Full piece here.

From the NY Times?:

‘The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.’

Such reportage might have something to do with Detroit, Chicago, the public pension failures across the country, Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, to name a few.  The Clintons are nothing if not ambitious.

There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the people and their elected officials in American politics right now; possibly related to much deeper structural problems:

The Republican party seems tired and out-of-touch to the people I’ve spoken with. It comes across as the party of big government and big business operating like it’s 1955 or so.  It’s being roiled by a Tea Party/small government populist resurgence which sees Washington as woefully distant from conservative principles.

It’s also being roiled by a libertarian coalescence as well,  which Ben Domenech’s libertarian populism argues is lining up more with demographic changes going on in America.  Technology is certainly changing our lives, but more people have been delaying marriage, and organizing their lives less around what we might call traditional values, including organized religion.

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So, what about the Democrats?  Do they want to take us back to about 1968 or so, back when there was a real WASPish ‘patriarchy’ to rebel against? Nowadays it looks more like an NPR/tech elite/university/cultural gatekeeper class on top actually running things, with the unions, rent-seekers and welfare state down below.

Here’s one (Marxist?!?) analysis put forward back during Occupy from Ken Anderson’s ‘The Fragmenting Of The New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility:’

‘The upper tier is still doing pretty well.  But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down.’

Here’s Walter Russell Mead, writing about NYC police unions:

‘In the public sector at least they have done surprisingly well at passing their jobs and connections down to future generations.  As the urban middle middle class shifted from a largely private sector group to a group primarily dependent on public sector spending and jobs, the political balance also changed. Like the goo-goos, the urban middle middle class needs more revenue from the rest of society: people in this group want the number of jobs in their institutions to grow and naturally enough they want to be better compensated: more take-home pay, better benefits, a younger retirement age with a more generous pension.’

A quote from Ira Stoll which I keep putting up:

‘Indeed, if there is a single fact that sums up the state of American political economy at the present moment, it is this: the Boston office building once home to Inc. Magazine and Fast Company, which chronicled and celebrated small and fast-growing businesses, is now the headquarters of a publication called “Compliance Week.”’

Related On This Site:   The Hoover Institution Via Youtube: Charles Murray On ‘Coming Apart’

Charles Murray At The New Criterion: ‘Belmont & Fishtown’…Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People…

Megan McArdle At The Daily Beast: ‘America’s New Mandarins’

Once you take apart the old structure, you have to criticize the meritocracy you’ve helped create: David Brooks At The NY Times: ‘Why Our Elites Stink’

Monday Quotation From Charles Kesler And A Few Thoughts on Conservatism