Well, they've learned to lose a lot in the era of Trump. But the way they talk about people "beneath" them entering the corridors of power hasn't changed at all. The focus on style rather than substance is quite striking in this post from ten years ago on Sarah Palin vs. the Ruling Class. Just substitute the words "Donald Trump" for "Sarah Palin" and it's really astonishing how it describes what we still see today.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
I apologize in advance, because this is going to be a rant. Actually two rants, about two related punks. If this isn't your thing, skip down the page. Otherwise, get the popcorn - these guys have put me in A Mood.
Punk #1 is Ted Diadiun of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Full disclosure: I was a paperboy for them, back a million years ago. Still doesn't keep me from recognizing an arrogant punk when I see one. King Kaufman lays out the situation, where Diadiun goes after Jeff Jarvis:
But why, representative of us readers, is it kind of unfortunate that Schultz gave Jarvis a lot of ink? Back to Diadiun: "... which I thought was kind of unfortunate because Connie's column is read by 25- or 30,000 people a month, which has to be many times more than this guy gets on his blog, and she gave him more publicity through that column than he would get on his own anytime." Thirty thousand readers a month "has to be many times" what Jarvis gets on his blog? Wait, that sounds like one of those unsourced, unreported assumptions you might get from ... from ... A BLOGGER! Diadiun actually started to say "is," but than corrected himself and phrased it "has to be." That was an admission, however subconscious, that he didn't have any idea what he was talking about. He was guessing to make his point.
So point one is that Mr. Diadiun has no idea what he's talking about. Point two is that he doesn't let this stop him from shooting off his piehole. But that's not the worst of it.
25,000 hits a month simply isn't very impressive, especially when you consider that those hits run off the branding established by the army of writers, editors, ad salesmen, and yes, paperboys that have built that paper. Kaufman compares that to Jeff Jarvis' traffic, which is several times greater without any branding other than Jarvis. Jarvis - all by himself - kicks the Plain Dealer's butt.
But that's not why Mr. Diadiun is a punk. He's about beat by my traffic. Dude, if a nowheresville blog like Borepatch is in the same ballpark as your paper, with all the branding and marketing of the paper's machine, you're a punk. A little humility would be in order.
Consider yourself punked. Your 15 minutes of fame will include the creation of a new category here - punks.
But it's really not hard to see why Palin inspires such devotion. And I do mean "see." She has one obvious thing going for her that [Harriett] Miers didn't: She's a babe, and she doesn't try to hide it.
Well, now. Let's look at what Mrs. Palin has done that might attract admiration, shall we?
Took on a famously corrupt political machine, and beat them at their own game.
Balanced family and a high-powered job.
Governed pragmatically, not ideologically.
Handled the most vicious public attacks that I've seen in 40 years of watching politics, with remarkable grace.
Didn't let herself get pulled into the Washington-Intellectual/Chattering-Class bubble world, but remained refreshingly normal.
Any of that appear in Chapman's article? Hello? Buehler?
Nope - she's babalicious:
Wayne: Cassandra. She's a fox. In French she would be called "la renarde" and she would be hunted with only her cunning to protect her.
Garth: She's a babe.
Wayne: She's a robo-babe. In Latin she would be called "babia majora".
Garth: If she were a president she would be Baberaham Lincoln.
Schwiiinnnnggg!!
Sheesh. What is present in Chapman's article? Let's run down the checklist, shall we?
Blaming her for John McCain's miserable campaign? Check. ("For all her alleged star power, she did nothing to improve the GOP ticket's fortunes on Election Day.")
Not part of the intellectual elite class? Check. ("She showed no gift for articulating conservative themes, beyond ridiculing liberals as overeducated, big-city elitists")
Mystification at why the rubes like her? Check ("When people remain ardent fans of Palin no matter how badly she performs, it's reasonable to wonder what they are thinking. But thinking has nothing to do with it.")
There's no nice way to say this: Chapman is an overeducated, big-city elitist. He recognizes someone who's not of his class, and will ignore all accomplishments, exagerate all failures, and descend into Middle School (SCHWIIIINNNGGG!!!) "humor", all to protect his class.
