In National Review Saturday morning, the great and the good are affirming their “long-held doubts about Biden’s ability.”

The question that Biden’s media allies and the Washington establishment are now privately wondering: Is the Afghan disaster an aberration, or will the calculated risk they took in helping Biden into the White House prove to be an unending series of headaches and embarrassments?

So why in the world did you geniuses deep-six Bernie Sanders back in March 2020? Imagine: if Bernie had been the nominee and defeated by Trump then everything going wrong, from Afghanistan to the cruel end of the rent moratorium, would be Trump’s fault. Yum!

According to John Hinderaker, the Brits are writing scathing articles in the Daily Telegraph about President Biden “owning” the decisions and the “consequences.”

Translation: what Gaetano Mosca calls the “ruling clique” has suddenly noticed that Houston We Have a Problem.

I guess you could say that this is progress. Up till now, the only thing the “ruling clique” cared about was that Trump is a Problem. Otherwise, everything was copacetic, except that we had only 12 years to save the planet.

As for the rest of the ruling class, the credentialed and educated liberals everywhere from tech to think tanks to universities to media to NGOs and the nice liberal ladies and their virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard signs? They don’t have a clue; not yet.

I guess I’m not that interested in Afghanistan, except in a Flashman novel, so I didn’t realize until yesterday that deposed Afghan President Ghani went to college in the U.S. and became a professor of anthropology. And he gave a TED talk(!) on “how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan.” I wonder who decided it would be a really good idea to educate all the girls and give them certificates -- that they are now burning. And it seems like all the other western powers were in on this folly.

Did you know there is a name for this sort of thing? That word is “colonialism.” Send in the best and brightest and lift the benighted primitives into the 21st century, old chap. That’s what this is all about.

Odd isn’t it. For all of my 75 years, lefties have been lecturing me about the horrors and the injustice and the Original Sin of western colonialism and imperialism. But if you ask me, The British Conquest and Domination of India was a walk in the park compared to this bunch.

Of course, back in the day, the Brits thought the Empire should pay for itself. That’s what the movie Lagaan is all about. The peasants paid lagaan -- taxes -- to the Rajahs, and the Rajahs paid taxes to the Brits and the Brits liked to play cricket of an afternoon: “I say, well hit!”

I guess our modern neo-colonialists in the global elite are much more advanced than that. Or are they just terminally conceited?

Back in 2014, after the Republicans won both houses of Congress in Obama’s second mid-term, I wrote a blog post “The Three Liberal Conceits:” the Economic Conceit that the government can run the economy; the Social Conceit that government can solve poverty; and the Moral Conceit that government can successfully “legislate morality.” Hey Afghanistan: how yer doin’ pal?

Do you notice something about our glorious global elite? They can all repeat: Trump is a problem. They can murmur: Biden has a problem. But they never ask: Do We Have a Problem?  The “we” being the global elite, les bels chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche and all that medieval romance rubbish.

You know, I hate this humiliation of America. I've loved this country and its people with all my heart since the first morning I woke up to a glorious Denver sunrise in December 1965. But we cannot make this country great again until our present ruling class is utterly humiliated and creeps away with its tail between its legs.

What does it take to humiliate a ruling class? It takes a humiliating defeat in war; it needs a reckless inflation that impoverishes widows and orphans; it takes a people enraged by a justice system that calls some people peaceful protesters and others armed insurrectionists.

But it takes one thing more. It takes a populace that is no longer afraid to be called racist, sexist, or homophobic. Or any other of the thousand-and-one pejoratives that the ruling class uses to lash the peasants into line.

Whaddya think, America? Is this the year when we tell our noble lords that they can take their race cards, their gender cards, and their gay cards, and put ‘em where the sun don’t shine?

Because you know what racism looks like? It looks like counting by race, affirmative action, protected classes, underrepresentation, diversity, and corrupting our kids with critical race theory.

As Cromwell said: ye venal slaves, be gone!

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also, get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Gage Skidmore

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