers shouldn't be criticizing Dave Ramsey; they should be thanking him. It's people like him, encouraging debtors to pay off as much as they can, who make it possible for us to maintain the easy bankruptcy laws that give relief to the clients of the consumer groups and lawyers who complain about Ramsey's message.

One set of people gets to just walk away from their mistakes, while the others are expected to drain their bank accounts, sell their homes, sell their goddamn body parts to pay for their mistakes. It's important that they sacrifice everything to keep the system upright so that their betters can be free to take important risks without sacrificing at all.

Obviously, the first group is much farther up the economic food chain than the sweaty peasants, and they don't need discipline and regimentation because they are just so much smarter and more moral than their lessers. Given that, is it possible that McArdle is operating under a definition in which the upper class is an objectively superior class of people?

And what if this definition is more widely accepted than any of us thought?

Even the Liberal Brookings Institution

 

The genesis for this post - well before any of this nonsense broke - came a few weeks ago at the Lawrence Public Library. I was in the new nonfiction looking for something I could read while walking back to my apartment and my eyes fell on the book Dream Hoarders by some aristocratic twit from the Brookings Institution. It's a slim book and, by my standards, light reading. Look at the jacket copy and you can probably guess why it appealed to my sensibilities:

It’s now conventional wisdom to focus on the excesses of the top 1% — especially the top 0.01% — and how the ultra-rich are hoarding income and wealth while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the more important, and widening, gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society. Income isn’t the only way to measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access to money generally determines who gets the best quality education, housing, health care, and other necessary goods and services.

...Various forms of “opportunity hoarding” among the upper middle class make it harder for others to rise up to the top rung. Examples include zoning laws and schooling, occupational licensing, college application procedures, and the allocation of internships.

That's what made me check it out, something I did in haste.

Dream Hoarders might be the most elitist book I've ever read, and it didn't take long to figure it out. This whole book is a long essay on the cultural, moral and intellectual superiority of the wealthy, along with an argument that it is these aspects and not money, connections, or other structural elements that have made it so hard for anyone to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

Now, as with most proper elites, he's not gauche enough to celebrate this - he presents his case with that mix of shame and pity that you get from some of these think tank/ideas festival types. Nevertheless, the argument is premised on the rich just being better than the poor, in many ways that have nothing at all to do with money. They're better parents who send their kids to better schools - and we know those schools are better because of all the rich kids there (and yes, some of the arguments are this circular). At one point, he even seems to argue that thanks to assortative mating, the upper classes are biologically superior to the lower classes.

Richard V. Reeves, the author, never really questions if this Brooksian "meritocracy" he describes actually exists. There's certainly evidence to suggest that the poor are hedged out because the wealthy have structured the system to favor their own kind regardless of whether their own kids are superior - that's my take. Reeves also believes that the system is fixed, but that it's fixed in such a way that rich kids really are superior. An example to illustrate the difference: A lot of employers screen for candidates who went to fancy, expensive schools. I would argue that these schools aren't necessary superior and that this is one of those ways in which the wealthy reduce competition by creating artificial barriers that the poor can't overcome. Reeves maintains that those fancy, expensive schools really are superior (he knows because of the totally unbiased metric of standardized tests and that feeling he gets on parent-teacher night) and do create superior children.

At one point, Reeves actually admits that poor kids who manage to make it through the obstacle course set up by the wealthy have a reputation for being better at their jobs than their born-on-third peers, which would suggest that this system is not remotely a "meritocracy." That would seem to back up my take more than his, but he promptly forgets he said that before the next chapter, the better to argue for his dreaded "market meritocracy" selecting the best people...all of whom just happen to be rich. He never really considers that these distinctions might be illusory.

My point here is not to bash some random Brookings wonk, but rather to point out an important fact: The notion that rich people are personally superior to poor people is not remotely controversial within the Brookings Institution. And if that's true, then it might not be controversial among elite circles at all.

And speaking of things that are inexplicably not controversial among rich assholes...

Charles Murray

Let us now take a few paragraphs to discuss the "redemption" of Charles Murray's career. I use the quotes because Murray never actually went away; after The Bell Curve blew up, we sweaty peasants quit talking about him for a while, but the man never stopped working, nor did he stop getting cited - Reeves namechecks him several times, and David Brooks has always been fond of him (and vice versa).

He kept on writing books, including Human Accomplishment (a catalog of Great Men which gave him another opportunity to argue for the superiority of white men), Real Education (i.e. Some Kids Are Just Dumb, Get Over It), By the People (his plan to impose bigbrain libertarian rule over the objections of the littlebrain voters), and the somewhat inexplicable The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead (a sort of high school graduation book for the disgustingly privileged which I very nearly featured here). But it was his book Coming Apart (i.e. The Bell Curve, but only for whites) that brought him back to the attention of the brutes.

He's made the news a few times in recent years. There were the protests at Middlebury College last year, which got him proclaimed a free speech martyr by Our Wonderful Newsmedia (the right to make large sums of money to speak at places where you aren't really wanted being a less celebrated component of the First Amendment). In the wake of that, he appeared on Sam Harris's podcast to discuss genetic "differences" in intelligence. Two affluent white egomaniacs calmly discussing the inferiority of black people and then patting themselves on the back for being "brave" truth tellers...I really never thought I'd see such a thing in my lifetime, but such was 2017.

In spite of all of this, Murray remains most notorious as the co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, a doorstop of a tome in which he argued for the intellectual inferiority of people of African descent. But what most people don't remember is that only a small part of the book concerned ethnicity at all. As a whole, the book dealt with a rising "cognitive elite" created through "cognitive sorting" (sounding familiar?) and, in the end, arguing from the likes of Aristotle that these differences are chiefly natural and need to be embraced rather than challenged. You can read a rather long takedown of this conclusion here; this post is long enough as is.

