Forcing conversations the Mandarin Class don't want

It always astonishes me how incestuous is the inner core of the Mandarin Class. Roger Kimball highlights another of which I was unaware. From Donald Trump at the Overton Window by Roger Kimball.

I shall leave it to the theologians to decide whether it is providential or merely coincidental that it was this very week in 1729, on Tuesday in fact, that the city of Baltimore was founded. I think we can say that, for the genus rattus, the city has been providential, at least since 1967. That was the year Thomas D’Alesandro III—the brother of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and son of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore)—began the city’s 50-plus years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. (If you except the younger Mr. D’Alesandro’s immediate predecessor, you can push the run of Democratic mayors of Baltimore all the way back to 1947.)

More than a century of a single family holding elected offices between Pelosi, her parents, her brother, etc.

While the target of Trump's initial tweets was the disastrous decline of Baltimore during Elijah Cumming's term of service in the House of Representatives, I wonder if he was aware of Pelosi's family connection. I am guessing almost certainly.

The initial attempt to push back on the self-apparently true observation that Baltimore was a once great city which has fallen on hard times despite gobs of federal and state reinvestment money, has been to accuse Trump of racism and to deny that Baltimore is all that bad.

But the conversation has already shifted from "Cummings has done nothing for his constituency" to "Democrats have done nothing for Baltimore despite more than half a century of control." How long before we get to "The Pelosi family has done exceptionally well over a century of nominal public service and despite the terrible condition of the cities with which they are most closely associated (San Francisco and Baltimore)?" And from there it is just a short jump to "Isn't it strange how well Pelosi's financier husband has done over the course of her career?"

No wonder the Mandarin class so hates Trump. He is forcing the conversation on to topics that are poison to them but genuinely interesting to the tax-paying, law abiding, middle class American who hates self-serving insiders.