Okay, there’s a fair amount of extrapolation and interpolation required to produce that pungent condensation of WashPost dude Dan Drezner’s last several columns, including the fact that the words “Fareed Zakaria” and “horse’s ass” never appear in any of them. Nonetheless, I feel safe in pronouncing that that is Dan’s bottom line.
Fareed Zakaria is right on occasion, but he’s always had a weakness for inconsequential excitement, and so when Donald Trump bravely attacked an airstrip by remote control, Fareed went wild, much to his subsequent embarrassment, exclaiming “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night”, displaying all the intellectual heft of a kitten spying a bright, shiny object.
Patiently, without naming too many names, Dan points out how stupid all this pants-wetting is, how pathetically grateful the Acela1 class is for some reason—any reason—to believe that we have a normal president. But, as Dan mercilessly points out, we don’t: “he’s awful at foreign policy rhetoric, has zero sense of strategy and appears to have appointed an incompetent secretary of state.” Furthermore, he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know anyone, and he gets 99% of his “ideas” from TV. Compared to past periods in U.S. history—the entire Civil War “era”, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War—we have practically no problems. Why do we have the worst president in our history?2
Afterwords
Why do I seem to be picking on Dan so much? Because he’s there?
- I frequently ride the Acela, and it’s a lot of fun, though its history is just a bit embarrassing to the “government works” crowd, of which I am at least 60% one. The idea for a European-class high-speed train had been tantalizing the East Coast elite for decades. When Amtrak put out bids for the train, the Canadian Bombardier company had the lowest bid by far, the only problem being that Bombardier had never built a high-speed train before. The Acela arrived years behind schedule and with many kinks yet to be worked out. Amtrak and Bombardier ended up suing each other (a lot). It’s likely that 9/11 “saved” the Acela, because in the old days riding the New York/DC air shuttle was scarcely more complicated than riding the subway, and significantly less complicated than riding the Acela. ↩︎
- No problems? You call the “gutting of the American middle class” not a problem? Well, for the most part, the middle class, rather than being “gutted”, has gotten so rich it isn’t middle class any more. What we have is the collapse of the “Great Lakes Advantage”, the massive American heartland that had an effective worldwide monopoly on modern industrial production. U.S. Steel, GM, and all the rest charged monopoly prices, pocketed monopoly profits, and paid monopoly wages. All that has gone away. We should be able to make the adjustment, but Republicans don’t want to. ↩︎
