Michael Lind thoroughly dissects the progressive movement.
whenever you read the phrase “public interest group” or “social justice organization,” you should substitute it with “billionaire-or-corporate-funded social engineering bureaucracy.”
That is one tiny slice. Read the whole thing.
On somewhat similar lines, Musa Al-Gharbi writes,
Since the publication of Anand Giridharadas’ best-selling Winners Take All (Knopf 2018), there has been a good deal of attention of how the super-rich use philanthropy as a means of shaping society in accordance with their own tastes and interests under the auspices of helping others – often exacerbating the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. However, millionaires and billionaires are not capable of creating, enforcing, managing and perpetuating society and culture all on their own.
More realistically, to understand whose interests are being served by a social order – to see how it is formed, reproduced and sustained – we should look at the upper quintile of society, the top 20%.
This is from the introduction to his own forthcoming book. One more excerpt:
Symbolic analysts’ dominance over knowledge production, culture, institutional bureaucracies, etc. often affords us even more clout than our (relatively high) incomes would suggest. And no less than the super-rich, (we) symbolic analysts attempt to shape ‘the system’ in accordance with our own will and priorities. We facilitate the operation of the prevailing order, ensure its continued viability, and implement reforms.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
The progressives sure have a lot of gall to rhapsodise about democracy the way they do. Lind is right that the way they do things is extremely undemocratic. Antidemocratic, even.
Of course, it’s democratic. It’s what people would want if they knew as much as progressives. And if they hadn’t been filled with false consciousness by the forces that oppress them.
One thing I think Lind misses is that the relationship between rich donors to progressive groups is not at all as simple as one of a customer purchasing desired results.
Ironically, it would usually be a progressive who would point out that “power imbalances matter” and what might seem like an arms-length transaction / quid pro quo on the surface, does not actually operate that way when it occurs under conditions of implicit threat or coercion. Thus, sometimes ‘donations’ are more like ‘taxes’, in the Chicago mafia (also, Chicago government) sense of the word. “Nice little public reputation you got here, be a pity if something bad to happen to it.”
A good model would be to say there are two basic types of carrot-stick spectra in terms of the what the ‘client’ can offer the patron in exchange for his money. The carrot ends of these dimensions are (1) Public esteem, fame, respectability, status, and (2) Concrete results furthering personal desires, whether in the form of venal interests or change in the stance of policy. The stick ends are (1) infamy, defamation, dishonor, disgrace, and (2) harm to personal interests.
So, when it comes to anybody asking for donations, you have to ask whether, and how much (a) can they boost my public reputation, (b) can they hurt my public reputation | (c) can they further my interests, and (d) can they harm my interests. Those answers determine what type of transaction is really taking place.
For the mafia, it is (n, n | n, y), so your ‘donation’ of ‘taxes’ or ‘protection money’ is really just what you have to pay them to leave you alone, and go break some other guy’s legs instead. You aren’t paying the mafia to obtain anything, you are paying them for the right to go about your business unmolested by their thugs.
In politics, fishing around for campaign contribution using implicit threats of considering policy changes that would hurt the interests of deep-pocketed entities is called “juicing” (as with an orange). “Nice little government contract you got here, shame if someone were to put debate on abolishing it on the legislative agenda. Oh, what a coincidence, thank you so much for your support, I knew I could count on you fellas, just like last election, and the one before that.”* That’s a mafia-like case of (n, n | n, y).
Lind’s case is (n, n | y, n) and is most clear when the people being bought off don’t really have any ability to threaten the benefactor, so the power is all on the patron’s side.
So, when in 1995 David Gelbaum told the Sierra Club’s Executive Director Carl Pope to switch the Club’s long-standing position opposed to immigration, it did, and got over $100 Million from him over the next few years, and has been silent on the matter ever since. Likewise recent donors are getting what they paid for when the ACLU flipped on the whole CL thing.
Politicians and media outlets / PR operations *on the right* are a lot like the Sierra Club and ACLU. They aren’t high status enough to make or break your reputation, and they can’t do much to hurt your interests. But they are relatively inexpensive to buy off (people in American politics are hilariously cheap from the perspective of savvy foreigners). When Omidyar or Zuckerberg ‘donates’ to these sellouts, they get good value for their money. Likewise, the typical Republican politician is very happy to do the bidding of their biggest donors.
Sometimes a rich person is a genuinely hard-core progressive who got the money the old fashioned way by marrying into it, and they will throw a lot of money at groups and causes with no demands at all, no strings attached, just for the reputational boost, which is a (y, n | y, n) case.
Every rich person knows that to get really high status and to get the usual suspects off one’s back means giving – willfully or cynically – conspicuously large sums to the highest status causes and institutions, which are almost all progressive causes.
But perhaps the most important case which Lind overlooks is (y, y | n, y), which is the unchecked and unbalanced power the NYT and progressive prestige media (including social media) has, even over what we otherwise think are the richest and most powerful people in the world. At any moment, these media entities can turn on a time, and spontaneously synchronize and coordinate to *absolutely annihilate* literally anyone’s public reputation with “the politics of personal destruction” in which they can go from darling to demon literally overnight, or, likewise, to cover up any transgression and make bad stories disappear down the memory hole like nothing ever happened.**
Because the business model of elite progressive media requires constant new targets, they are like a hungry crocodile needing to feed continuously on new prey to stay alive, which in turn means they are *always juicing*. In such an environment, rich people are the highest value prey, and in the current ideological cultural environment in which extreme wealth is viewed as presumptively suspect, it’s easy to implicitly threaten any of them with a smear campaign insisting that their wealth was all ill-gotten.
