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Jamil Smith
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To build a government of the worst people, one must not merely be amateurish or inept. It requires a special hatred for America to form a kakistocracy. I wrote about @BetsyDeVosED and other members of Trump’s rogues’ gallery in my latest for @RollingStone.
The Worst Government Possible, on Purpose
The disastrous Betsy DeVos interview shows how much America is now on its own
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/jamil-smith-betsy-devos-trump-worst-government-possible-on-purpose-w517857
We Americans are on our own, and what we saw Sunday night from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos during the '60 Minutes' interview was only a reminder. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
By Jamil Smith March 14, 2018
I worry less about Kim Jong-Un than I do Betsy DeVos. The North Korean dictator, for one, doesn't have dominion over the educational futures of nearly 51 million elementary and secondary students and countless more in college. Barring a nuclear attack, of course, the wealthy charter-school champion is poised to play a much larger role than Kim will in determining the future of United States. The sophomoric invective he directs at us pales in comparison to the utter disrespect that President Trump demonstrated by nominating her to lead the Department of Education in the first place. To build a United States government of the worst people, one must not merely be amateurish. It requires a special hatred for America to form a kakistocracy.
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Betsy DeVos' Holy War on Education
Her appointment as education secretary marks the crowning achievement of the Christian right's campaign to infiltrate America's secular institutions
DeVos earned every bit of the hell she caught for botching her 60 Minutes profile last Sunday night. Even aside from her inarticulate espousal of insane Trump proposals like arming schoolteachers, DeVos flaunted the kind of casual incoherence that was funnier ten years ago when Sarah Palin ruined herself with that Katie Couric interview. It was difficult to laugh as CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl flummoxed DeVos, a dogged advocate of "school choice," with rather basic questions about her alleged areas of expertise. It was difficult to muster even the kind of nervous snicker that you might let squeak out when a colleague or classmate embarrasses themselves by being unprepared for a presentation. The Secretary of Education not only failed the test; she clearly hadn't cared enough to study.
Regarding public education, she told Stahl, "We have invested billions and billions and billions of dollars from the federal level, and we have seen zero results." Stahl immediately noted that test scores have improved over the last 25 years and that DeVos was quite literally avoiding reality to adhere to her charter-school absolutism.
She then tried to say that her priority was "investing in students, not in school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems," surely news to the Baltimore students who continue to freeze in their dilapidated classrooms due to a lack of heat. DeVos has been in office for 13 months now, and she exhibited a rather cursory relationship with information that she should have mastered by now.
Those who have yet to hear (or sound) the deafening alarms about this administration use words like "polarizing" rather than "dangerous" to describe Trump officials like DeVos, still nurturing notions that this president and his Cabinet can actually operate the franchise they've been trusted with. The reality is that the United States is now learning to live without a functional president or government. They are out of ideas, save those that feed the cultural insecurities of their base. "Infrastructure Week" has become a punchline. Puerto Rico has been abandoned, as has Flint. What makes all this worse is that this was the plan, born from Trump's lack of knowledge, varied bigotries, and intellectual incuriosity. We Americans are on our own, and what we saw Sunday night from DeVos was only a reminder.
As the most vulnerable in our society have long known, incompetence and willful disregard in Washington is common. Kakistocracies are not. Even conservatives in the Reagan era who preached the gospel of limited government saw some value in the actual practice of governance. Today, all that voters on the right seem to demand of their elected officials is headline fodder and comfort in the face of a more multicultural future. They voted less for a president than an emotion, and Trump's results thus far bear that out. Even their few efforts to shape legislation have been darkly comical. A government that works is a pretty important thing, yet this one will always be more skilled at reproducing gruel for cable consumption than it will be at forming policy.
What both in this White House and from Republicans in Congress are giving us now is more akin to an aggressive virus than an operational Washington apparatus. Like the president they serve, DeVos and many of her fellow cabinet members have proven themselves not merely the antithesis of what their particular offices require, but a band of grifters wearing the masks of public servants as they seek to profit politically or financially from their service.
Virtually every office is undergoing a hostile takeover. Scott Pruitt, friend of polluters, is busy dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency in the service of his polluter friends. Chair enthusiast Ben Carson is chosen to lead Housing and Urban Development – perhaps because he is "urban," but also so that he might spread his brand of Horatio Algerism: those pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps myths that are only meant to blame the poor for their own plights. Jeff Sessions is living his best life in his efforts to implement Jim Crow, Jr. Budget director Mick Mulvaney is also busy making the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau kinder to the payday loan vultures who contributed to his Congressional campaign.
David Shulkin, Wilbur Ross and Ryan Zinke are authoring their own brands of disaster............................................
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