ABC of Politics: Activism

Back in the day, I had never really thought much about "activism." I knew about it, disliked it, but had never tried to understand it. It was a political "ism" that belonged to the left-wing world -- as are many isms. It was a foreign country and was no concern of mine. But one day a friend told me that she was quitting her corporate job in order to go back to school and become an activist. She had always wanted to "get into activism."

One can ignore the madness of strangers, but a friend one has to try to understand.

Why would a educated woman in mid-life want to get into activism? It was not because she wanted to rebel, I decided, but because she wanted to conform; she wanted to be the best person she could be, and that, she believed, meant activism. I suspect that her yearning was a consequence of the fact that today's youngsters are taught, from kindergarten through graduate school, to believe that political activism is the highest and noblest form of life.

After years of investigation I have come to believe that today's Activism Culture is very similar to the Medieval Romance culture of the olden time. That is to say that I believe it to be a ruling-class conceit, a form of high-class virtue-signaling.

Why do we teach our children to become political activists? It is a long story.

Politics, according to Nazi Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, is the distinction between friend and enemy. Simply put, according to neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy." Or, I would say, the more politics the more enemies.

Now back in the good old days every human community was surrounded by enemies, and it was the job of the men to put a stop to any dawn raids that might be visited upon the community. So, back in the day, political activists were border warriors defending the community against the enemy. 

Later on, in England, King Alfred was sorely tried by various Danes that liked to come a-viking to loot the Wessex villages of grain and silver and sell the women and children as slaves. Looters and slavers as enemies.

Later on, wars developed into high-toned arguments about dynastic succession: the Wars of the Roses. Rival lords as enemies.

Then there came a change: the age of religious wars: Puritans against Cavaliers. The Thirty Years War of 1618-48. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

But then there was Frederick the Great. He may have been an Enlightenment intellectual, but his conquest of Silesia was reactionary: back to simple loot and plunder. Silesia was much richer than the sandy Brandenburg lands around Berlin that he had inherited from his father. Think of the revenues!

Next we get to the French Revolution. It ended up in a Reign of Terror, but it began with an Assembly of Notables -- princes of the blood, archbishops, dukes, marquises and counts -- proposing fairly sensible revisions of the tax system. Then came the men that made the French Revolution a revolution, the Mirabeaus, the Marats, the Robespierres, ideological activists punishing moderates for their moderation with a bit of regicide on the side. And there was no war at all until the peasant revolt against the revolution in the Vendée. The French Revolution was an ideological war, with the old regime, the moderates, or anyone, as enemy.

There is no politics without an enemy. So, as society has changed and politics has changed, the enemy has changed. In our day, we are no longer surrounded by enemy Vikings and looters, but we are still surrounded by enemies. The US Pentagon just announced that climate change and China are both "security threats." The Biden administration early on advertised its determination to tackle the two existential threats of climate change and systemic racism. There is no politics without an enemy.

China? Climate change? Systemic racism? Of course. Each one is an existential threat, an enemy to our way of life, experts agree. If those enemies didn't exist there wouldn't be a need for a government to protect us from anything. No enemy? No need for a government? Fuggedaboutit.

If the foregoing has not persuaded you about the change in political enemies since the good old days of the dawn raid, there is another "tell" that might convince you to believe that the enemies problem has changed in recent times. The "tell" is that our modern ruling class in the developed countries is not a warrior class but an educated class. A warrior class is the ruling class you want when you need to fight military wars to protect the homeland from Vikings, Goths and Vandals. But what is the point of an educated ruling class? What wars would it be needed to fight?

Test Question: What is the difference between a warrior ruling class and an educated ruling class? Explain.

The answer is obvious. Our modern ruling class fights ideological wars, as Robespierre and his ilk did in the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In World War I we were fighting against the horror of old-school Teutonic emperors with stupid mustaches and with knightly stars on their chests; in World War II against the monstrosity of fascism and another mustache; in the Cold War against the horror of Communism and Stalin's mustache. And in the War on Terror? Mullahs with beards.

Of course, we moderns like to sneer at the dynastic wars of the old kings and princes and the religious wars of the 17th century. But is there anything more contemptible than the ideological world wars of the 20th century and the ideological civil wars of the 21st century? And don't get me started on our current Wars of the Wokies that began in the USA and is spreading throughout the mind-world of the West.

I repeat: politics always needs an enemy, and it is the particular talent of an educated class to be able to call up an ideological enemy from the vasty deep on demand. Yes, but what enemy?

