Earlier in the day, I wrote about the behavior of the big law firms vis-à-vis Trump, which looks like “cowardice.”
I followed up, with a post about the Wall Street Journal’s courageous condemnation of “moral relativism.”
Now for a little commentary of my own.
Molière is said to have taken great pains to find le mot juste. Confucius heavily emphasized the harm that can arise when elites don’t understand the situation they are in—and don’t use accurate language to talk about it. See Analects !3:3, which reads in part, “When a ruler doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, he should remain silent. When names aren’t correct, language doesn’t accord with the truth of things. When language doesn’t match reality, nothing can be carried out successfully.”
In the spirit of Confucius and Molière, I would like to suggest that our elites have not been afflicted with a bout of cowardice, nor has their thinking suddenly become infected by morally relativistic fallacious reasoning.
They aren’t cowards, and they aren’t irrational. Instead, their problem is that same problem that elites always have—their values.
What they value is acquiring wealth and exercising power. In pursuit of those values, they are both courageous and rational.
Facing MAGA 