The “establishment” was the institutions of liberalism — the media (especially The New York Times), the universities, the courts. We, by contrast, were outsiders, training low-caliber arms fire at the high, fortified walls protecting the liberals who really wielded power.
The fact that the magazine’s editor in chief advised George W. Bush prior to his run for the White House and then occasionally visited the president of the United States in the Oval Office was irrelevant. So was the fact that one of Bush’s senior advisors (Peter Wehner, who now writes regular op-eds for the Times) sent frequent faxes to our offices giving the administration’s spin on events — spin that not infrequently made its way, uncredited, into the editor in chief’s widely read monthly column in the magazine.
.. the Republican counter-establishment unanimously supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and actively excommunicated the few on the right who dared to dissent from the party line.
If there was a mea culpa for this, I missed it.
Trump As Republican Apocalypse
I am fond of the word “apocalypse,” which in common usage means “the end of the world,” but etymologically means “an unmasking.”
.. Taking a stand against Trump is all well and good. But I’d have been more impressed by an honest effort to come clean: Yes, we’re the establishment; yes, we’ve made some massive mistakes and need to change course; but Trump is not the answer.
Instead, we’re left with the same old denial of responsibility.
Until that changes, the Republican establishment will remain vulnerable to the anti-establishment furies it unleashed so many years ago and has never ceased to encourage.
.. It really is hard to overstate the degree to which people on the Right’s leadership class think of themselves as outsiders.
.. like Fidel Castro playing the eternal revolutionary
Maybe Rubio’s Just a Bad Presidential Candidate
While it is often taken for granted that Rubio is the one that party leaders and donors should get behind, he has scarcely any qualifications to be president. He has nothing like the executive experience that the other “establishment” candidates have in spades. (If you judged Rubio against Kasich or Bush just on their resumes, he is hardly the obvious “establishment” choice.) Rubio also ran away from the only major piece of legislation that he worked on in his one term in the Senate. That does not exactly scream leadership material to the people that are “supposed” to rally behind him.
.. Many people are impressed by Rubio because he delivers speeches well and performs capably in debates. He is smooth and fluent when speaking about policy (even if the things he’s saying about it happen to be dangerous or nonsensical).
.. For most people, he doesn’t inspire the sort of excitement or devotion that Trump does, and that’s because he is a little too polished, too scripted, and too much the career politician (which of course is exactly what he is).
.. Add in his other weaknesses, including his unappealing message of perpetual meddling in foreign conflicts, and you’ve got a recipe for a bad candidate.
John Kasich and the Fading Republican Establishment
But she was also interested in how the most prestigious banks, consultancies, and law firms were responding to pressures to make their companies more racially and culturally diverse. Rivera embedded with corporate recruiters working élite campuses, interviewed the partners, canvassed the applicants. She found that even when the members of firm’s leadership were looking for diversity, they were drawn to candidates whose experiences mostly matched their own. Investment banks were thrilled to find an African-American candidate they wanted to hire, but she was more likely to be a Princeton midfielder than the valedictorian at Spelman.
.. Recruiters, Rivera found, tended to have an exceptionally narrow idea of what qualified a candidate as élite. One partner told her, “Someone will show up and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School], but I am an engineer at MIT and I heard about this fair, and I wanted to come and meet you in New York.’ God bless him for the effort, but it’s just not going to work.” When recruiters considered a candidate beyond an exceptionally small group of élite schools, it was often because the candidate had a personal connection with someone at the firm, and those candidates “were almost exclusively white and from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds.” One of Rivera’s conclusions was that the system of selection in these firms was not what we would call a meritocracy but rather something more confined and particular: a system of individual sponsorship, in which the élites hand-pick their successors.
.. Kasich told a voter that the response to inequality was not to raise taxes but to encourage workers to develop more skills. A middle-aged woman stood up in the crowd, sounding astonished, and asked if Kasich was “seriously suggesting” that; even for people she knew with master’s degrees, she said, it could be hard to find work. Kasich suggested that maybe their degrees were of the wrong kind, or simply wrong for the region. Maybe they needed to move.