Virtue-crats, Autocrats, and Plutocrats
I still have the February issue of "Imprimis: The National Speech Digest of Hillsdale College" on my desk.
Hillsdale College is a teensy "conservative arts" school in Michigan that is seemingly dedicated to passing lavish per diems on to every rightical chic crackpot in the book.
As such this school is a favorite stop on the conservative speech circuit where the most imbecilic platitudes may be mumbled for all the market can bear and in front of a sympathetic audience.
Last month's front-pager was hapless virtue-crat William J. Bennett the former Secretary of Education under Reagan and later Bush I's "Drug Czar". Big Bill is a famously inept player on the national level, his stint as Education Secretary occasioned plunging test scores all over the nation followed by a run as Drug Policy Director in which crack cocaine became as cheap and plentiful as leaves in the autumn.
No man so perfectly suits the notion of relentlessly "failing upward" as Mr. Bennett. He is also proof positive that conservative standards of success revolve mostly around who gets blamed for your own failures.
In Bill's case he has made a twenty year career now blaming the manifold policy failures of conservative governance on liberals, teachers, spoiled middle class kids, atheism, single parent families etc etc etc.
You all know the drill.
And it's been a profitable ride for Bennett, two disastrous periods in government have been followed by easy money flowing in by the bushel as Bill has marketed himself as a perennial head of various "concerned American" think tanks and lobbying groups in D.C.
All of whom pay the former Secretary of Education hefty compensation for his fulminations.
The problem with Bill Bennett is the same as it is with most other rightical chic players in DC. They have a long list of woes and problems they are upset about (expl. illegitimacy, divorce, crime, SAT scores, and drug dependency) all of which can be objectively measured and quantified. They then make a mighty rhetorical leap to the conclusion that "virtues" must be practiced, taught, and inflicted on all and sundry in order to solve the above list of problems.
Virtue is a value, and a profitably transcendent value to Bill Bennett who has made big money off of it, but there is no logical link between a normative preference and a disparate set of disquieting statistics.
Bill Bennett, having allegedly studied philosophy ought to understand that there is an gulf between facts and values, but there too much money to be made to pay any attention to that little detail.
And there is his unremarkable sense of white upper middle class identity politics most of which he's cribbed from Michael Medved. Apparently to hear Bill tell it, businessmen come in for too much abuse from aspiring pseudo-intellectuals and Hollywood producers. He's trying to assign these poor dears victimhood status, which might work if those same Hollywood producers weren't themselves the most ruthless businesspeople on the planet..
As for the menace of pseudo-intellectuals to poor middle class folks well...consider the source and his swollen pride in his law degree from Harvard and his PhD in Philosophy.
Bill has essentially figured out a way to make money off of nagging...to the point where he clearly doesn't need to hit up the current admin for a job.
Sick
Demented
Typical...