David Brooks draws an analogy.
So in the late 1960s along came a group of provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the counterculture to upend the Protestant establishment. People like Hoffman were buffoons, but also masters of political theater.
He goes on to suggest that President Trump is playing a similar role today. While I agree with much of what he says about the current cultural struggle, Brooks is not old enough to really remember the 1960s, and I don’t think he has his history right.
What Brooks calls the Protestant establishment was not brought down by Abbie Hoffman. It brought itself down, largely because of Vietnam War guilt. Think of Robert McNamara as the canonical figure. The Protestant establishment lost its arrogance. Its denizens engaged in soul-searching. They became tentative and uncertain.
What Brooks famously labeled bourgeois bohemians (Bobo) and what he now refers to as today’s meritocratic establishment is not feeling so wracked with guilt. Instead, they are mostly circling the wagons and doubling down on arrogance. For example, mainstream economists will tell you that heroic macroeconomic policymakers saved the country in the wake of the financial crisis. I think that the policies only served to bail out investment banks. Maybe I am wrong about that. What strikes me is how vehement and closed-minded the economics establishment has become on this issue. Instead of trying to see what can be reasonably inferred from observation, they are working backward from the elite-friendly conclusion to analysis that justifies it.
In the 1960s, much of the establishment rightly or wrongly viewed itself as discredited. It yielded its authority, and new cultural and political power structures emerged. Today, I don’t see the same sort of humility and self-doubt afflicting the Bobo elite. It seems to me that the most likely outcome of the current cultural struggle is that the Bobo power structure will return to power–with a vengeance.
Aren’t you just projecting your perspective on the economic profession onto the greater political establishment?
Martin Luther King Jr. arguing for basic equal rights under the law is likely to induce some humility and self-doubt. Trump… not so much.
Weren’t the elites all pro MLK? I’m excluding some southern politicians that were clearly not elites at the national level. Did elites not order the national guard in to enforce desegregation.
I think we are reliving the 60s and 70s. And I think you have a good point. Not that fond of your political divide.
Was it really guilt over Vietnam? I doubt many WASPs were connected to Vietnam enough to feel guilty about it.
I’m guessing it was other cultural and economic changes at the time.
Agree the Bobo’s feel no guilt. They may not even be capable of it.
The rebirth of American social fabric in 39 words:
If a state or local legislature passes a law that makes exercising freedom of association (e.g., organizing a labor union) possible where it would otherwise not be possible, then, Congressional preemption of labor law falls to the First Amendment.
The success of a democracy may depend more on balancing power between competing factions — than supposed civic virtues. 6% labor union density in the private economy equates to 20/10 blood pressure — starves every healthy process.
Brooks’ narrative is off base in a few ways. Thing about this statement, “Jon Stewart was so anti-establishment the way he made fun of all those politicians, CEOs, and religious leaders.”
But actually, we recognize Jon Stewart as being the comic voice of the actual (progressive) establishment, punching down by mocking non-respectable non-progressives of all types and kinds.
Now, think of someone saying that Saul Alinksky was “anti-establishment”. Oh, that’s a slam dunk for sure, right? Well, wait a minute. Even in his own book, Rules for Radicals Alinsky mentions several times how they got nearly uniform supportive coverage from the press, got treated with kid gloves by local law enforcement on several occassions, and even the Attorney General (Robert Kennedy) and the Department of Justice was letting his groups get away with all kinds of mischief.
And what about Joe McCarthy? Establishment, or anti-establishment? What about the old political formula of The-Top-and-Bottom againsst The Middle?
Well, now we’re in a pickle. It’s almost as “the establishment” is not some accurate description of social power at all, but more like “The Man”, a kind of narrative-based social construct that doesn’t, actually, map well to reality at all, that is, when it’s not a complete pretense of a conception.
When understood properly, one sees that Trump and Hoffman have almost zero overlap except for a knack at provocation, “heightening the contradictions”, and exposing deep and raw social fractures and bringing them to the fore of public awareness. But Trump, like McCarthy, has practically zero sympathizers among the elite class and controllers of the Intellectual Fashion Industry, and thus it’s clear that he has genius-level natural skill in this regard that it is an entirely different qualitative category than Hoffman’s or Alinsky’s antics.
Once again, we see that reality is made of of allied groups in rival political coalitions with representatives in all classes and positions of authority (though with unequal and evolving distributions) and “establishment” is a kind of political rhetorical device use to spin a tale about a noble struggle against The Powers That Be, even when many of the powers that be are actually on ones side, either explicitly or covertly.
Nice post. I agree that the analogy with Abbie Hoffman does not seem right, but I do agree with Brooks’ key point about Trump:
“Donald Trump came into a segmenting culture and he is further tearing apart every fissure. He has a nose for every wound in the body politic and day after day he sticks a red-hot poker in one wound or another and rips it open.”
