The Meaning of "Elite"

For most of my life, the word “Elite” has had but a single definition… those who are the very best in the world at what they do. In recent years however, America’s ongoing crisis of competence has helped create a second definition, one which is much less flattering. As public trust in American institutions has collapsed, the word “Elite” has become associated with a long record of failure at the top of just about every institution in America, both public and private.

Using this new definition, politicians on the Right have begun to attack the “Elites” who run these institutions and who are failing to deliver the kind of results, products and service we expect and to which we are entitled by virtue of the taxes we pay and the citizenship we hold. These attacks have been brutally effective because with a few notable exceptions, everywhere we look, we see highly credentialed “Elite” leaders with middling accomplishments who seem utterly lost in the critical jobs which they inhabit.

I would note, as an aside, that almost everywhere we see effective Elite leadership, that leadership is relentlessly attacked by the increasingly mediocre system which that Elite leadership threatens with its hyper-competency… Elon Musk comes to mind.

Almost no organization is immune from being tarred by this new definition of “Elite”… even those which have long been admired by a majority of Americans.

Organizations like the United States Secret Service.

Back in April, a strange story about the USSS came and went, mostly unnoticed except by a few terminally online news addicts on social media. It was the story of an agent on Vice President Harris’ protective detail who went crazy, pretend-hiding from her colleagues, deleting apps from the phone of a supervisor and eventually attacking him physically and having to be removed from the detail. The Secret Service is a stressful job in which the primary requirement is a willingness to die in order to protect one’s Principal, and so like most I didn’t think much of the story at the time.

But then, over the Summer there was a nasty row between the insurgent campaign of RFK Jr., Joe Biden and the Secret Service which he comands.

RFK wanted Secret Service protection and Biden didn’t want to give it to him. The optics for the President were not good. It seemed obvious to everyone that RFK’s campaign was damaging to Joe Biden’s re-election hopes, and the Kennedy family’s long ugly history with Assassins’ bullets is well known, and yet Biden remained intractable. No one will ever know the true motive for Biden’s refusal except for Joe Biden, but it wasn’t a good look for the President.

And we all know what happened next… GOP Presidential Candidate Donald Trump went to a rally in Butler, PA.

If anyone had told me a year ago that the second most enduring image of a Presidential assassination attempt would be that of a chubby Secret Service agent trying and failing to re-holster her weapon so many times that she finally gave up, I would’ve said you were crazy… and yet, here we are.

Because of that one enduring image of failure, many on the Right were quick to blame Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) for what almost happened in Butler. I believe this was a tactical mistake. For one thing, there was plenty of male failure to go around that day, including but not limited to the counter-snipers who failed to act until the assassin had successfully put lead on target, the agents who decided to abandon the most obvious sniper nest because the roof was too hot and/or too sloped, to the agents who ignored reports of an active shooter for more than 30 minutes before the first shots were fired.

But mostly it was a tactical mistake because it created an opening for the Left to suggest that what the Right really hates is the fact that female Secret Service Agents exist at all, which plays right into what has been their most successful argument throughout this political cycle, that the GOP is anti-woman.

This simply isn’t true, and we shouldn’t help them make the case.

Take a moment to think about some of the pop culture offerings which appeal primarily to the Right and it quickly becomes clear that no Conservative has ever had a fundamental problem with the concept of Female Secret Service Agents in particular, or of female law enforcement officers in general.

“In The Line of Fire” was Clint Eastwood’s last truly great leading man performance. Eastwood is a movie star who has long been more popular on the Right and “In The Line of Fire”, alongside “Dirty Harry” and “Unforgiven”, features Eastwood in a star turn that speaks to uniquely Conservative ideas about courage, honor, law-and-order, toughness and masculinity. But I have never heard a single Conservative suggest that “In The Line of Fire” is somehow unrealistic because the most courageous and lethally effective agent on Eastwood’s team is a woman, Lily Raines, played perfectly by Renee Russo.

In a similar vein, for forty years Tom Clancy’s “Jack Ryan” novels have been a staple on the book shelves of “Foreign Policy Conservatives”, who once revered the United States intelligence Services as much as the author did. The men and women of Clancy’s novels were universally “Elite”, in the old school definition of that word. They were the best in the world at what they did, and that included the Secret Service Agents who inhabit the novels.

(Above: Agent Raines leads the way)

The two most senior Secret Service Agents in the later novels are both women, and they’re both badass. One of them, Helen D’Agastino, whose nickname is “Daga” because she once coooly drew her weapon and put two rounds into the occular cavity of a dangerous perp, is last seen alive running to shield her “Principle”, the President of the United States, as a fully-loaded JAL 747 bears down on the US Capitol building during a joint session of Congress.

I have no doubt that “Daga”, or her equally capable replacement Andrea Price, could re-holster their weapon on the very first try, every time. They can DEI as many women like that to the top of the Secret Service as they want and I won’t lose a minute of sleep worrying about the safety of the President… nor would any other Conservative I know.

Similarly, I’ve searched far and wide and I cannot find a single Conservative reveiwer willing to go on record and say that Clancy’s well-deserved reputation for realism and attention to detail suffers because he placed two women at the top of the Secret Service hierarchy.

Conservatives object to incompetence, not plumbing… or at least we should. And incomptence was the problem in Butler on that hot summer day. The failure of the Secret Service in Butler was so pervasive, the embarrassing specter of the director of the agency trying explain the disaster was so complete, that the dam which had been holding back the flood of whispers and leaks since that bizarre incident back in April finally broke.

Read this expose from Real Clear Politics and marvel at the insane level of dysfunction inside the USSS. It’s beyond shocking. Homeless drug addicts read that article and think to themselves, “you know something, maybe I’ve got my shit pretty well put together, after all…”

There was a time not so long ago where you had to search long and hard to find examples of true incompetence at the very top of America’s public and private institutions. Nowadays it’s easier, and faster, to list the institutions that aren’t visibly corrupt or incompetent. From a Department of Transportation which can’t keep the ports open or trains on their tracks, to an FBI which seems better able to recruit morons to fantastical assassination plots than to interdict the “Known Wolves” shooting up our schools, to a Department of Homeland Security which can’t secure the border, or the Centers for Disease Control which seem to be in the business of creating and accidentally releasing deadly diseases via “gain of function” as much as they are in the business of “controlling” those diseases, to private sector firms like Boeing which can’t seem to put planes in the sky without those planes shedding parts at altitude, to Disney, Universal, Paramount and WB who no longer know how to make movies people want to see, to Anheuser-Bush and Harley-Davidson who seem to have forgotten how to… (checks notes)… sell beer and motorcycles to men.

Perhaps our institutions have always been this incompetent and were simply better at hiding it in the past, but I don’t think so. Something is badly wrong. The country feels broken in a way that doesn’t come with easy answers. But we’d better figure it out fast. We need to make our institutions “Elite” again… because it’s clear the dogs can no longer protect the sheep, and the forest is full of wolves.

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