The pronoun obtrudes in this item on the John Edwards trial:

What did Young, or any of us, see in Edwards? What did Edwards see in Hunter, for whom he risked his marriage, despite telling Young, according to his testimony yesterday, “that she was ‘a crazy slut,’ and there was a ‘one-in-three chance’ that it was his child.” In quoting that, I don’t mean to imply that his characterization was in any sense fair; but it does say a good deal about, first, a view of women, and, second, about the assumption that the view is widely enough shared that one would talk that way in a bid for support. Rielle Hunter may not be the most sympathetic figure . . . but that adds no points to Edwards’s column. It only makes the story more unpleasant.

Who is “us,” these people who saw something in Edwards? Members of the Council on Foreign Relations? Summa cum laude graduates of Harvard? Just a couple of items on Amy Davidson’s bio there.

Populism is a political sentiment inspired by the belief that the elites have screwed things up, because they don’t actually know what they’re doing. When a society begins to fail — and America is now nearly a half-century into the failure that began in the mid-1960s — the elites are often the last to recognize or acknowledge what has gone wrong.

Certainly, it would never occur to Amy Davidson to use the first-person plural to describe those who are most responsible for what’s gone wrong in America. Yet if she ever saw John Edwards as anything other than a phony — a slick-talking hustler — hasn’t her judgment been thoroughly discredited? And if she had surrounded herself with other such fools (the “us” of whom she speaks, none of whom apparently detected Edwards’s fundamental bogusness) doesn’t this discredit not only Davidson, but also the entire elite class to which she belongs? Continue reading First Person Plural: The John Edwards Scandal and America’s Discredited Elite →