Among All the Best People
26th February 2015
Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.
The flip side of fame is often fear. Take the fate of Jonathan Gruber. In 2006 president Obama told an audience that he had “stolen ideas liberally” from Gruber, “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”. Gruber once had multiple contracts worth millions to supply economic modeling to the president’s signature healthcare program. He was riding high.
Then Rich Weinstein an investment adviser from Philadelphia found a series of videos taken at small forums in which Gruber confided to audiences the less than flattering inside dope on Obamacare. It portrayed an administration laughing at ignorant voters for believing in the promises of the program. After the videos were publicized Gruber’s world began to fall apart.
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If you really want to understand what holds the liberal establishment together the one-word answer is fear. Fear among the rich has a different flavor from fear among the poor. The poor are often so used to deprivation and insecurity that it holds no special terrors for them. When you’re already a bum and a good day is when you can eat the whole box of macaroni and cheese; when you’ve been unemployed for longer than you can remember, then “you’ll never work in this town again” can be answered by “so what?”
High flyers on the other hand, have an awful long way to fall. Nobody wants to finish up like the fictional Stanton Carlisle, who descends from the heights of the entertainment industry, fleeing police trouble and winds up working in a carnival freak show, eating live chickens for a living. And therefore media will be paying very close attention to the fate of Jonathan Gruber, formerly “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”. If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s to wind up like Gruber.
The chains of patronage are hard to avoid in exalted circles. According to Elias Groll writing in Foreign Policy, Rudy Giuliani is a consultant for Qatar. That’s nothing. The Clintons have collected over two billion dollars from foreign governments and lobby groups through their foundation.
‘Chain of patronage’ is an elegant term for the wind beneath the wings of the Crust.
You haven’t arrived until everyone is offering you job; and once hired you don’t make waves with money like that at stake. The great and the good are bound together by chains of gold. Some will argue this is a good thing. The Clintons were perhaps the first prominent American politicians to understand that Globalization made it possible for an international elite to settle all disputes by means of cash payments or penalties. Once the top men had reached an understanding, the elites could jointly rule over the international taxpayer, thus abolishing conflict forever. In today’s world no longer are patronage relationships limited to national borders, as was formerly the case. Today, political deal-making is global.