Trump's own elites tripped him up: Conservative

A conservative columnist who has accused President Donald Trump of being surrounded by sycophants, appointing trolls and guiding foreign policy by his own narcissism has a new accusation — namely, that the president is being tripped up by the same elites he vowed as an ostensible populist to defeat.

Describing the recent death of “overpopulation doom-monger” biologist Paul Ehrlich, New York Times right-winger Ross Douthat cited how his fellow right-wing pundit Richard Hanania condemned Ehrlich’s legacy.

“He ‘was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes,’ Hanania wrote,” per Douthat. “‘He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation.’”

He added, “This analysis is correct and indeed could be taken further: Ehrlich wasn’t just prominent; his ideas were also profoundly influential, shaping population control policies that in the short term yielded horrifying human rights abuses in countries like India and China, and in the longer run pushed East Asia down a path to potentially catastrophic population decline.”

At this point, Douthat compared the scholarly Ehrlich with a very different figure — conservative podcaster Joe Rogan.

“Consider, by way of example, the difference between Paul Ehrlich and Joe Rogan,” Douthat observed. “Hanania is hard on Rogan, treating him as the embodiment of populist anti-intellectualism, contemptuously listing all the ideas given a respectful hearing on his show — from ancient cities below the pyramids to anti-vaccine theories to 9/11 trutherism to psychic phenomena — that “are rejected by virtually all academics and experts in the relevant fields.”

He added, “This is fair enough. But it’s also fair to say that Rogan and much of his audience seem to hold this range of wacky and paranoid ideas together in a jumble, considering them as theories and possibilities, without building a rigorous or zealous system around their precepts.” By contrast, Ehrlich was able to take his single idea and “persuade individuals, institutions and governments to conflate his misanthropy with science, reason and progress — which only a clueless populist or a religious fanatic could possibly oppose.” In this sense, he compared Ehrlich to people like those promulgated by Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic which were later harmful. (Douthat did not go into specifics on that point.)

From there, he explained how similar elite-based thinking has hamstrung the Trump administration.

“For instance, the struggles of the Department of Government Efficiency partially reflect a populist unwillingness to listen to credentialed experts about the sheer difficulty of budget cutting,” Douthat wrote. “But the belief that a group of high-I.Q. outsiders can come in and remake a complex system is itself a characteristic elite temptation, a right-wing version of the progressive faith in ivory-tower experts. It’s too simple to say that Elon Musk struggled in Washington because he embraced populist paranoia; he also struggled because he thought that his own forms of truth-seeking, so successful in business, were adequate to dealing with a very different world.”

He also observed that the Iran war was the product “of the pre-Trump G.O.P. elite and think-tankers who had been making the case for intervention for years. The voices raised in opposition often belonged to the populist wing, including some of its most paranoid factions. And while he quickly soured on the conflict, one of the initially pro-war voices was Richard Hanania, overcome with temporary optimism about the ability of the American military to remake the world.”

He concluded, “The takeaway from this experience is not that populist governance is desirable; it clearly fails in many of the ways that Hanania describes. But recognizing those failures shouldn’t make us suddenly naïve about elite failure, which persists even under populist conditions, and retains its distinctive power to dress hubris in the garments of wisdom and tempt smart people into folly.”