LET THE RECRIMINATIONS BEGIN.

Mike Lofgren calls out one of Our President's court intellectuals.  "Walter Russell Mead writes Trump campaign propaganda disguised as analysis."  Possibly, although it's misleading to call the professor a "Yale academic" (he once worked there) when his current post is Bard College, and I wonder if he's dubious of people who go by three names generally.

Has Yale’s Professor Walter Russell Mead (using the middle name in one’s moniker is a flashing caution light when it comes to pretention) ever actually ventured into Wheeling or Steubenville or Youngstown to see, unblinkered, what motivates their residents? The American class system is riven with more denial, fake guilt and crocodile tears, snobbery, reverse-snobbery, and sheer humbug than any social organization on earth.

We could call the roll of columnists and talking heads who go by three names, and it's not hard to come up with examples from all over the political spectrum, just turn on the opinion shows this evening or Sunday morning and convince yourself.  I'm probably in agreement with Mr Lofgren about the pretentiousness, although what I've done is simply use the railroad convention of two initials and a surname to refer to such people.

But that's not Mr Lofgren's most telling error.  Rather, it's that he decided to open up a can on the people whose lives are being blighted (For Their Own Good, mind you) by the ongoing confinement and shutdown of normal business.  "Could it be that Jesus, Duck Dynasty, and putting minorities in their place might have loomed larger in their political imagination than sober calculations about where they will sell their soybean crop, or how long they’d be able to keep their Obamacare policy?"

Listen up, Mikey, you'd better hope that the weather in Illinois will be favorable to getting those beans in the field.  Another growing season with snows into April and mid-October snows, and it's going to be difficult for hipsters to get their tofu fix.  (I have a view of the corn and bean fields across the mile road and hope to be able to report on the activity there.)

Meanwhile, the expert class hasn't been covering itself with glory.

But, says Mead, the pointy-heads discount the populist base’s profound distrust of establishment competence and wisdom on economic policy (meaning, mainly, outsourcing), while skimping on health care and infrastructure items like good roads and bridges, and at the same time piling up enormous deficits. He even gets in a few licks against social promotion and virtue signaling, whatever that is.

Getting a screed published by Common Dreams meets the bar for social promotion and virtue signalling. Q.E.D.

The American Conservative's Daniel Larison also weighs the professor's arguments and finds them wanting, although in a different way.

One of the reasons why there has been so much self-flagellation, as Mead would have it, is that for at least the last thirty years American leaders have overdosed the public with self-congratulation and fantasies of exceptional excellence that masked serious shortcomings and failings in our society. Especially since the end of the Cold War, many Americans have cultivated a triumphalist attitude that blinded us to the flaws of our system, and that blindness left us vulnerable. The “indispensable nation” that presumes to dictate the affairs of nations on the other side of the planet can’t even take care of its own people in an emergency. The government that imagines that it can remake other countries in our own image can’t provide enough protective equipment for our medical professionals. The U.S. could have invested much more in its own health care, infrastructure, and workers, but for decades we have chosen to fritter it away on imperial fantasies and giveaways to concentrated wealth.

There's nothing like a plague to quickly destroy concentrations of wealth.

That reference to a failure of government to provide protective equipment and ventilators is a topic for a future post.  Mr Larison is right, though, to be skeptical of nation-building activities.  Nations are emergent.  As will be the life of the world to come.