John H. Cochrane: Incompetent [Delusional, Condescending] Elites Make Trump Look Appealing

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   The left, of course, now loves democracy but hates populism. But populism, characterized as opposition to elites and/or elite rule, is not inherently bad. Its goodness or badness depends on the character of the elites at the relevant time. And our political and cultural elites are largely delusional and incompetent--and incompetent largely because they're delusional. Yes, they claim more expertise than they actually possess--not always, but often. But the real problem is that they've allowed postpostmodern progressive politics to infect not only their political judgments, but their nonpolitical ones as well. It's bad enough that e.g. psychology and medicine have lent their credibility (such as remains) to gender ideology and the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children...but they even allowed it to infect their judgments about COVID, which ought to have been very far-removed from politics. Pushing weird sexual and quasi-sexual weirdness...well...that's just what the left does now... But pushing/enforcing not only mask mandates and vax mandates, but the left's terminological preferences about virus-naming? And declaring that church services were verboten, but BLM riots were just fine? You couldn't make that up. (And, note: if the argument had been: church services should be held outside, too...that would have been different. But the argument was, rather: "systemic racism" is so dangerous that protests against it are so important that blah blah blah...)

   Anyway.

   Yeah, there's a cult of Trump. Absolutely. There are people who simply will not hear a bad word spoken about him. Not denying it. I think they're as crazy as you do. They're off their collective nut.

   However, most Trump supporters support him reluctantly, and do so only because they judge--probably correctly, IMO--that the other guys are worse.

   I'd add to the Cochrane piece: the combination of (a) patent lunacy, (b) incompetence, and (c) condescension toward ordinary people...I mean seriously. Fuck that. To be looked down on disdainfully by a group of ludicrous, addlepated elites religiously devoted to a laughably absurd, crackpot religion they just picked up last Tuesday... Any reasonable person must be revolted.