Kevin Drum has a complaint about the mass media:
This allows me to complain about my two pet peeves from last week. First, the unbelievable amount of attention paid to a tiny little college admissions scandal. We still don’t know how many people were involved, but at appears to be something like 0.01 percent of the entering freshman class of America’s most elite universities. This is a rounding error, and it’s for a scandal that only affects about 5 or 6 percent of American families in the first place. What’s more, it’s just standard issue cheating, not even a symptom of some new or systemic problem. It deserved a few column inches on A7, not flood-the-zone coverage everywhere we looked.
And then there’s the president of the United States coyly suggesting that he has “tough” supporters who might—wink wink—get even tougher under the right circumstances. Sure, it’s just Donald Trump acting like his usual asshole self. But still. Doesn’t this deserve a few front-page stories? I mean, maybe it’s just a coincidence that hate crimes suddenly spiked as soon as Trump became president. But then again, maybe it’s not.
This bothered me, but I couldn’t quite figure out Drum’s error, and we’ll skip over the relatively minor error of assuming that the entire problem has been found – that is, is this the entire cactus, or is this an iceberg a mile high and ten miles deep?
Then, while reading this Lawfare article concerning the technicalities of the Venezuelan Constitution of 1961 and how they were eventually used to disassemble and destroy the very democracy it was designed to protect[1], it came to me.
See, while the Venezuelan article immerses itself in an abstract summary of specified Venezuelan Constitutional procedures, as well as how members of critical institutions were intimidated into silence and submission by threats from eventual President Hugo Chavez and his followers, it sort of skips over perhaps the most important part of the destruction of Venezuelan democracy, and that’s the yawning abyss between the elites and the poverty-stricken. I’ve consulted a couple of sources on this, and they seem to agree that one of Chavez’s main charms was his loud support for the most destitute of society.
But yawning abyss is a terribly insufficient description. We need to remember the tendency of South American elites to engage in any activity which will secure their place in society. Remember Chile and General Pinochet? These behaviors, from favoring the rich in the court system to just outright killing of peasants, generates enormous resentment, destroys faith in the societal model, and fractures the nation. In a sense, the fleeing of poverty-stricken Venezuelans to Chavez was a rational response on their part. Society isn’t working for them. Find something else that works.
So how about that college admissions cheating scandal? Consider its salient features: Rich people buy their kids’ way into colleges for which they might not otherwise qualify, wherein everyone else must struggle with stringent standards, and often fail.
Is that fair?
Of course not. And that generates division in our society. Sure, it’s only a few kids involved. A rounding error, to quote Drum. So far. So fucking far.
But societies must have cohesion, and this is another chip out of that cohesion. Fractured societies fall to fighting, lose production, spirit, begin to have food riots, and before you know it you have a broken country. Even a broken governmental paradigm.
Now, you can handle this in one of two ways. The first, covering it up, results in a big old abscess full of pus, which gets worser the longer the prick is delayed. Sure, maybe you take a chance on it never being exposed, but those are long odds.
The second is to expose it to public loathing immediately, as our press has (hopefully) done. It’s embarrassing, there’s going to be a lot of speculation that the kids who have unknowingly benefited are not ready for society due to this bit of bad parenting, and maybe a few more foolishly rich parents will be caught doing the same thing.
But through the public debate that comes with the exposure, society has at least a chance of not being damaged by this idiocy. But if it’s not, if it festers?
It alienates the poverty stricken, the middle classes – everyone who isn’t in on the cheating.
OK, so Trump opened his mouth and his dementia carried him along to claim the military and police and a biker gang would support a coup d’état on his part. Let’s think about that. If the military is truly ready to support such a thing, then we’d better talk about the education scandal because we haven’t a chance against an American military that’s ready to turn on its own families. We Just Don’t. If the military can be persuaded to commit such a heinous action, then this nation doesn’t deserve to exist.
If the police are ready to support it, but not the military, the police get squashed by the military.
And a biker gang? Maybe this is an example of Trump’s wit, because it’s just damn silly.
But for all that the education scandal is a rounding error, it just illustrates that Drum’s looking through the numeracy prism at the wrong time. The importance doesn’t lurk in the numbers, but in how it potentially affects society, as it goes through our adversaries’ magnifiers and becomes worse and worse.
Until that rich family in the gated community doesn’t dare leave because of the rioters outside. Or me in my middle class community. All because trust has been destroyed.
And society fractured.
