RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, Bacchae

What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy — our overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe?

Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance of life outside the Boston–New York–Washington corridor? Political correctness as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place to learn?

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.

The most enduring and destructive superstition about American politics is that the president is “in charge of” the economy, and so it was no surprise to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday say that she’d put her husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy.” As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke points out, this is an example of “talismanic” thinking, that what makes the world go ’round is having the tribal chieftain do that voodoo that he does so well.

There are some obvious problems with this line of thinking, the main one being that it is complete and utter undiluted poppycock.

It is true that the U.S. economy performed to general satisfaction during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But most of the big economic news of the 1990s had little or nothing to do with Bill Clinton, with government policies that were uniquely or mainly the work of Bill Clinton, or with the day-to-day management of public resources by the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-era boom was in no small part a continuation of the Reagan-era boom, which was, like the performance of the economy under previous and subsequent presidents, only partly a product of the president’s economic philosophy and policies. Two of the great economic-policy successes of the Reagan era — the taming of inflation and the bundle of reforms generally described as “deregulation” — were rooted in Carter-era policies. Ronald Reagan knew enough to understand that enduring the recession engineered by Paul Volcker and the Fed was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy, but he wasn’t terribly happy about it, and neither were voters: Reagan’s approval ratings were at 41 percent at the end of 1982, and his unpopularity cost Republicans a couple seats in the House. At the beginning of 1983, Reagan’s job-approval number was down to 35 percent. But in May of 1980, inflation had been 14.4 percent; in May of 1986, it was 1.5 percent, and Reagan’s approval number roughly doubled.

Was taming inflation Reagan’s doing? Volcker’s doing? Do we give Carter credit for choosing Volcker, or do we penalize him, knowing that he hadn’t wanted to do so but was pressured into it? Robert J. Samuelson and Paul Krugman have argued that out at some length, and the answer is inconclusive.

“Inconclusive” is the conclusion more often than not in these kinds of debates. The federal budget was in surplus (“primary surplus”) toward the end of the Clinton administration, as Mrs. Clinton points out. Why? Partly because of tax increases that Republicans fought vigorously against; partly because of spending controls that Democrats fought vigorously against; partly because of a stock-market bubble that liberated both the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans from making some really tough decisions.

On May 9, Vanita Gupta — the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice — uttered these words:

Here are the facts. Transgender men are men — they live, work, and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work, and study as women.

In other words, according to the DOJ, it is a simple “fact” that a man can have a menstrual cycle, that a woman can have a penis, and that men can get pregnant.

Then, on May 13, the administration purported to transform these “facts” into law by issuing a letter that threatened every single public school in America with the loss of federal funds unless it adopts the administration’s point of view that gender is defined not by biology but instead by personal preference.

The administration’s edict is clear: It interprets federal law to require schools to create a “safe,” “nondiscriminatory,” and even “supportive” environment for transgender students. Creating gender-neutral access to bathrooms or showers represent mere examples of how schools comply with the edict. In other words, the broad principle is “nondiscrimination,” and bathroom access is but one narrow application. Thinking through the broad principles reveals the depth and breadth of the administration’s power grab. The consequences will be profound.

First, the very act of teaching biology and human physiology will be hate speech unless it’s modified to conform to the new transgender “facts.” Teachers will have to take great pains to note that chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormonal systems, and any other physical marker of sex is irrelevant to this thing called “gender,” which, “factually,” is a mere state of mind.

Second, any statements of dissent — from teachers or students — will be treated as both “anti-science” and “discriminatory,” contributing to a “hostile environment” that schools are legally bound to prohibit. This prohibition will go well beyond the use of pronouns and into discussions of what it means to be male and female. The argument that a “girl” with a penis remains a boy will be treated exactly the same as an argument that blacks are inferior to whites or Arabs inferior to Jews.

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Sebring is 98% white. Ohio governor John Kasich is a Republican, but currently favored by the media. So talk of Sebring being the next Flint remained just that.

St. Joseph, Louisiana might have been the other “next Flint,” but before long Louisiana had elected a Democratic governor. St Joe’s is mostly black and there are no Republicans in sight to blame for its water crisis. Plenty of villages, towns and cities have tainted water. The cause is usually local, but the media is only interested if it has the right victims and the right villain for its manufactured drama.

The closest counterpart to the media’s wildly dishonest coverage of Flint’s water troubles was its Katrina reporting. Even though New Orleans had an incompetent Democratic mayor, who would be sent to jail, and a Democratic governor, all the blame was directed at the Republican president. The crisis coverage was filled with hyperbolic exaggeration in which Brian Williams’ own lies garnered no attention. New Orleans was a post-apocalyptic hell on earth where the residents had devolved to cannibalism. All because of Bush. The Flint coverage is the old Katrina coverage with Snyder swapped out for Bush.

If Romney had won the last election, Flint would be his fault. But with Democrats in the White House and in Flint, the media chose the lone Republican in the middle. It had no interest in asking questions about the EPA’s slow response to the crisis or in investigating local Flint politicians.

These included Councilman Wantwaz Davis, a convicted killer, whom the media celebrated as the hero of the Flint crisis, while dismissing his time in jail for murder. Davis was expert at getting media attention by playing up his background and denouncing the tainted water as “genocide”.