It is a multi-front war on the managerial and professional class.
". . . we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing."The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution of 1966-1975, a period that is described in English translations on public monuments in China as the "era of troubles," took place while my own generation was focused on the Vietnam War, hippie counterculture, the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate, and the greatest popular music of all time. Mao Zedong led a social revolution that parallels the one taking place now under President Trump.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
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| Mao's cult followers waving the Little Red Book |
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| Re-education of elites by doing factory work |
They had an enemy: intellectuals, whom Mao said embodied bad values and lifestyles. The class included professors, authors, artists, pundits, and teachers but also physicians, engineers, and people with technical expertise. These elites were rounded up, sent to re-education camps where they were expected to confess their crimes of "improper thoughts," and then sent to the countryside to work as farm or factory labor. Agricultural and factory drudgery was both punishment and opportunity for them to reconnect with proletariat values.
It was an economic, public health, and political disaster for China. Modern economies need the skills of educated people. The disaster laid the groundwork for Deng Xiaoping's reversal into capitalism, pragmatism, and today's China.
Donald Trump is carrying out a softer, Americanized version of China's cultural revolution. 
With the help of rally crowds who responded with unexpected enthusiasm to the "drain the swamp" phrase, Trump's 2016 campaign located an area of populist resentment symbolized by the person of Hillary Clinton. She represented the power and corruption of the elites. The swamp. She was Wellesley and Yale Law-educated, fluent in the values and vocabulary of the managerial class, and the archetype of the opinionated female boss. She and Bill hobnobbed with the wealthy, vacationed on Martha's Vineyard, and gave $300,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs clients. "But her emails" was a criticism of the entitlement of the elites. The fine-detail reality of what the emails meant or didn't mean wasn't important. Hillary had her own email server, whatever that was, and "regular people" do not.
Trump's time out of office was spent nurturing resentments and making plans for his own Cultural Revolution. Elon Musk is taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy. Who needs all these bureaucrats with their supposed expertise? Trump cut funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Research is a fancy form of waste, welfare for professional students. He fired meteorologists, air traffic controllers, foresters, health care workers, and data analysts. Cut first, add a few of them back if they are really, truly needed. Expert content review is censorship by experts. Let citizen-supplied information and misinformation fight it out while readers "do their own research."
Universities are a prime target. Trump's lawsuit argues that hiring by fellow professors evaluating peer-reviewed academic work disfavors conservative Republican thinking. How likely is it that Harvard would hire an archaeologist, geologist, or biologist who believed the world was 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs lived on Noah's Ark, and that species are God-created and immutable? Yet millions of the 77-million Trump voters believe exactly that, and they are unrepresented. Why should such a biased university have tax-exempt status?
Hillary Clinton, and Democrats generally, represent the hegemony of the managerial class. These are people who work in air-conditioned offices. They are comfortable with the courtesies and language expected by H-R departments. They earn an upper-middle class income moving data around. There is a feminine quality to it. It doesn't exclude men, but it doesn't value masculine traits of upper-body strength, physical courage, and willingness to get dirty. Trump's huge margins came in rural areas among men who work growing things, fixing things, digging things, and moving things. Outdoor work. Men's work.
I expect Harvard will win its lawsuits, but it may not win the larger political war. Trump is a morally flawed, narcissist demagogue, but he isn't stupid. He won't fight on the grounds of having cut funding for Alzheimer's disease research. He will find something said or written by a Harvard professor about gender fluidity or systemic racism, and it will sound foolish to nearly everyone. Trump will make that the example of wasteful elitist Harvard thinking. He will attack a straw man and look courageous and strong for doing so. After all, he will have taken on those Harvard snobs.
Trump is leading a populist revolution against the privilege of elites who have designed an economy that rewards what intellectual elites are good at: manipulating symbols and data. In that sense, the elites did rig the system.
It took 10 years for China to realize that it desperately needed those managerial and technical elites.
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12 comments:
A large portion of Republicans don’t believe in science. Galileo was house bound his last years for suggesting the earth circles the sun. Carl Sagan worried about this happening again and it sure looks like it is. When the experts opinion is viewed with equal weight to the loud MAGA follower, problems for everyone will ensue. JFK in charge says it all.
Generally agree except for the "not stupid" part. I certainly agree with the comparison of MAGA followers with the Chinese citizens waving their Little Red Books, (Red Hats?), with the obvious difference that the Chinese did so under a gun.
But, all said, was Mao a con man? Would there be a meme coin if he was around now? Mao steaks?
You mention Harvard's lawsuit. Eric Trump already is accusing at least one and I think more of Harvard's lawyers as having a conflict of interest. There might be something to that accusation. The very idea that Harvard's lawyers are unethical is not a good look for Harvard in the court of public opinion, especially MAGA public opinion and red-state public opinion. For many Americans, this litigation could deteriorate into what seems to be a classic pissing match before very long, with much of the public losing interest in it. Truth be told, Harvard might as well be the planet Neptune for many Americans, or the embodiment of Babylon in these latter days, regardless of Harvard's many very important accomplishments for humanity's benefit.
