[Note: askblog had an existence prior to the virus crisis. I still schedule occasional posts like this one.]
Titus Techera writes,
Monopoly over the sources of shame makes our elites superior to the rest of us, and Caldwell analyzes it in terms of the courts, administrative agencies, and business. This monopoly is why they can do anything and get away with it. No one will ask the Clintons or anyone around them or like them about their relationship to Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein; it’s perfectly okay—because they are elite liberals who demonstrate their virtue by regularly calling the rest of us racist. In doing so, they remind us that it’s their privilege to slap us, the necessary punishment for our lack of enlightenment.
…The Republican Party is not without its victories—remember 2016, when the people gave them victory in all elections throughout the land? But Republicans almost never follow through by using their electoral victories to practice politics. They refuse to cripple the power of Progressives to ruin decent citizens’ private lives. Every year, conservatives become more scared about even voicing their opinions on college campuses or at work or on social media, living in fear of Progressives and ashamed of themselves for being so afraid—and you may imagine how they feel about the elites who don’t even seem to want to protect them. We will get Progressives to stop when more citizens act to stop them with support from their own institutions and their own elites. We will get citizens to act when we make them angry at the humiliations Progressives inflict on them, and we will generate that anger only if we force our own elites to act on our behalf
The essay reacts to Christopher Caldwell’s controversial new book, The Age of Entitlement.
I don’t think GOP are scared. The GOP elite are regressive, too. That is why we elected Trump.
“The people gave them victory” is not an accurate characterization of a consistently unpopular President elected with a 46% not-even-plurality of the nationwide vote, a Senate that is majority Republican only because of the disproportionate weight it gives to small-state voters, and a House majority that was boosted by blatant partisan gerrymandering.
The canard that “we represent the True Voice of the People ™” is obnoxious and empirically wrong when Sanders supporters say it, and it’s just as much so when Trumpists do.
I confess, it feels good to read a polemic bashing snobby liberals and elites.
I am the sort of person for whom polemics are just generally fun. It may make me a worse person.
Often there is nothing like a polemic to puncture someone’s smug assertions. In the hands of a certain type of scholarly it can have considerable scholarly merit.
Useless essay.
Indeed. Does Mr. Techera even notice that he is confused? The essay provides no evidence in favor and much to the contrary.
When the first step of your plans for a comeback in the culture war is to assume that you haven’t lost the culture war… Um. You lost the culture war. That means, almost by definition, that you have no power whatsoever to encourage or compel the victorious elites to do anything, or to shame them, except with their own weapons (accusations of racism) which they immediately deflect back at you.
This division of elites into our own and not our own is, as I see it, almost completely fictitious. Republicans are contiguous (sometimes overlapping) with moderate Democrats, the latter with mainstream Democrats, and so on further leftwards. If there are any elites who we can call our own, it remains to discover who they are. At present, I suspect, most of them languish in obscurity, as Octavian Augustus’ novi homini did in their backwater Italian and Cisalpine municipia and colonies did around the time of the great contests of Optimates and Populares in Rome.
I would prefer ‘politician’ to ‘elites’ anyway. Whether the typical GOP politician is an ‘elite’ in anything more than position is an interesting philosophical question, but we don’t have nobles, and certainly one doesn’t require the meritocratic best and brightest, or the richest.
What Techera means is that GOP voters can’t seem to get typical GOP politicians to use their positions to do what their voters want done, or what would be in the long term political strategic interests of those voters.
And that’s because the big donors and party bosses and fickle swing-voters don’t want those things to get done.
In solid districts, maybe miffed voters can be scarier to the local politician than donors and bosses via primary challenges (e.g., AOC booting out DNC establishment favorite Crowley, but turns out she had some big help too). In purple and increasingly blueing districts, forget it.
But let’s say by some miracle you got a crop of scared-straight GOP Senators with at least 41 votes and the filibuster holds, or a majority in either house.
Fortunately you don’t need elites – or even people as ‘elite’ as we currently have – for what Techera would want them to do. That is, for how it would have to actually play out. Which is what Al Gore called ‘political terrorism’, but involves no threats of violence, only voting.
But voting in such a way that it means certain social death, which is perhaps worse than actual death for many elites, and thus not something you could get an elite to ever do, anyway. Which is, of course, a big reason they don’t do what Techera wants now.
So you don’t need elites, but you do need martyrs, and shahid is no job for elites. If you’re going to have elites, you want them unknown, hidden away, sending secret orders to the martyrs to carry out. Otherwise they’ll get whacked.
For a shahid, you want a loyal and reliable true believer with either heroic disregard for all he has to lose, or better, nothing to lose, (i.e., a loser), who, like a drone, is just competent enough to get the vote-bomb to the target, and who will obey orders without question, willing to stand firm like an inflexible hold-out juror.
You would also like this person to not be corruptible or able to be bribed, especially with ‘strange new respect’ rehabilitation.
That’s a tough issue. Groups which use organized violence punish defections with personal violence. Social pressure is the comparative advantage of your opponent. In that domain, they have better carrots and bigger sticks.
The religious can bribe you with the afterlife, but the GOP doesn’t have an afterlife.
Well, not an actual afterlife. But there is perhaps “the life after”, that is, if by some miracle your team wins, then in “the life after” that win, you will not actually be a martyr, but an attempted martyr. That’s like the guy, even if he’s a loser, who throws himself on the dud grenade to save his buddies, not knowing it’s a dud. He’s still a hero, which is why they have that exact scene in the Captain America movie. And then loser becomes a huge winner.
So that’s the “Loser to Captain America” offer as incentive. You are asking people to throw themselves on grenades. No one knows if they are going to be duds or not, but probably not. Anyone who throws himself is still a martyr if you lose and it blows up, and hero if you win in the off-chance it doesn’t.
As it happens, this “successfully recruiting support from society’s losers by promising them higher status if you win” strategy is not altogether without historical precedent.
The trouble is, the GOP can’t promise “the life after”, and not even “the life between this election and the next one”. To really be able to deliver, one has to win so big that one doesn’t even have to worry about ‘the opposition’ anymore. That’s also not without historical precedent, but I don’t think it’s what Techera has in mind.
Well said
Dear Mr. Kling,
a friend who’s a loyal reader pointed this out to me–I’m as pleasantly surprised as he was that you’ve shared my essay.
Thanks!
Titus Techera