My point is that, for his notoriety, Murray writes about class a lot more than he does about race, and he mostly writes about race in the context of class. Losing Ground, which preceded The Bell Curve, was his argument that the welfare state is doomed to fail because it encourages bad behavior in the underclass. The 2006 book In Our Hands took the opposite approach to reach the same ends, suggesting that we should just give money to the poor and let them destroy themselves with it, thus freeing us of any responsibility. And then there's this obscure little AEI report from 1998, in which Murray writes about divergent cultures in a way that would become mainstream a decade and a half later thanks to Robert Putnam and Murray himself.

Putnam and Murray are frequently mentioned in the same breath, and for a reason. Their philosophies are not identical - Putnam doesn't go in for biological determinism, although Murray has likewise downplayed this in recent years - but it's hard not to notice the similarities between Coming Apart and Putnam's Our Kids, both of which wholeheartedly embrace the cultural superiority argument for disparate outcomes.

So why is it that Putnam gets so many liberal heads nodding while Murray remains despised? Answer: Because Murray done fucked up when he brought race into it. If he'd left those chapters out of The Bell Curve, his reputation wouldn't have taken such a hit (it also probably wouldn't have sold so well among the conservative set, but details). At some point, though, if you are going to make this argument, you have to discuss what it says about race. If you're going to claim that class is the natural result of personal decisions, eventually you have to make a note of the disparate difference between white and black in this country. If poor whites are poor because of their inferior morals and culture, then what does it say that poor blacks and Latinos are doing even worse?

To date, Murray is the only one dumb or arrogant enough to answer that question. Everyone else sidesteps it and only talks about whites, but make no mistake - the question is there, taunting them. If poor people are inferior to rich people, and indeed are poor because they are inferior, then it follows that certain ethnic groups are inferior to others. You can try to argue for structural racism, but that brings in the possibility of structural factors in poverty more generally and there goes your superiority argument. Even so, as long as you only talk about poor whites or poor people generally (implied to be white unless otherwise stated), then no one will push you on this.

As you can see, there's a fairly extensive history of conservative and "centrist" pundits talking about class as though it were personal inferiority that causes poverty, to the point where it is a central idea in elite circles. But wait, I feel like I'm leaving someone out, maybe someone who's made an appearance in everything I've ever written...

David Brooks

I hope that the above sections have helped explain why David Brooks has a career, because they sure helped me grasp it. Brooks has had a hand in this nonsense for his entire career. His first two books - the "Paradise Suite" - consist of endless sub-Erma Bombeck musings on the superiority of the upper class and their whimsically absurd and absurdly whimsical ways. The Social Animal was him throwing that into a blender with some bad fiction and worse science. There have been traces of that more-in-sorrow wailing on the plight of the benighted Poors in so many of his columns and tied up in the Great Man sermonizing that comprised 90% of this monstrosity.

I don't want to talk about those, though. I'd like to highlight a column that was one of the more broadly mocked things he's written in recent memory, despite being pretty trivial. But maybe the triviality was an illusion. Maybe Brooks gave away the game.

I'm talking, of course, about the sandwich column:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

A few things off the bat: One, Brooks actually mentions Dream Hoarders in this column, but I swear I didn't remember that when I started writing this. It was just a beautiful serendipity. Two, while I thought that Reeves came across as extremely superior in that book, Brooks seems to think that he didn't go far enough in that Reeves recognized some structural impediments (e.g. education, though see above as to my thoughts on the subject). This means that not only is Reeves not controversial, he's actually the moderate in the room.

The above paragraph, in all of its shitty rich guy glory, was Brooks' response to Reeves. Seriously. Brooks wrote that piece dumping on a totally real person who was for real a friend who was earnestly flummoxed by sandwiches with funny names in order to prove...what, exactly?

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

Brooks was arguing that rich people and poor people are so far apart that they are totally incapable of communicating. He's gone into this nonsense before regarding urban vs. rural - the infamous "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" debacle, in which he envisioned the United States as a nation containing New York, Chicago and then Mayberry for thousands of square miles - but this is a step past that. This is someone being rendered nonfunctional by a fancy sandwich, by bread and meat.

That right there proves to me that this person (provided she really exists and isn't a Friedman-like convenience construct) can't possibly be Brooks' friend in any real sense. He views her like a child, endowed with a very simple, unrefined intellect rendering her incapable of appreciating the diet of a superior figure, a mind so basic that it was frozen fast by a menu. In true upper-class ninny fashion, he presents this in a somewhat self-deprecating manner, but that doesn't change the fact that he views her as his lesser, someone lacking in what he considers very fundamental knowledge.

But then again, why wouldn't he view this totally real person as his lesser? That's a lesson he would have learned many times in those years since he learned that kissing William Buckley's ass would give him a pass into the world of the elite. What he writes about the poor is certainly less hostile than what we've seen from Williamson, McArdle or Murray, more in line with the "noble savages" sentiment of the delicately aristocratic, but in practice that doesn't mean much. Think about the views of well-to-do Englishmen on the original noble savages - noble, yes, with a pure and harmonious existence, but still decidedly inferior, in need of the correcting influence of their "civilized" betters. To Brooks, people from the sticks might as well be the denizens of some lost tribe, and the problem is that we're not taking his good advice.

This, however, is only a small part of what I hope to lay out. Part I addresses how one gets into what Driftglass calls the Club. The answer is simple - show that you hew to the prevailing worldview of the other members of the Club. But while the belief in personal superiority is a critical part of that worldview, it's not the whole thing. In Part II, we'll delve a little deeper into the world that those elite journalists serve.