nakedcapitalism | On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into
banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American
exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we
can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that
introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment?
Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate
democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?
It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even
more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with
the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And
remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of
people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of
people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a
meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the
claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore
obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much
better than everyone else.
And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10%
professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease. Recall
in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal how he set forth, without irony, a
conference that was treacly with the self-regard, with the way every
participant was lavished with embarrassing exaggerations of their
accomplishments. No one had the slightest sense of how narcissistic and
pampered they seemed. And it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d all collapse
in a heap if presented with a real challenge, like suddenly becoming
destitute or being dumped in a remote area with neither a water bottle
nor GPS.
And we keep seeing this leadership class succeed in rent extraction
and not much else. Go down the list: The post-crisis failure to reform
the banks or even go through the motions by incarcerating a few execs
and turfing out some board members. Our grossly over-priced,
underperforming health care system. Our student-impoverishing higher
education system. The F-35. The botched Obamacare rollout. Our
Middle-East nation-breaking, which has scored geopolitical own goals
like destabilizing Europe, facilitating Russia asserting itself a
geopolitical power despite having an economy the size of South Korea and
in the face of our economic sanctions, and making us deservedly
disliked around the world. Hillary Clinton losing to of all people
Donald Trump despite spending twice as much as his campaign spend
because her team was enamored of Robby Mook’s models and somehow forgot
about the Electoral College.
And if you believe, as Team Dem does, that every problem can be
solved with better PR, the corollary is you never admit to failure, you
never do post mortems, and you keep incompetents around who you allow to
fail and fail again.
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