I spent an hour watching Mark Steyn interview Douglas Murray on his new book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Mark titles his piece "The West in Existential Crisis."
I think I'd rather say that the problem is that the western elite is bollixed up in the internal contradictions of its ruling-class ideology. Why not? Marx predicted that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its fall. Couldn't we apply his wisdom to all rulers and oppressors?
Just what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of capitalism, I'm not sure. After all, as a Hegelian he ought to think that capitalism will go from strength to strength as it overcame the antithesis of every contradiction with a new synthesis. Which it has.
But listening to Murray and Steyn talk about the sad decline of Europe, it seemed to me that they were tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Why, for instance, would Swedes say that they are all in favor of diversity while they remove from the vibrantly diverse center cities of Sweden for rural whitey-ness?
The answer is, of course, that they are good little boys and good little girls that know the correct -- orthodox -- opinion they are supposed to hold if they know what is good for them at work and on social media.
Now, I take it as given that whatever is the correct and orthodox opinion in society will have something to do with the class interest of the ruling class. I hope you will not think this is a bridge too far.
So, what is the class interest of the ruling class?
Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked that.
The class interest of the ruling class is to stay in power, and about a century ago -- and in the US no later than the New Deal -- young educated folk decided that the royal road to political power was to put themselves at the head of the working class, then struggling to convert from the rural culture of feudal -- actual post-feudal -- agriculture to the market economy of the city.
Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the thing for the working class to do would be to lose the subordinate culture of the feudal peasant and learn how to be a responsible middle class participant in the wage economy of the city. But the working class did not feel that way. It experienced the vibrancy of the city economy as a frightening burden and a loss of all security. So its instinct was to take arms against a sea of troubles by forming labor unions as a means of protection and fighting back against the bad faith of the bosses.
It was the historic role of the Educated Youth of the 19th century to say Yeah! Those stinkin' bosses! Vote for us and we will save you from the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist economic system. Hey, how about Free Education?
This, in my view, is one of the great crimes of the last half millennium. What the Educated Youth should have done is give the working class temporary aid while doing everything to help them assimilate to a middle-class culture. For, to get all Hegelian on you, I believe that the way to get on in the city and obtain a lasting prosperity is to utterly surrender to the market and its prices. To admit that no job, no skill is forever, and the only security is to never settle into a secure job, but always be ready to acquire a new skill as the market economy continually renews itself and puts the "buggy-whip makers" of the day out of business. Instead, the Educated Youth confirmed the workers in their feudal habits, and told them that their neo-feudal capitalist bosses should protect them from economic storms just like the feudal lords protecting the peasants from the Mongols. (Not!)
But you can see what a grand ride it has been for the Educated Youth of the 19th century and their sons, the educated ruling class of today. Political power, administrative state sinecures, social science research grants, activism, peaceful protest: what a ride!
Nothing lasts forever, of course, and when the educated ruling class got tired of telling lies to the working class. There, all of a sudden, were Negroes, victims of a century of Jim Crow in the South. And women: dying of despair in the suburbs, if we were to believe Betty Friedan! So just as the old gig was getting past its sell-by date, up came a new gig, and the educated class jumped in with both feet, promoting special privileges for blacks and women and a delicious expansion of the administrative state and with postmodernism opening up a whole new horizon for academic research, and expanding the old game of class politics into gender and race politics.
Of course, the educated ruling class lied to women and minorities too. Instead of passing the civil-rights laws and letting people get on with it, the ruling class has riled up women and minorities for the last half century with the notion of "institutional racism" and a "glass ceiling" and "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" preventing their final arrival in a perfect world. So instead of letting women and minorities find their own way in an economy where government would not discriminate against them, they made women and minorities into their special charges, or what I call "Little Darlings" and fed them a constant narrative of oppression and exploitation.
Well, now the United States has enjoyed its First Black President. What is the educated ruling class to do now? Perfectly simple: encourage migration of the poor from the South and the Muslim lands to immigrate to the city. With any luck they will become the favored political clients of the educated ruling class and continue its rule for another half century. Yay!
You can see that all this is catnip to you if you are an educated person with an advanced degree and interested in a job in the administrative state or social science research or if you are a "woke" twenty-something that has been carefully taught to want nothing so much as a life in activism. But if you are just an average Joe or Jane you might not be quite as enthusiastic. For it might seem to you that you have become a second-class citizen. You might even start to act like the embittered and discarded mistress of a rich guy that likes to trade in last year's model for a hot young thing.
Also, as a disinterested observer, you may feel that we are darn lucky that so far, with the educated ruling class endlessly riling up the latest arrivals to the city, we haven't had any serious political unrest. You would probably have noticed that the educated-class power rests on an immensely cunning and astonishingly successful narrative of naming and shaming any dissent from its agenda as racism, sexism, and homophobia, and now Islamophobia. In 2019 no educated white person wants to have the Scarlet Letter of "Racist" embroidered onto his clothes.
And so the beat goes on. And you gotta say, it has been an astonishingly successful gig for the educated class.
But now we have a cloud on the horizon: Trump, and Brexit, and nationalism in Eastern Europe: ordinary people proposing that government is supposed to serve them and not the latest hot number from wherever.
Of course, if the Trumps and the Brexits and the Eastern European nationalists succeed then it could be "curtains" for our beloved educated ruling class. So it makes complete sense that the educated ruling class has mounted a soft coup to kick President Trump out of office, or at least discredit him enough to prevent his reelection. Same with Brexit: the British ruling class is doing its best to muddy the waters and stay under the rule of the European Commission in Brussels and its army corps of educated administrators.
