Reporters engage in the objective discussion of the opinions of the electorate and the success or failure of political strategies. Policy experts on the sidelines bemoan the failures of the press and engage in the objective discussion of policy. Neither are neutral, neither are objective. Both are passive, shallow, incurious, self-absorbed—their logic founded on if obscuring (only sometimes) a crude nationalism. My fondness for the American people as a whole, mixed always with horror, becomes little else when I look at their elites.