Dude, if you're so danged smart, explain why so many people think Mrs. Palin is pretty interesting. Go ahead, dazzle me.
[crickets]
Chapman, you've been punked. And your attempt at Middle School humor? It's been done better. Way better.
President Obama greeted a White House crowd this afternoon gathered for a May 4 premature celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday honoring an upset military victory over the French, whose troops didn't do so well in North America and don't celebrate the same day much.
Anyway, in a well-intentioned attempt at Spanish and a joke about being a day early, Obama said:
"Bienvenidos. Welcome to Cinco de Cuatro -- (laughter) -- Cinco de Mayo at the White House. We are a day early, but we always like to get a head start here at the Obama White House."
Apparently unbeknownst to the president he wasn't saying "Happy May 4th." He was saying, Happy fifth of fourth."
But don't forget, Sarah Palin is too stupid to be Vice President! [rolls eyes]
By "Small Town Bumpkins", I'm not referring to small towns or the people who live there (both of which I generally find quite agreeable). Rather, I'm talking about the stereotype so commonly found in literature - close minded, ignorant, uninterested in anything beyond the close and comfortable horizon. American literature certainly from about 1870 through 1960 is filled with this trope.
There's nothing uniquely American about this, and in many places it's been institutionalized. Scandanavia has what in Danish is termed Janteloven - the Law of Jante. The idea was described in a novel in the 1930s, but basically is a set of rules imposed by the citizens on the citizenry. It's used to maintain social cohesion, unity, and (most importantly) existing power structures. Some examples of the ten Laws include:
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as us.
You're not to think you are smarter than us.
You're not to convince yourself that you are better than us.
Probably most important was this: You're not to laugh at us. The novel described the soul-crushing conformity imposed in the town of Jante. This resonated so strongly that the idea of Janteloven has entered the Scandanavian mindset (or perhaps more accurately it gave a name to what was already there). But it's here, too, on these shores.
Interestingly, you really don't find it much in small towns. Instead, you find it in the Faculty Lounge, in the coastal SWPL Intellectual Class, in the New York Times and CBS News. This is unspoken but brutally enforced. Need an example? OK ...
Palin violated all of the ten laws, particularly the rule against laughing at them. I remember blogging her speech to the Republican Convention in 2008, and that's what stood out most strongly:
"A mayor is like a community organizer - with responsibilities."
"Send the Styrofoam Greek columns back to the studio set."
"What's he going to do - after turning back the waters and healing the planet?"
"Self-designed Presidential Seals."
Oh, and she mocked the media, too. Looked like she enjoyed it.
Boy, howdy, this is turning into an interesting race.
And the Intellectual "Elite" went into full meltdown mode. It was full bore Class Warfare, with the "Elites" uniting to punish a violation of the Janteloven. And then it continued a couple years later:
And once again, the "Intellectual Elite" lost its collective mind in a spittle-flecked rage.
Because the Tea Party is all about repealing the 13th Amendment, or something. Remember, the people foaming at the mouth at the impudence of the peasants willfully violating the Janteloven are firmly convinced that they're smarter than you, better educated than you, more traveled than you, and nicer than you. And so, there are some things you need to keep in mind, wingnut:
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as they are.
You're not to think you are smarter than they are.
You're not to convince yourself that you are better than they are.
And you must never, ever laugh at them. Look at the kids in the Tea Party picture, at their signs: Stay Out Of My Piggy Bank. They're laughing at the "Intellectual Elite".
And the "Elite" acts like you'd expect from a closed-minded small town rube who's climbed to the top of the local power structure. Well, the literary stereotype, since most small town folks I've met have a lot more common sense than this. The "Elites" - the New York Times Editorial Board - remind one of the conversation you had with the President of your High School Debate Team back at the 20th reunion. Remember how you went away shaking your head that he still though that made him smarter than everyone? That's the NYT Editorial Board on Palin or the Tea Party.
Small minded, insular, untraveled (at least to flyover country, where their mental horizons would get expanded). Bumpkins. Angry bumpkins.