This sets up a kind of competition for social credit points which one gets by paying the jizya and Danegeld and donating to the favored causes of those editors and journalists. Because while you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you always need to be ahead of the slowest guy, i.e., the bear’s next meal.
While this case *looks* like the rich elites forcing their values on a resentful majority, it’s something of an altogether different character. Yes, that kind of stuff is happening, but my impression is that it’s not really the main reason donation patterns look like they do.
*This is one of the reasons politicians love laws – not just appropriations but plenty of others – that must by regularly renewed, with votes tending to happen at the point in campaign season when they need a financial injection. It’s also one of the more subtle reasons they like to give a lot of annually-decided discretion to other branches, because discretionary decisions are like lobbying-magnets, and if it’s your party’s guy in charge, the party has a great regular revenue stream, and as an example, this is precisely how the H-series visa sausages get made.
**This is an anti-Gurri point, but even Gurri himself was anti-Gurri in his last City Journal piece (and using a metaphor already familiar to readers of this blog!), it’s just that Gurri thinks anti-Gurrism is only temporary and the Jedi will return, whereas I think it’s permanent and we’ve seen the last Jedi.
At first I thought this was one more “muh corporashuns” type piece, but although Lind buries the lead far enough, he does seem to get it, at least part of the time, that big money is not the driving force behind progressivism:
Indeed. But later he turns around and writes
Where and when were the conclaves that agreed to make WWT the next big reform, I wonder? How did they know what was cool? Does Lind think that if they decided to turn the spigot on supporting, say, men’s rights activism instead of WWT, it would actually work? I think that’s a preposterous suggestion. Anyway, big business has been thoroughly domesticated. Lind’s claims about deregulation and privatization conflict with what I know from other sources. Regulations have been growing continuously, and if the state chose to do a bit of influence/power laundering by letting some concerns (which ones?) out to private business, it kept a firm rein on what they were allowed to do. Lind’s analogy to medieval aristocracy and clergy
does not work either, because in the American case the clerisy hates the peasants and has no reason to look the other way as the lords pillage the remains of the Amerikaner middle and working class: they cheer it most vociferously.
Sorry, you lost me — what is WWT?
You would pronounce it “World War T” – The T is for Transgender.
WWG and WWT are Steve Sailer’s humorous twists on Max Brooks’ “World War Z”.
It makes fun of the holy war crusading mindset, blinded by the rage of fanatical zealotry and jihadist fervor, that woke progressives bring to matters surrounding sexuality, sexual morality, and the social enforcement thereof.
Thanks.
World War Trans
WWT appears to be an acronym for “white women’s tears” – no direct connection to polyamory, but a concept from intersectional theory (etc.).
Nope; see my explanation above.
In that way, WWT is like “CRT”. Like McWhorter and Sullivan said, it’s not about whatever Crenshaw and Derrick Bell wrote in law journals decades ago, it’s now what people use to talk about the “blame whitey” premise and the tendency of woke progressives to want to ‘totalize’ it like the Communists tried to do with Marxism and make it the main point and alpha and omega of literally everything.
It really helps to have common, handy, shorthand terms for social phenomena like this. One one catches on, it seems so obviously right in retrospect that it’s easy to forget that awareness and usage aren’t very widespread.
When will old-fashioned polygamy be exalted?
After all, some religions and cultures embrace polygamy.
Bain & Co. runs ads on their Linked In posts that they are 100% true to the rainbow flag. That’s fine.
But the polygamists…an impolite topic I guess.
In the US, while polygamy is not legally recognized, there are people who are practicing it de facto and in practice it is more or less tolerated as an arrangement so long as it doesn’t lead to charges of statutory rape or matters falling under the jurisdiction of child protection services. These include certain Mormon sects usually in the Mountain West, some hippie / new-agey / or just plain bizarre cults (e.g., Carbon Nation) in Hawaii, and previously polygamously-married Muslim or African immigrants from countries where the practice is legal. All of these groups situations tend to get reported in “We can’t believe this scandal of brazen welfare abuse is perfectly legal!” articles from time to time.
It’s not just the US. I don’t know about continental Europe, but in the rest of the Anglosphere, the issue with polygamous Muslims in particular (usually covered in the same kind of articles) has popped up occasionally in Australia and Canada. People don’t like it, but at the same time, they’re very reluctant to support any serious efforts to root it out, and don’t carry around the moral vocabulary from a coherent framework to explain why they should besides, “it’s against the law!” which is hardly enough on its own.
In the UK, polygamous marriages have been legally recognized for nearly half a century now – since 1973 – but only if everything was done legally in polygamy-exercising countries and without any party having been domiciled in the UK during any of those marriages. There is also a fairly generous welfare system which has provisions for such situation and which also pops up in a “seems like it should be abuse” scandal from time to time. These don’t end up in divorce or other family court disputes very much, but I can only imagine how much of a mess it must be to adjudicate all the particulars in those cases.
Apparently this was and continues to be a bit of a controversial sticking point when it comes to the benefits under their new Universal Credit welfare system.
I think what these cases show us is that, while it may be a long time until polygamy is actually declared legal, it will be tolerated by officials looking the other way as no one has the stomach or the moral confidence to do anything about it. Some guy is going to get prosecuted for bigamy one day (it happens!) and his lawyer is going to make the predictable argument and unequal treatment and I guess we’ll see what SCOTUS thinks about it in 2031.