The Fallacy of Credentials

For your consideration, I give you Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan, as a reminder, is Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor. He is a mere forty-four years old. But what a resume!

• Sullivan went to Yale, where he was an editor of the Yale Daily News, graduated summa cum laude, was Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Snow Prize as the single best scholar in his class.

• Upon graduation, he was offered both Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. He went with the Rhodes.
• From Oxford, it was off to Yale Law School, where he was an editor on the Yale Law Review.
• From there, Sullivan clerked for Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

I’m even leaving out some stuff. Credentially speaking, Jake Sullivan sits at the very pinnacle of the American establishment. Resumes don’t get much better.

And you know what? None of that means a damn thing, because Jake Sullivan is an idiot.

Oh, I don’t deny that Sullivan is book smart, and likely has a capacity for hard work. Once, a generation or two ago, you would have said, “Wow, this is a crazy-smart guy.” But now all his resume says is, “I have marinated my entire life in the progressive establishment, and am now a card-carrying member of America’s liberal elite.”

It hardly merits mentioning that this has left Sullivan without the capacity for common sense. He he has presided, in various capacities, over the following foreign policy disasters:

Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Myanmar, and now, of course, maybe the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in collective memory, Afghanistan.

Jake Sullivan is not alone. I’m picking on him because, well, he’s just such low hanging fruit. Our nation’s elite institutions are turning out scores of Jake Sullivan’s. (England, too — check out the Rhodes winners. 100% social justice warriors.)

But when a tenured Cornell professor calls black holes “racist,” when Harvard holds a separate graduation for blacks, when Yale bans calling anyone a “master” of something, seriously, what do you expect? Kids with street smarts or basic common sense?

The institutions that we have traditionally placed on the top of our cultural pedestal — the ones that award all those coveted credentials — are now the most corrupt. They have become radical left-wing echo chambers where ideological adherence is rewarded and dissent swiftly punished. Social justice has replaced the search for truth as the over-arching guiding principle. Debate and free inquiry have all but vanished, because both imply there’s more than one acceptable viewpoint. Students rising through this system are never truly taught how to think, merely what to think (to quote my friend, Andrew Gutmann).

Such inflexible minds are destined to fail when let loose in the messiness of the real world, where solutions require mental agility, reason, and common sense. They require one to think through different options and to consider the perspective of others. It was almost deliciously revealing that the very week Afghanistan fell, our embassy there was flying a gay pride flag (as encouraged by another credentialed idiot, that Princeton grad with a chest full of meaningless ribbons, Mark Milley).

One wonders if Jake Sullivan realizes just how useless all his credentials are. Just kidding, because there’s no way he does. That was rhetorical musing on my part. Jake Sullivan will continue to burnish his resume. Our finest universities will heap honorary degrees upon him and ask him to speak at graduations. The media will exalt him. High paying sinecures and book deals await him when he leaves government service. Perhaps he’ll even win an Emmy like Andrew Cuomo.

Guys like Jake Sullivan fail in only one direction — up.