It started with cloth making, where initially water power drove a set of rapidly evolving machine types that made cloth literally thousands of times easier to make. Prices plummeted, and consumption rose by a factor of 12 between 1770 and 1800. People's lives began to change, as now underwear was affordable to more than just the wealthy.
In it, I discussed how regulation is slowing down the emergence of new industries:
The reason is regulation (and its bastard child, litigation). That's the problem. We have buildings full of people that make us stop what we're doing, fill out forms in triplicate, and then wait months or years before we are allowed to pick up where we stopped. Think for a minute what this does. It pushes some of the middle of the S-Curve into the flat part, reducing the overall value of the industry, as resources get sidelined instead of being engaged in production. More damagingly, it pushes the next S-Curve to the right, increasing the time that it takes to bring a new industry online. Most damagingly of all, it possibly completely eliminates some S-Curves from appearing at all, because the risk is too high to attract investors.
But I didn't calculate the impact, because the post was too long and I was traveling then and didn't have easy access to the data. And because I'm lazy, I didn't go back later and "show my work".
Fortunately, Captain Capitalism has done the work for me, and it's eye-popping. Ever wonder what our GDP per capita would be without OSHA, the EPA, and all the other balls and chains? (hint: more than it is today. Way more)
The next time some smarmie leftist smugly tells you that corporations manage for the next quarter rather than for the long term, show them what could have been.
Barack Obama is a communist. That's a low schoolyard insult, even though it's true, but it doesn't matter. You see, Mitt Romney is also a commie. No, this isn't yet another Mitt Romney rant. All of our political establishment are commies, and have been for a long time. Buckle up, because this is an uberpost.
I often hear the expression "we're not going to vote ourselves out of this." The older I get it seems, the longer the pelt of my Wookie Suit becomes, and so I can sympathize with people who think we've lost something, something that we won't be getting back easily.
Some ideas which had been stewing in my subconscious since August (!) coalesced when I read a post by Kevin Baker, quoting a John Ringo novel:
(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This....is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.
Well yeah. Our elites are contemptible - everyone agrees with this, and by "everyone" I mean everyone. But the issue isn't whether we can restore a lost past of Ordered Liberty. The question is whether, like Plato's mistaken idealization of Sparta, we yearn for a past that never really was:
Bertrand Russell wrote of this in his A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946, p. 114):
To understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta. Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth. Each is important. The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato's political theory, and that of countless writers.
And so to our Republic. What is the reality, and what is the myth? It's here we go down Moldbug's rabbit hole, but a marvelous rabbit hole it is:
A few things must be dispensed with. The more obvious is that the US is governed by the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment as encoded in the US Constitution. We are in fact governed by the Puritan concept of ordered liberty, and all the revolution, liberty, freedom, representation blah blah blah crap was only used to transfer power from the British aristocracy to the Puritan merchant and banker elite, and to keep it firmly there. They are assisted by various hunchbacked toadies, notably the Quaker/Methodist/other pacifist Christian bourgeoisie and the Jewish merchants and bankers, but these people should not be mistaken as having any executive function.
...
The PQJs [Puritans/Quakers/Jews - Borepatch] nonetheless thought communism was an excellent form of social organization for the rest of the world- Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America- and the preferred replacement for older authoritarian social systems. Representative democracy could too easily be hijacked by the old elites, as was the constant danger in the West.
First, I believe anti-Americanism is best described as an epiphenomenon of Universalism. The single most significant fact about the world today is that sixty-two years ago it was conquered by a military alliance whose leader was the United States, and whose creed of battle was this nontheistic adaptation of New England mainline Protestantism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the European ruling class holds essentially the same perspectives that were held at Harvard in 1945. The US Army did not shoot all the professors in Europe and replace them with Yankee carpetbaggers, but the prestige of conquest is such that it might as well have.
...