What would be nice is if we could get onto the "next thing," whatever it is, without blood in the streets.
I think I'd rather say that the problem is that the western elite is bollixed up in the internal contradictions of its ruling-class ideology. Why not? Marx predicted that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its fall. Couldn't we apply his wisdom to all rulers and oppressors?
Just what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of capitalism, I'm not sure. After all, as a Hegelian he ought to think that capitalism will go from strength to strength as it overcame the antithesis of every contradiction with a new synthesis. Which it has.
But listening to Murray and Steyn talk about the sad decline of Europe, it seemed to me that they were tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Why, for instance, would Swedes say that they are all in favor of diversity while they remove from the vibrantly diverse center cities of Sweden for rural whitey-ness?
The answer is, of course, that they are good little boys and good little girls that know the correct -- orthodox -- opinion they are supposed to hold if they know what is good for them at work and on social media.
Now, I take it as given that whatever is the correct and orthodox opinion in society will have something to do with the class interest of the ruling class. I hope you will not think this is a bridge too far.
So, what is the class interest of the ruling class?
Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked that.
The class interest of the ruling class is to stay in power, and about a century ago -- and in the US no later than the New Deal -- young educated folk decided that the royal road to political power was to put themselves at the head of the working class, then struggling to convert from the rural culture of feudal -- actual post-feudal -- agriculture to the market economy of the city.
Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the thing for the working class to do would be to lose the subordinate culture of the feudal peasant and learn how to be a responsible middle class participant in the wage economy of the city. But the working class did not feel that way. It experienced the vibrancy of the city economy as a frightening burden and a loss of all security. So its instinct was to take arms against a sea of troubles by forming labor unions as a means of protection and fighting back against the bad faith of the bosses.
It was the historic role of the Educated Youth of the 19th century to say Yeah! Those stinkin' bosses! Vote for us and we will save you from the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist economic system. Hey, how about Free Education?
This, in my view, is one of the great crimes of the last half millennium. What the Educated Youth should have done is give the working class temporary aid while doing everything to help them assimilate to a middle-class culture. For, to get all Hegelian on you, I believe that the way to get on in the city and obtain a lasting prosperity is to utterly surrender to the market and its prices. To admit that no job, no skill is forever, and the only security is to never settle into a secure job, but always be ready to acquire a new skill as the market economy continually renews itself and puts the "buggy-whip makers" of the day out of business. Instead, the Educated Youth confirmed the workers in their feudal habits, and told them that their neo-feudal capitalist bosses should protect them from economic storms just like the feudal lords protecting the peasants from the Mongols. (Not!)
But you can see what a grand ride it has been for the Educated Youth of the 19th century and their sons, the educated ruling class of today. Political power, administrative state sinecures, social science research grants, activism, peaceful protest: what a ride!
Nothing lasts forever, of course, and when the educated ruling class got tired of telling lies to the working class. There, all of a sudden, were Negroes, victims of a century of Jim Crow in the South. And women: dying of despair in the suburbs, if we were to believe Betty Friedan! So just as the old gig was getting past its sell-by date, up came a new gig, and the educated class jumped in with both feet, promoting special privileges for blacks and women and a delicious expansion of the administrative state and with postmodernism opening up a whole new horizon for academic research, and expanding the old game of class politics into gender and race politics.
Of course, the educated ruling class lied to women and minorities too. Instead of passing the civil-rights laws and letting people get on with it, the ruling class has riled up women and minorities for the last half century with the notion of "institutional racism" and a "glass ceiling" and "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" preventing their final arrival in a perfect world. So instead of letting women and minorities find their own way in an economy where government would not discriminate against them, they made women and minorities into their special charges, or what I call "Little Darlings" and fed them a constant narrative of oppression and exploitation.
Well, now the United States has enjoyed its First Black President. What is the educated ruling class to do now? Perfectly simple: encourage migration of the poor from the South and the Muslim lands to immigrate to the city. With any luck they will become the favored political clients of the educated ruling class and continue its rule for another half century. Yay!
You can see that all this is catnip to you if you are an educated person with an advanced degree and interested in a job in the administrative state or social science research or if you are a "woke" twenty-something that has been carefully taught to want nothing so much as a life in activism. But if you are just an average Joe or Jane you might not be quite as enthusiastic. For it might seem to you that you have become a second-class citizen. You might even start to act like the embittered and discarded mistress of a rich guy that likes to trade in last year's model for a hot young thing.
Also, as a disinterested observer, you may feel that we are darn lucky that so far, with the educated ruling class endlessly riling up the latest arrivals to the city, we haven't had any serious political unrest. You would probably have noticed that the educated-class power rests on an immensely cunning and astonishingly successful narrative of naming and shaming any dissent from its agenda as racism, sexism, and homophobia, and now Islamophobia. In 2019 no educated white person wants to have the Scarlet Letter of "Racist" embroidered onto his clothes.
And so the beat goes on. And you gotta say, it has been an astonishingly successful gig for the educated class.
But now we have a cloud on the horizon: Trump, and Brexit, and nationalism in Eastern Europe: ordinary people proposing that government is supposed to serve them and not the latest hot number from wherever.
Of course, if the Trumps and the Brexits and the Eastern European nationalists succeed then it could be "curtains" for our beloved educated ruling class. So it makes complete sense that the educated ruling class has mounted a soft coup to kick President Trump out of office, or at least discredit him enough to prevent his reelection. Same with Brexit: the British ruling class is doing its best to muddy the waters and stay under the rule of the European Commission in Brussels and its army corps of educated administrators.
What would be nice is if we could get onto the "next thing," whatever it is, without blood in the streets.
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