The Nominee From Davos

Centrism Perfected.

I must say, it is absolutely hilarious to watch David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan both go all thrombo over the nomination of Elena Kagan for the same reason:

From Sullivan:

The Purity Of Her Careerism
11 May 2010

David Brooks' column today really helped crystallize for me my qualms about Elena Kagan. Her life, so far as one can tell, is her career, and her career has been built by avoiding any tough or difficult political or moral positions, eschewing any rigorous intellectual debate in which she takes a clear stand one way or the other, pleasing every single authority figure she has encountered, and reveling in the approval of the First Class Acela Corridor elite. The NYT profile - which is superb apart from its editorial decision to excise any account of any non-trivial private life (she smokes cigars!) since high school - is chilling in its assessment of a human soul in steady, determined pursuit of approval and power.
...

From Bobo:

What It Takes
By DAVID BROOKS

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.
...

I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

Comical Bobo Update from "Our Crazy Supreme Court Nomination Process":

"The result is you get a set of incentives that impairs the careers of brilliant but flawed or prolific people. It rewards the careers of bland mediocrities."

I know why these characteristics bother me, but I fail to understand why two such stalwarts of Conservatism and Capitalism as Sullivan and Brooks would find them disturbing or depressing. After all, if they are correct (and I have no way of knowing if they are or not), all they are witnessing is one more landmark among the hundreds of moraines and valleys that the glacier of Modern Capitalism is in the process of gouging out and leaving in its pulverizing wake as it grinds across the face of the old world, obliterating everything in its path.

Those at the top of that New World Order see the conventions and rituals of our world and its cultures as their personal Etch-A-Sketch, to be shaken up as many times as suits them. Under the banners of "Risk" and "Creative Destruction", they disorder the world so that they might better rule it, and use their superior social and fiscal positions to insure that the dice are always shaved in their favor. And because they and theirs are safe behind cofferdams of wealth and power and a dense social network of likewise insulated elites, those at the top need never worry too much about the downsides of living in a world that runs on risk, chaos and winner-take-all Davos capitalism (h/t Richard Sennett.)

Of course, for the rest of us, life under an economic regime whose mission is to relentlessly abolish any sense of personal security and which straps us all -- willing or not -- to the same rigged, roulette wheel is a fucking misery. And getting worse.

Since capitalism was let off its leash under Reagan and through all the subsequent years of massive dislocation, radical deregulation, whiplash corporate layoffs, the gaps between the Rich and Everyone Else widening into unbridgeable chasms, the rise of the New Moguls and the annihilation of the Middle Class...no cultural message has been clearer than this:

"He who succeeds best in this Brave, New Abattoir is he who best harnesses every impulse and domesticates every talent in the services of the System. Rack up as many degrees as humanly possible, and never twitch a muscle that isn't calculated to achieve a pre-conceived effect."

As both Sullivan and Brooks damn well know, while the New Capitalism claims to celebrate the rebel and the risk-taker, it actually destroys them, and anyone else who can't come to the table armed with enough wealth, position, "private knowledge and web of social networks" to keep their shirt past the first or second spin of the wheel.

(I would also add that the hilarity really peaked for me in the moments of pure, sublime, comic absurdity when Andrew Sullivan bemoaned the "private knowledge and web of social networks" that made the Kagan nomination possible...from safely beneath the sheltering, career-sustaining bower of his own "private knowledge and web of social networks"...

... and David Brooks, the reigning King of Calculatedly Hollow Beige Conservative Doublespeak, loudly tsked-tsked the kind of "bland mediocrities" that "a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess" produces. )

And so, to deal with the remaining points of contact between them and the grubby institutions of the rest of us "left behind" humans, our new Capitalist Gods require a new Priesthood -- a set of perfect, bright, subservient technocratic roller bearings on which their New World Order can glide.

Which is why I do not understand Sullivan and Brooks discomfort with the calculating, passionless face of Centrism Perfected.

It is, after all, the world they wished for.