In the 1940s, America invaded Europe, rather than the other way around. Therefore, we would expect to see more political diversity in America than in Europe, for much the same reason there are more dialects of English in Britain than in the US. The Englishmen who came to the US were by no means uniformly distributed across England, Scotland and Wales, and the randomizing process of migration tended to homogenize their speech and create a lingua franca. Just as the English of Appalachia retains Elizabethan tropes which have long since disappeared in the home country, the Universalism of Europe has a kind of New Deal purity which the fray of American politics has long since diluted.
The idea is that what we're seeing today with elitist government goes back very, very far. The Cold War was not a Kabuki dance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was a Kabuki dance between Western traditions in the United States, the elitists vs. the Populists:
Recent American history is plagued by dishonesty. One of my guiding principles when thinking about recent American history is to assume that every prominent American from the mid-20s to the mid-50s found a way to make himself acceptable to the communists. If an American during this period was unable to find a way to make himself acceptable to the communists, he wouldn’t have been prominent. [Sarah Palin could not be reached for comment. - Borepatch]
...
I assumed – last week – that Eisenhower would have similar connections.
So, in response to Ike’s defenders, I planned to dig through Ike’s connections and see what turned up.
Fortunately, Moldbug chimed in to the comments to point out that Ike chose Joseph Fels Barnes to ghostwrite his memoirs. I guess he couldn’t find any non-CPUSA members to write his book. Moldbug also adds, "Eisenhower did not keep Acheson as Secretary of State, but he kept the Acheson-Hiss State Department – and indeed collaborated quite enthusiastically in purging its enemies. This was not an accident or a mistake." Indeed, what could be more complicit with communism than not purging the State Department post-Hiss?
...
The Birchers believe that Ike stopped short while the USA was defeating the Germans so that the Soviets could capture more territory. I have no idea if this is true. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, since the Acheson-Hiss State Department was going to make sure the Soviets got more than their fair share.
Moldbug amplifies this battle, and then we'll get to the meat of the argument here:
It is not that the American left was the tool of Moscow. In fact, it was the other way around. From day one, the Soviet Union was the pet experiment of the bien-pensants. It was Looking Backward in Cyrillic. It was the client state to end all client states.
...
The theory of Russia as a client state of the American left helps us understand the behavior of the great Communist spies of the 1940s, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Essentially all significant institutions of today's transnational world community - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank - were designed by one of these gentlemen, whose role in passing American documents to Soviet military intelligence is now beyond dispute. John Stormer was right.
Or was he? The thing is that while, technically, Hiss and White were certainly Soviet agents, they hardly fit the profile of a traitor like Aldrich Ames. Hiss and White were at the top of their professions, respected and admired by everyone they knew. What motivation could they possibly have for treason? Why would men like these betray their country?
The obvious answer, in my opinion, is that they didn't see themselves as betraying their country. The idea that they were Russian tools would never have occurred to them. When you see a dog, a leash, and a man, your interpretation is that the man is walking the dog, even if the latter appears to be towing the former.
Hiss and White, in my opinion, believed - like many of their social and cultural background - that the US had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. They saw themselves as using the Soviets, not the other way around, helping to induce the understandably paranoid Russian leadership to integrate themselves into the new global order.
So a Puritan drive towards the perfectibility of mankind drives the entire political establishment - including Presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush - to support what on the face would be far left wing policy positions.
They're all dirty commies, ever one of them. Objectively speaking, of course. Think I'm joking?
The Cold War continues, as Moldbug relates:
Anti-Americanism, in this interpretation, is the organizing ideology of an empire. Call it the Blue Empire. The Blue Empire is an American empire, and its headquarters are in Foggy Bottom and Cambridge and Times Square. Anti-Americanists have no idea that they are in fact serving the needs and wishes of the Blue Empire. But then again, why would they?
The Blue Empire's bitter enemy is the Red Empire, whose headquarters is in Arlington and (for the moment [Written in 2007 - Borepatch]) Pennsylvania Avenue. The Red Empire is currently defending itself in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia - former clients such as Chile, Spain, Portugal, South Vietnam and South Africa having fallen to the Blue side. (The Red Empire still has strong clients in Asia, though, such as Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia.)
If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago. But even then, it wasn't really America. Moldbug yet again:
By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.
Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First.
