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You Are the Threat
On this anniversary of that infamous day, it’s worth considering what the political class regards as the true threat to the United States: you — or, more precisely, your loss of faith in its legitimacy.
American political elites are accustomed to dealing with left-wing revolutionary sentiments. From workers’ strikes at the turn of the century to bombings during the sordid ’60s, and from the WTO protests to Occupy Wall Street, left disillusionment is, by this point, an old American story. Over time, political elites have learned ways to defuse this energy. The best way to defuse it is to absorb it. Make the left’s concerns into objects of corporate and political interest. Join the barricades. Patronize its organizations. And let’s not forget about the real revolution — the Sexual Revolution — which rolled over America with nary any opposition, and which the political class benefited mightily from. The Sexual Revolution was a boon to the system, not a threat.
What’s new, and scary, is the emergence of revolutionary sentiments on the right. It’s one thing when an LSD-addled college kid loses his faith in the political order, and it’s entirely another when a middle-aged machine-shop owner does the same. It’s one thing when a union employee complains about corporate malfeasance; it’s another when Tucker Carlson or Marco Rubio does it. Someone, somewhere once said that Trump’s most lasting legacy was getting right-wingers to talk like Marxists. It’s true. We on the right now dabble in class analysis and use words like “elite” and “bourgeois.” For the elite, this language registers as a threat. Because it is a threat. The elite can’t respond with its usual absorb-and-distract tactic. What can megacorporations do to appease people who believe the election was “stolen”? Nothing. What can the leader of any prestige institution do, these days, to maintain the appearance of political neutrality? Not much. The left and the right have mutually exclusive demands. They can’t both be satisfied. So, institutions indulge one and demonize the other.
Consider the case of critical race theory. When the academic-activist class started airing its racial grievances in public, every major institution capitulated in a nanosecond. Local governments pledged fealty to the cause of anti-racism, school districts built and staffed diversity bureaucracies, and corporations began throwing money (billions of dollars of money, it turns out) at struggle sessions led by upstart consultants. Libraries hyped Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and the National Archives slapped a trigger warning on every catalog page. A classic institutional response to left-wing agitation. Of course, none of this satisfied the academics, genuine revolutionaries who really do want to tear the system down and build a new one in its place.
These actions inspired political opposition, especially to the growing wokeness of public schools. Parents packed school-board meetings to voice their annoyance. Politicians began crafting bills. But notice what happened next. “There’s no critical race theory in our schools! You’re just imagining things!” said every superintendent in the country. Elite outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times ran stories denouncing CRT as a right-wing boogeyman invented by Fox News and Chris Rufo to scare the proles, and local newspapers echoed the sentiment. The respectable right wagged its collective finger and muttered, “Censorship! Censorship! No-no!” And David French, author of plenty of sensible pieces about why critical race theory is bad, turned around and started arguing that, actually, CRT has much to teach us, and that Christianity compels us to atone for the sin of “systemic racism.”
The point is this: It is not the irritant, but rather the response to the irritant, which causes the alarm bells to ring. Your sin consists of noticing American institutions’ various failures and their capitulation to left-wing causes. Your role is to wave the flag around and parrot their language, not oppose them. Bigot! Fascist! Why are you questioning their legitimacy? You should be sticking with them, no matter what. That’s what being an American means. Faith in institutions. Don’t look behind the curtain!
Read a publication like The Bulwark, and you’re left with a sense that its writers really do believe in their own limitless ability to shape public sentiment. They really do think that, in a different universe, a universe in which Trump didn’t exist and everyone read prestige media (and them), every American would be dutifully wearing a mask outside and checking his or her privilege, and all would be sunshine and lollipops. They really do believe that with some bans on “right-wing disinformation” here and there, and some changes to the electoral system, and a nice diet of mainstream media, the American people can be remolded into something compliant and virtuous.
This is false. But as long as the delusion remains alive, American institutions will continue to shoot themselves in the foot. Trust will continue to decline, and right-wing rage will build. Polite, well-read people will continue to fret about the specter of fascism on the horizon, and they will wonder when, where, and why it all went wrong. And they will never, ever look in the mirror.
Published in Politics
Main feed this, and then to Instapundit with this!
There’s little I can add to such excellent analysis. Only that some people saw this coming nearly fifteen years ago with the 2008 economic crash, the 2009 Obama stimulus (which stimulated only government cronies) and then Obamacare to put a cherry on top. What happens, people asked, when the middle class notices that nobody else is playing by the rules except them. What happens when the middle class just stops playing by the rules and checks out?
Actual liberal news outlets in those days wrote a lot of think pieces about the disappearing middle class and whether they’d ever earn a decent wage again. You know who claimed that was hogwash?
The establishment right. They didn’t give a rodent’s hindquarters about the middle class. Or if they noticed it was disappearing, they were convinced that meant that the middle class was rising into the upper class. (See any AEI piece on the subject from that era. Heck, AEI is still repeating the same mantra today.) To do this they had to redefine middle class, and completely ignore that the lower half of the middle class was getting poorer and poorer. Or they’d admit that families were earning a lot less, but they claimed that family sizes were a lot smaller these days, so it was all okay.
The establishment right really didn’t like that.
The establishment treats every political problem as an information problem. If people feel the middle class is shrinking, it’s not because the middle class is shrinking — it’s because people are getting bad information. If they had good information, they’d think and act differently. They wouldn’t believe the middle class is shrinking.
This pattern repeats itself again and again. CRT? An invention. Doesn’t really exist. Anyone who tells you it does is peddling misinformation. Skeptical about the public health establishment’s response to COVID? Trust the experts. Do what the doctors say. Your lies are killing people! Less than confident in the security surrounding elections? You’re reading the wrong sources. Look at The Federalist less and The Atlantic more.
It never occurs to these people that (a) many controversies are rooted in real disagreements about the way society ought to function, and that (b) their tendency to use information for political purposes, by their own admission, kills their credibility. Sorry, but you don’t get to pull out your “expert” card after you’ve told people they ought to attend anti-police protests, but forbidden them from attending church services or family gatherings.
I do.
I didn’t lose my faith in its legitimacy; it was driven out of me.
Jesse Kelly is en fuego.
You could probably go back to the 90s at least what with Clinton feeling our pain, among other things.
Although I do agree that the change started around 2008 when we were all bitterly clinging to our guns and religion.
Because the machine shop owner is the milk-cow from which political elites derive their sustenance. Without the revenue extracted from him/her, the elite can’t line their own pockets and buy off the revolutionary left. They need the machine shop owner and they hate him/her for it. And what they require of the machine shop owner is complacency. Don’t rock the boat. And never, ever, become aware of your own power.
Not sorry:
They simply cannot conceive that there’s any logical or rational reason not to agree with them and understand them. So there must be something hideously wrong with you for not agreeing with them you’re stupid Or racist or members of a cult.
The whole attitude seems to be if I could just get my message through your thick skull you would see the light and become enlightened. The fact that you refuse it means you must be evil.