How that plays out is anybody’s guess.
I struggle with that characterization. It puts Trump in the role of the causative agent.
Look at some of the ‘wounds’:
* Russia. Seems to have disappeared from the news. Was a smoking gun ever found? Or a gun of any type for that matter?
* North Korea. The Kims freak out and rattle swords every 3-5 years at least since the Berlin Wall came down…that’s not Trump’s doing.
* Immigration. Apparently the idea that illegal immigrants should have to obey the law the same as the rest of us is a human rights violation.
* NFL kneeling. Dude, stop being a drama queen and stand up for this small civic ceremony with everyone else.
He’s not even using a red-hot poker. Most of the time he’s like the pot-stirring relative at Thanksgiving that pokes one of the buttons on the family crazy, who then freaks out.
Trump is a cause, not an effect. If he wasn’t there it wouldn’t make the fissures go away. The pressure would build and make the eventual rupture even larger.
I completely agree. Trump is needling the Establishment and they’re freaking out.
I wonder if there is a parallel here to regulatory capture. A scandal happens in an industry, prompting calls for regulation. Industry appears to acquiesce but manages to steer regulations to erect barriers to challengers. Social upheaval leads to anti-establishment sentiment and calls for restructuring of institutions. Establishment appears to acquiesce but manages to restructure institutions to preserve its own prominence. Examples: pre-Civil Rights institutional racism leads to current political correctness, safe spaces, etc. So, the elites, which by definition controlled institutions in the pre-Civil Rights era, now views itself as the essential force in protecting minorities from the non-elites.
Incidentally, we may be witnessing the birth of regulatory capture by internet companies. In response to the Russia ad scandal, facebook recently announced a number of measures, including hiring 250 people to work on “election integrity”. Facebook was famously started in a college dorm room. If Harvard student Zuckerberg had to hire 250 employees to monitor content before launching the first facebook, facebook would never have happened. If one examines all the measures that facebook is “voluntarily” implementing, most if not all of them would be impossible for a college student in a dorm room to implement, or even a small growing firm. If those measures (or similar ones) become expected norms for social networks, then facebook will not have to worry about many new challengers.
Totalitarian overreach requires some unsolvable problem which can be blamed on “wreckers” that only the authority can solve. “Racism” is just the latest unsolvable problem requiring total control by “good people.”
The authority need not be the state, it can just as easily be a private actor. The line between private and public is pretty hard to pin down anyway.
Check out Steve Sailer’s take on Brooks’s article. The new “meritocratic” establishment Brooks is talking about is essentially Jewish. Kevin McDonald has claimed that the old Protestant elite did not commit suicide but rather was murdered by you-know-who. I think it is probably a combination of the two. Paul Gottfried wrote an excellent article about this years ago claiming that the Old Establishment went soft in the head, or lost its will to lead just as Jews were rising in society. With natural smarts, hard work, and ethnic networking they climbed to the top of the greasy pole.
Bailouts are a bipartisan bright-spot. They’re unpopular with all of the voters, Hillary’s and Bernie’s and Trump’s. There’s no divide in the country. The divide is between the voters, united and harmonious, and then their rulers ignoring them.
Brexit’s another example of how voters, both Labour and Tory, can hold hands across the partisan divide. Project Fear was a failure. Project Sneer was a flop. But at no point, even in 2017, is the establishment prepared to resort to anything as drastic as thinking up a reasoned response. Being vehement and closed-minded is so much more flattering to our self-conception than having to persuade people with logic and facts.
A reasoned argument for the EU’s tariffs would acknowledge their existence. The EU’s defenders would admit out loud that the EU’s 16.9% tariff on sports shoes exists. Instead they just double down on how the EU represents and stands for and is a symbol of free trade and the open society. The merely empirical fact of the EU’s 16% tariff on oranges is not something that needs to be spoken of. The EU’s 15% tariff on unicyles needs no argument.
Abie Hoffman wasn’t the ideal choice for Brooks’ screed, but the 1960s radicals certainly informed political thinking after. I rather think of a combination of economic washout and the rise of “systems-think” ( ala Adam Curtis’ “All Watched Over By Machines…” ) as the primary mechanism for dislocation of the WASP elites. That was partially to blame for Vietnam, as MacNamara was one of the first high-ranking Operations Research practitioners.
Curtis’ essay-film has been quite valuable to me – it describes the rise of what Adam Smith called “the man of system” as a rebirth of central planning, which is just everywhere, from engineering to “six sigma” .
The progressive elite lack the humility and guilt of previous elites, they are doubling down on their arrogance, and they will probably return to power with a vengeance.
I hope otherwise, but I fear that Kling is right. Kling’s analysis is particularly insightful.