Learning from Phoniness

It is not news that most politicians and their media flacks are phonies. They produce evidence of that routinely day by day. People are so used to it that many expect nothing else and scarcely notice it anymore.  However sometimes  our civil masters and their friends display their phoniness in ways that tell people something interesting.   

A few years ago in  the Kelo case, the  Supreme Court ruled  that it was permissible for state and local governments to seize people’s property through eminent domain and hand it over to  private individuals or companies the governments favored.  Republicans like to claim they are defenders of individual rights and opponents of arbitrary government power.  The decision gave them an opportunity to show it by passing legislation banning the practice- either directly or indirectly by withholding money from governments that did it.  They  controlled the White House and both houses of congress, but  no bill was passed. (The president did issue an executive order, but it had little effect.)  One does not have to be a cynic to wonder if that was because some important donors to the Republican party were wealthy real estate developers who preferred having a government steal property for them to having to acquire it through voluntary exchange. Whether or not that was the reason, their  behavior told people something worth learning.

A while back Hillary Clinton let a large cat out of the bag when she  explained that she left Margaret Thatcher out of her supposedly apolitical compendium of gutsy women because she did not approve of her politics. It has been obvious to some people for a long time that Clinton’s style of feminism is less about women’s independence, accomplishment, or gutsiness than about leftist politics, and that to people like her the lives and accomplishments  and gutsiness of women who do not fit the political mold are to be ignored or disparaged. Still it was useful  though  a little unusual for her to proclaim her phoniness directly, out loud, and in public, but she is neither as clever nor as shifty as her husband.

  

A few days ago Trump appointed Richard Grenell to be acting director of national intelligence.  He is the first openly homosexual person to  have a cabinet level position in the United States. Activists and people in the traditional media have generally seen such firsts as beneficial and important whether by football players, police chiefs, elected officials, or whatever. One might have expected a similar reaction here, but it did not happen. The obvious reason it didn’t is that Grenell has the wrong politics, and that to them breaking down barriers does not matter if the politically wrong sort of people are doing it. That too is useful information.