THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency the first time, one of the smug coastal cosmopolitans sketched a cartoon that was hailed by all the other Credentialed Fools.

My Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster notes the cartoon is not the flex the Fools think it is.

[T]he pilot does not choose your destination.  You do that yourself…if you are an airline passenger, by choosing the airline and the flight, if you’re going by charter or are the airplane owner, by telling the pilot directly where you want to go.  But in neither case will you hear the pilot say, “Hey, you guys are kind of out of shape; forget Florida, we’re going to Minnesota for cross-country skiing and ice fishing.”

He notes a number of other things, including division of labor among experts.

[A]lthough the pilot in command is responsible for and is the final authority as to the operation of that aircraft, he is also responsible for gathering information from multiple sources relevant to the safe conduct of the flight: weather information, fuel calculations, airspace restrictions, mechanical condition of the aircraft, etc. He can’t just say well, the plane is in good shape and there’s plenty of fuel to get there, so let’s go. Compare and contrast with the politician who in making a ‘lockdown’ decision chooses to rely only on the opinions of virologists and epidemiologists, while ignoring any information about the effects on schoolchildren and small businesses.

A commenter quips, "Expert. That word is well on the way to meaning something like 'overly credentialed fool.'"

It does not have to be this way, and yet, dear reader, don't contemporary technocrats put a lot of their efforts into undoing the errors of past technocrats?  "Internal improvements."  Eugenics.  Urban renewal.

Maybe, as Pajamas Media's Chris Queen notes, by their fruits shall we know the overly credentialed fools.

Rural voters made their voices heard as well. Tired of the “big city problems” that spread throughout the country, rural voters turned out largely in support of Trump. Voters without college educations, whom I firmly believe the mainstream press reports on dismissively, voted for the interests that matter most to them, instead of the issues that the elite says should matter.

In 2024, voters soured on the Biden-Harris administration. They were fed up with the media force-feeding a great economy that didn’t reflect in people’s paychecks or spending patterns. They were tired of an administration that denied biological reality to placate a tiny minority of the deluded. They had had it with bureaucrats telling them what to drive, how to heat their homes, and how to cook their food. And they showed up at the polls.

Matthew Continetti, who might be in Official Washington but not of Official Washington, cautions such voters to be careful what they wish for.

The Donald Trump-Elon Musk mind-meld may provoke, or may have already provoked, complications and backlash. Pete Hegseth would be a telegenic disruptor at the Defense Department—and quite possibly a one-man recruitment machine—but is he prepared to lead the largest and most unwieldy organization in the United States? Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face strict scrutiny before the Senate approves their nominations to be, respectively, director of national intelligence, attorney general, and secretary of health and human services. The Senate has a constitutional role and responsibility to provide advice and consent to the president. It is, as they say, the federal government's human resources department.

And the Senate may not deem Gabbard, Gaetz, and Kennedy worthy of confirmation. Indeed, their nominations may not come to a vote.

That's what advice and consent means, dear reader, and I am not a fan of an incoming president attempting to get as much done at the margin of Susan Collins as he can.  Look what that strategy got Dementia Joe.  The voters, though?  Perhaps they want the plane flying to a different destination.

Institutional Washington—and I belong in this category—was tempted to forget during the Biden years that Trump and MAGA always have intended to overturn the established order, to give the middle finger to the permanent structures of government and the credentialed elites who live in and around the nation's capital, and to enact their agenda despite howls of outrage. The past week, then, has been both a reminder of the past and a preview of the future. When Donald Trump is president, the unconventional happens. The chattering classes wail. Guardrails are tested. Politics matters. Everything is up for grabs. And no one is ever bored.

Whether any resolution to the punishment cycles will follow remains to be seen.  But Chris Queen and James Zogby, writing in Common Dreams, can at least agree that the Current Crop of Experts ought not be navigating the Ship of State.

One problem with the political consultant class isn’t just the power they wield, it’s the judgements they make, and to whom they are ultimately answerable. It’s not to the political parties, or the voters. It’s to the donors who are paying their tab.

Another problem is how overly cautious, unimaginative, and out of touch these consultants are with voters and their needs. A former Obama official once decried the “foreign policy blob” which he described as a self-perpetuating cast of characters who had served in past administrations. They now populate the think tanks and the commentariat. They are out of touch with a changing world and yet offer the same ideas—a kind of groupthink of conventional wisdom—which failed before and are destined to fail again. The same is true of the political consultancy blob. They are out of touch with a changing electorate and have nothing more to offer other than the same old ideas that may have succeeded once but, given the changes that have occurred in the electorate, are destined to fail.

For example, those who ran this year’s Democratic campaigns failed to appreciate the economic insecurity of white working class voters, instead focusing their attention on what they called the “Obama coalition” of young and non-white voters, and college educated women. They rejected as too leftist increasing taxes on the richest 1%, providing universal health care, and raising the minimum wage. Instead of attending to the needs of working-class voters in key battleground states, they had Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris campaign with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney believing that she would help win over moderate Republicans, and suburban women—which she could not. And of particular note, they failed to understand the impact of the genocide in Gaza on not only Arab American voters, but also on key components of their Obama coalition, in particular young, progressive, and non-white voters.

That's more a lament about the unwieldily large political bundles both major parties attempt to sell, and a second Trump presidency will run afoul of that same problem.  The kind of poseurs who accept that cartoon as Received Wisdom?  In the manner of losing skippers everywhere, they blame everyone but themselves.

Democrats lost the White House and both houses of Congress. Harris won far fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. And lost votes with almost every demographic group, including Hispanics, Asians, white women, and, of course, Arabs.

In the aftermath, the Democratic pundits will find fault with the voters and their choices, not with the poor decisions they themselves made. They will denounce White voters as racist or misogynistic. And they will ask, how could Hispanics vote for Trump after what he and his supporters said about them? And how could Arabs and Muslims forget what Trump did to them during his first term?

In hearing this, I am reminded of one of the sayings attributed to St. Augustine—that in the contest between the church and the world, it’s the church that must go to the world, not the world to the church. In other words, don’t blame the voters. If you want their votes, you must earn them.

Perhaps "government is not the solution to our problems" first requires the Credentialed Experts to have a new birth of humility.