This country has been run by roughly the same 100 families for at least the past one hundred years. And some time in the 60’s and 70’s all of their children got radicalized. They grew their hair out, marched against the war in Vietnam, and have never since changed their views or ways, and have brought their kids up the same way.
Their parents were infuriated and disgusted, but that did not prevent the graduates of Exeter and Harvard from going into “public service” and filling the highest echelons of our government with their fellow travelers.
And for these people, Trump’s greatest sins are that 1) he isn’t one of them; and 2) he is gauche; he lacks style of a sort they recognize. He is vulgar, and even if he has principle, he lacks class, and class–in all senses of the word–is all they care about. Where you come from, who you know, how you dress and speak and carry yourself. If you merely enact great policy, that scarcely excuses the crime of being blue collar and unelite. Trump carries himself as nouveau riche. That will not do. Simply will not do.
These people have benefited greatly from an American system they nonetheless despise. And even though they have zero intention of relinquishing their control of it in whatever they want to come next, they nonetheless want to be known for their sense of Noblesse Oblige, which in their case is a farcical sense that the people they are killing and ruining through malignant neglect and bad policy somehow benefit from their ministrations.
And these people, plainly, are willing to cause global starvation and to inflict major psychic and economic wounds on the world in order to pursue their aims. That they have tea parties and receptions with the Communist Chinese seems obvious to me. Xi must seem to them their sort of fellow. Most of them, of course, are insane. Most ridiculously rich kids are. David Rockefeller, Jr. thought Fidel Castro was one of the coolest guys he ever met. But if you think of Cuba as a prison, and Castro as a prison warden getting rich on the system, you’ve come very close to the reality. Think of the warden in Shawshank Redemption, except that he was never caught. He lived a long and prosperous life, able to deliver 6 hour rants to audiences too terrified to pretend they were not interested.
But this is the world we live in. Nobody will write about it, because only the people inside of it really understand it, and they are taught from an early age to look out for members of their class, even if some of them wind up as heroin addicts on the streets somewhere.
I feel this. I can’t see it.