Clinton’s Clueless National Elite

The trouble with our current national elite is they really, deeply, truly believe they are better. They are the product of high SAT scores and elite universities, trained to rule, a bicoastal meritocracy in control of government, the media, the arts/entertainment, and the global, knowledge-based economy.

The old land-based aristocracy understood they held their exalted status via dumb luck. Our meritocracy is more arrogant, believing brains earn them the right to rule. Therefore, they cannot defer to the country’s vast, inferior majority. But the U.S. inconveniently is a democracy that proclaims all people equal. That’s not meritocracy!

Thus our outnumbered elite know they must by “hook or crook” maintain their status. That means rigged elections (see “Undocumented Democrats”). It means corruption (as in “Clinton Foundation”). It means Hillary’s “public” (false) and “private” (real) positions, as discussed here.

Hillary was raised a white-privileged Goldwater Republican, with no love for the masses. In college, along with many of her fellow late ‘60s anti-Vietnam elitists, she made a smooth transition from reactionary to radical without dropping her detachment from the masses, re-tagged “rednecks”.

Hillary was early to discover Saul Alinsky, even before he wrote Rules for Radicals (1971). Roger Kimball, in the conservative Washington Examiner, tells us that in 1969, Hillary wrote "'There Is Only the Fight ...': An Analysis of the Alinsky Model," a 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis that at the Clintons' request, remained embargoed until after they leave the White House.

We know that Alinsky:

• admiringly cited Lenin's observation that the Bolsheviks "stood for getting power through the ballot, but would reconsider after they got the guns.” 

• practiced deviousness, saying there would be "absolutely nothing here that the police department or the ushers or any other servants of the establishment could do about [trashing]. The law would be completely paralyzed.” 

• preached mouthing various nostrums about the welfare of children, access to healthcare, etc.; one might rail against inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., but at the end of the day, politics was all about the acquisition of power and life was all about politics. 

• in Rule No. 13 advocated, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it ... All issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” 

• in Rule No. 4 said, "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules,” adding, "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity.” 

As Alinsky says, it’s all about power — the “private,” real side of defeating the enemy. Or, as Hillary herself described her opponents:

You know, just to be grossly generalist, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. . . Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable. . .

Comment: What’s so very wrong about the Alinsky/Clinton approach to power is that the differences between people are far less important than their similarities. We are all flawed. A century ago, the white world went crazy believing skin color determined who should rule — supposedly based upon the “science” of evolution. Then, it was about superior v. inferior races.

A world war later, have we not learned anything? Brains no more divide us than did skin color. In a democracy, meritocracy is doomed.