Perfectly simple. The ideological enemy of today's ruling class is the ordinary middle class, people that we might call yeomen or commoners. This is a necessary consequence of the over/under political formula that has inspired today's ruling class ever since Rousseau invented it in his Discourse on Inequality and Marx supercharged it in The Communist Manifesto. Our rulers experience themselves as the noble protectors of the lower class against the dawn raid of the bourgeoisie. In the Ally narrative, the rulers are the allies of the "oppressed peoples" and fight the "white oppressors."

There is a difference between olden times and today. The old nobility was a nobility of blood; the new nobility is a nobility of education, of selective college, and credential. In the high Middle Ages the king and his nobles were warriors. In high modernity the leaders of the intellectual class were revolutionaries. But you can see that nothing has changed: the key to any ruling class is its self-perceived specialness.

Every ruling class needs a self-congratulating narrative, especially when it is in decline.

In the Autumn of the Middle Ages the ruling class fell deeply in love with the medieval romance -- stirring tales of knightly virtue, damsels in distress and Holy Grails -- to enjoy before the blazing fire of an evening in the castle keep. Of course, these late feudal nobles were not saintly knights shepherding pilgrims to the Holy Land; they were just powerful men looking after No. 1. But it was their conceit to think of themselves as soldiers of Christ searching for the lost Holy Grail from the Last Supper. They needed something that would make them feel special.

Why should things be any different in the Autumn of the Administrative State? Today's stirring tales of activism are merely the modern version of the medieval romance, putting lipstick on the pig of ideological warfare, elevating the sordid loot and plunder of the modern state into a sacred reparation to peoples oppressed since the dawn of time. Activists are the noble knights -- or at least aspiring squires -- of the ruling class, ideologically setting forth from their NGO castles every morning sans peur et sans reproche to rescue victims in distress from the bigotry and violent extremism of the middle class.

More than that, the activism concept answers a real social need for our well-born youth. In any society it is a real challenge for the child of a wealthy or high-status parent to find a métier that accords with her noble status. In our age the problem is bigger than in the Middle Ages, because children don't automatically inherit the status of their parents. For instance, Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door asked: how does a millionaire mom raise her children? Not to go into business, because of the risk of failure. Instead she raises her children to the high-status and well-paid professions of medicine and law. That was then; this is now, and the most prestigious of today's professions is surely activism. Our universities teach activism as they once taught theology to well-born youngsters fated to become priests in the state established church, and our billionaires fund activism. Activism is a way of acquiring high moral status in a society ruled by an educated elite.

One question that still troubles me: what on Earth did Richard Wagner think he was doing in the middle of the 19th century with all his medieval-romance operas about swan knights and Grails and Teutonic myths?

Ruling classes like to flatter themselves, because the reality of political power is not very pleasant -- since politics is about the enemy. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages were the original robber barons, not noble knights. Today's activists are the bribed apologists of today's ruling class, not dedicated monks of truth and justice. We can tell that as we look back on the riots of the US 2020 election season. Our rulers seemed to be quite untroubled by the riots staged by the activists of Black Lives Matter and AntiFa. But they were deeply offended by teenager Kyle Rittenhouse battling the Kenosha rioters in August 2020 and the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021. The lesson is obvious. Left-wing activists are tolerated by the regime; their riots are judged to be "mostly peaceful protests." Right-wing activists are not even rioters; they are "armed insurrectionists."

For us, the medieval romances and Wagner's operas are delightful entertainment. And there is nothing more delightful than watching Shakespeare's Harry Percy and Prince Hal duke it out at the battle of Shrewsbury.

But the melodrama of modern activism is not so funny. For it is based on a lie, that modern society does not care about the travails of the oppressed, and that the only way for the voice of the oppressed to be heard is through the intercession of well-born activists. Not at all. Our era is remarkably sensitive to the cry of the oppressed, beginning not later than the Duke of Wellington persuading the British House of Lords to pass the great Reform Bill of 1832 that broadened the franchise to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers.

Indeed, the concurrence between the medieval romance and the modern activist romance is telling. It is telling us that the present age, in which all good people are devoted to digging out oppression wherever it can be found, is in its autumn. Just as aristocrats down the ages sported the stars and crosses of various orders of chivalry on their chests, so do our modern aristocrats sport their NGO exploits on their college applications and resumes.

Politics needs an enemy. But a ruling class also needs to believe it is doing good.