The Nov. 6th issue of the Economist magazine has an essay by someone going by the pseudonym Lexington pointing out that the latest victory by Glenn Youngkin against the elites was in fact won by someone who went to Harvard. Moreover, Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania, Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard, Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard, and so on. Lexington’s point is: how can these people be populists when they are elites themselves? This seems, Lexington concludes, less like an uprising of populists and more like a fight among the elites.
So let me point out the huge difference between those I and others call the elites and those challenging them. The elites who currently dominate America hate the Constitution, hate America, and hate many Americans. Those challenging them do not, and that is why, despite their elite schooling, they can appeal to non-elites.
But in addition, they are elites in various senses of the word.
• They don’t believe in allowing non-elites to have a say. They come to their opinions on some moral issue by discussing things among themselves, after which they impose their values on the rest of the country; non-elites are simply supposed to accept the decisions that have been made.
• They don’t allow non-elites to have any access to what has been called the Megaphone, that is, the ruling-class media.
• They have double standards allowing them to make rules for the rest of us which they themselves don’t need follow.
• They think that democracy itself is in great danger when they aren’t in control, even though they aren’t especially devoted to democracy.
• They imagine they are more knowledgeable than non-elites, even though there is no evidence for this (see here).
• They insist that they are science-based, even though they have odd ideas about science (that complex questions can be settled once and for all, and that it runs by consensus) and some in their own ranks are more anti-science than any non-elite (“math is racist” being the obvious example here).
• They imagine that they are more moral than non-elites, whom they imagine to be seething with racism, even though there are so few racist incidents that blacks must engage in hoaxes to “show” how racist the non-elites are.
In addition, our elites are constantly apologizing to foreigners for America’s sins (which are no worse than any other nation’s). They frequently talk of how people who don’t accept certain claims (about global warming, for example) should be jailed, and in general they want to restrict the freedom of non-elites. In fact, if they had enough power, they would chuck the Constitution and rely on their own sense of what is just and what is not. Given the way that leftists have run things in the past, this would not be pretty. Democracy would be gone, no matter how much they claim to like democracy. The average Republican voter would not be allowed to vote because of their presumed racism. In fact, the average Republican voter might be in a prison camp for “re-education.”
Perhaps the incident that typifies elitist attitudes toward non-elites is when they said that parents should not be allowed to have a say in the public schools and that those parents who protested were domestic terrorists, after which they alerted the FBI. More on that later.
Anyway, let me critique certain statements in the essay.
“The anti-elitism fervour that has captured the right is largely a creation of rich Ivy Leaguers.” No, they just happened to notice it and to use it to their political advantage.
“[William Buckley] did not rubbish the very idea of expertise, as Trump populists do.” We merely rubbish the idea that only those who agree with the Narrative of the elites can count as experts. It’s clear in many cases that experts disagree, yet our elites would have us believe that the experts have spoken and you must accept what they say. They do this by doing their best to silence or marginalize those experts who disagree.
“[Their anti-elitism] lumps together real gripes ... with an ever expanding list of imagined ones: against the FBI....” That isn’t imagined, as I noted earlier. The FBI has totally discredited itself with non-elites by siding with the elites.
“[Their anti-elitism] aims to ... weaken institutions, not improve them.” I’m not sure what Lexington is thinking of here. First, it is the elites who are in control of institutions, and second, they are the ones who are weakening them.
“Conservatives have long argued that campus liberalism produces ambitious narcissists, not public servants.” I suppose that some conservative somewhere might have said something like this, but the general claim by conservatives is that campus liberalism produces unthinking leftists who side with everything the elites say and do and who could not state the conservative position if their lives depended on it.
Worst elites ever, as Glenn Reynolds often says
They are class traitors. Look in Marxian philosophy for the answer. They are every bit the enemy as workers who refused to rise up and charge the machine guns for the victory of communism. Traitors to their own kind. Elites who refuse to represent the interests of elites.
Ignore this "UR A HIPOCRIT LOL" nonsense. It means they don't have any other arguments. They don't allow themselves to be straitjacketed by this kind of discourse; why should we? They take private jets to climate conferences.
"You put me in mind of a case I ran into in the American West. A respected citizen shot a professional gunthrower in the back. When asked why he didn't give the other chap a chance to draw, the survivor said, 'Well, he's dead and I'm alive and that's how I wanted it to be.' Jamie, if you use sportsmanship on a known scamp, you put yourself at a terrible disadvantage."
-- Heinlein, Red Planet (1949)
Posted by: Harland | 11/15/2021 at 10:09 PM