We snicker at the French, always rewriting their Constitution. We gloss over that our Constitution has been a "living document" at least since the time of James Polk. At least the French had the decency to write their changes down in public.
Archaeologists unearth layers of detritus, reconstructing ancient living patterns from the cast off, scattered rubble. Similarly, we can observe the layers of parasitic attachment to the Res Publica. RTWT, all of the links.
And so Obama is a commie, as it Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower. Non-commies (Sarah Palin) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game. What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite. The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low. How will it end?
Who can tell? But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel. The Republic waits, expectantly. Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.
The Fifth American Republic does not have to look at all like what has come before.
Sarah Palin's at it again. Which means making all Right Thinking People® fume. They hate her with the fire of a thousand suns, but they can't stop looking.
What a strange attraction she has for some people. They claim to be repulsed, but can't bring themselves to look away. Few creatures have captured our imaginations like Sarah Palin ...
Well, that's the position of Michelle Goldberg, who gets positively bitchslapped by Ann Althouse at around 10:00 into this video (note: Video from November 2009). The three minutes starting at that point is a very interesting window into the progressive way of thinking. Goldberg is very clearly sealed in the progressive bubble (see her comment at 40:45 that "reality has a liberal bias"), but is also absolutely incapable of defending her positions when someone pushes back.
This is a long video, but is important for anyone who - like me - is tired of sneers from smug progressives. They congratulate themselves on being more insightful and nuanced (see 10:50), when what they really are being is tribal.
Goldberg offers numerous examples of what lawyers call "declaration against interest", where the statement is so contrary to their chance of winning their case that the statement is presumed to be true. For example, at 24:00, Goldberg states "... I found it, if not unbelievable, then her psychology is so different from anyone that I've ever encountered as to seem unrecognizable ..." For someone who by her own admission values nuance to offer a nobody I know voted for Nixon example is telling indeed.
Tribal. Goldman has chosen Obama's progressive intellectual tribe. She picks arguments that support that decision, and rejects arguments that show that decision to be less than wise, and there's no bridging this divide.
Watch the exchange that starts around 26:00, where Althouse (who voted for Obama) says that he's "dithering" on what do do about Afghanistan. Goldberg rushes to his defense, exclaiming that she loves (her words) an intellectual President. Althouse is looking for leadership; Goldberg is happy to have someone from her tribe on top. Althouse brings it up again - and Goldberg challenges her again - at 37:30. There's simply no possibility of common ground here, or of a true intellectual debate of the ideas.
None of this would matter much if the Left were intellectually sound. Unfortunately, it's not, and rather than being the odd "black swan", Goldberg's helplessness in the face of reasoned analysis is sadly par for the course. The Left is populated by people who spent their school years in the comfortable cocoon of compliance. Rather than challenging ideas that were presented to them - from either the Left or the Right - they cruised along, got their honors degrees from Ivy League schools by parroting what their professors expected, and became so used to hearing that they were "the best and the brightest" that they came to believe it in their bones.
They have no idea that there are people who don't think like they do, but think as well - or better - than they do. And when they run into one of these people, they have absolutely no idea how to respond other than falling back into tribal platitudes.
Progressive 's view of Gov. Palin seems based not on analysis, but on which tribe they self-identify with. I mean, ZOMG she's so dumb. I mean, how can you do anything like this if you're notZOMG dumb dumb dumb?
I keep saying that this Republic needs an intellectually vigorous Left. Sadly, we don't have one, but even worse we have an intellectually feeble left that thinks that they're Ever So Clever, and therefore Fit To Rule.
I don't know what to do about this, other than sit back and watch the inevitable collapse of the current Intellectual Order. This coming decade will be a series of catastrophes for them as Great Society and the New Deal collapse, as the most progressive states go bankrupt, and as we see a return to 1970s-era stagflation as the policies implemented during the first two years of the Obama Administration bite. The Progressive Intellectual's world view will be swept aside, but a lot of regular folks will get caught in that rip tide, too.
What I do expect is that whatever is left standing at the end of the decade will be stronger and more intellectually vigorous than what we have now. Not that that is saying much.
