Thread by @interfluidity

there’s a sense in which Donald Trump’s administration was the best thing that could happen to the professional-managerial class that most loathed him. he drew all kinds of fire that otherwise would turn towards them. 1/

i just listened to @LRCkcrw, and (on COVID stuff) it might have been Rush Limbaugh talking, the way all three of (“left”) @ebruenig (“right”) @DouthatNYT and (“center”) @jbarro used the term “bureaucrats”. castro.fm/episode/4N02rT 2/

i found this particularly striking with respect to @jbarro, who five years ago, in the wake of Trump’s election, became a pretty full-throated defender of elites and deference to elite guidance. 3/

now he sees the problem as a Biden Administration to strongly influenced by “bureaucrats” and by a faction the three panelists identified as Hillary Clinton supporters, who have deflected Biden from his own wiser and more sound temperamental bias towards “normal”. 4/

it’s the neurotic upscale pinheads for whom “work-from-home” is no great hardship versus “normal”. that seemed the consensus view of the three panelists. it also wouldn’t be unfamiliar on fox news. 5/

i can’t imagine even of these three panelists coming to anything near a consensus like this under a Trump Administration. 6/

failures of public health would have been blamed much more on the dysfunction of the administration in corrupting or failing to interface well with public health experts, rather than on the experts corrupting the sound soft populism (“normal ppl”) of the administration. 7/

one way to put it is that a decade and a half of elite-led catastrophe had made populism very popular by 2016, but the emergence of so ridiculous and obnoxious a figurehead as Donald Trump gave experts an ironic last play at demanding deference with roughly half the country. 8/

but absent the shelter of Donald Trump, “professionals” have not succeeded in turning around public skepticism. the unraveling of the legitimacy of demands of deference has continued. 9/

even among people like @jbarro who, i think, half a decade ago would have been a full throated defender of elite legitimacy. 10/

(i’ll note i am not intending in this thread to throw stones at @jbarro @ebruenig @DouthatNYT, all three of whom i hold in very high regard. i broadly agree with the new consensus i attribute to them.) 11/

(but we’d better figure out a kind of normal-people populism more muscular than what Joe Biden has offered, more competent and less destructive of our ability to live together than what Donald Trump offered, ASAP.) /fin