The dumbing-down of the US. Good job MAGA! The problem is that many stupid (lower IQ), uninformed, uneducated people don't even know how stupid, uninformed and uneducated they are, nor do they care. Often they are proud of it.
It will be beyond sad if the US becomes dependent on other countries for brainpower and research. The US will be reduced to an isolated, has-been nation, former superpower and world leader. Welcome to Yahooville, American-style.
The elites that Peter mentions spent the last few decades crapping all over the working class, both in their attitudes and in the way they globalized the economy and destroyed the lives of the working class. The working class eventually noticed and voted.
Trump is what you get when the elites fail to take care of the rest of the people.
I blame our clueless, selfish f***ing elites for the election of Donald Trump.
Being pretty poorly educated because willfully incurious, because self-referential (and self-reverential), could equal one version of stupid I suppose. But then we might as well call narcissism and selfishness "stupidity".
I'm now worried about who might comprise the Trumpist Gang of Four, or even Pol Pot.
Not sure why* you like to pick on Hillary Clinton. But, as you know, she WON the popular vote by 3 Million votes. That is a great accomplishment for the 1st female candidate of a major party considering the history of blatant sexism in this country. Al Gore, President Bill Clinton's Vice President, also won the popular vote. (We know that you don't like Al either. In addition to also not liking Joe Biden.) The problem in both cases (Al and HRC) was the ridiculous, antiquated and anti-democratic Electoral College.
Do you even know anything about Hillary Clinton before she went to Wellesley College (an all-women's college near Boston)? Do you know anything about her family of origin, her upbringing and where she is from? It doesn't seem like you do. Have you bothered to learn more about the woman who graduated from Yale Law School (where she met Bill) and eventually served as Secretary of State and a U.S. Senator from New York before running for President?
*but I have a good guess
Peter wrote: Why should such a biased university have tax-exempt status? My parallel question is: Why should such a biased church have tax-exempt status?
I know Hillary's history well, including Wellesley and Yale. She is two classes ahead of me, but I dated women at Wellesley when I was in college and ate breakfast at the Yale Law School when she and Bill were there, though they weren't famous then and I don't know if we met face to face in New Haven. I was in the School of Arts and Sciences and lived 100 yards from the Law School.. I contributed the maximum allowable to her campaign, as did my wife. I have attended six or eight events held by her, including both fundraisers and town halls in New Hampshire. I like her a lot more than many Democrats did. I preferred her to Bernie, but recognized that she did not have the affability gene that her husband has. She projects a "managerial" tone, which I am comfortable with personally because she and I are rather alike in background and education. That is the problem. She gives off the elitist vibe and I probably don't quite as much. I was a farm boy who grew melons, fought forest fires, and never really had the upper middle class vibe that she gives off, even though I stumbled into an upper middle class income after I left doing retail politics. I am analytical about Hillary. The fact that she is pretty perfect for me, but my taste is a counter-indicator for winning blue collar non-college votes. She is more polished than Bill. More boardroom-comfortable, not tavern-comfortable. I am comfortable with smart, educated women, and am married to one. Not every guy is. So, since you ask, yes, I am familiar with her personal biography, her political biography, her education, her personality. I have written about her self discipline and stamina, which I praised. I also wrote, though, that I stood five feet from her when she spoke for an hour listing the politcy proposals she hoped to enact, and I thought she was sound, sensible, but un-inspiring as a speaker, alas. She did not emotionally engage with any of the six or eight audiences I saw her speak to. I try not to be a fan-boy who ignores reality and just cheerleads blindly.That got us a situation where Biden's close allies were blind to his declining mental capacity. We don't do ourselves a favor by pretending we don't see what others see. At a $5,000 a person fundraiser for Biden we weren't allowed to take photos or record anything. I realize now that the campaign did not want to risk a recorded senior moment. They wanted to hide the truth. That was a selfish, disastrous decision. I tell the truth as I see it and if more Democrats had faced the Biden truth we would have had a real 2024 primary.
I blame the clueless selfish f***ing deplorables who voted for him.
Hillary Rodham Clinton does not come from an upper middle class background. I read a biography about her years ago and did a quick review on the internet. Her father was a small business man who owned "a small drapery fabric business." He was a staunch Republican from Scranton, PA, who graduated from Penn State with a BS in physical education in 1935 during the Great Depression. He also served in the Navy during WW II. Apparently he was gruff and difficult to live with.
Her mother left a very difficult home situation at the age of 14 to work as a nanny. Although her mother never had the chance to go to college, she always encouraged her only daughter Hillary. (Hillary was the oldest child, with two younger brothers.)
Hillary was born in Chicago in 1947. The family moved to a suburb of Chicago when she was three years old. Hillary Rodham was raised as a Methodist and she attended the local public schools, where she excelled, until she graduated and went away to college, where she also excelled.
There is nothing elitist about her family and childhood, at all.
The same reason that perpetual non-profit foundations are tax-exempt: because wealthy and influential people argued for legislation to make it so. The argument back then was, that private charities were more capital-efficient than government is at doing “good things”. If Harvard loses its tax exempt status, then you might see the end of all of them. It used to be hard to imagine. Not anymore.
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