The high price of sanctimony

A rolling ‘moral revolution’ that voters have grown weary of will power Trump to victory

Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

That’s Just How It Is: Most Politically Incorrect Person You Know Also Most Dependable In A Crisis
Recent Betoota Advocate headline

I’ve got a 50-50 record with predicting Trump victories. It was pretty much just me, Michael Moore and Steve Bannon who saw him coming in 2016. After getting in that back pat, I’m obliged to reveal that, even with the wildcard of Covid, I was sure he’d also win in 2020.

If you’re interested in my reasoning, I assumed the 2020 election would play out similarly to 1972, with a ‘silent majority’ disturbed about the breakdown in law and order voting enthusiastically for the right-wing candidate. I now realise several important demographics – suburbanites, Asian-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic-Americans – saw Biden as representing a return to order. In contrast, Trump was seen as an agent of ongoing disruption.

A week is a long time in politics and seven months is an eternity. Statistically, it’s entirely possible one or both candidates could have gone to their eternal reward by the time the US election rolls around. But if it’s Biden vs Trump, I’m predicting Trump pulls off the biggest comeback since Nixon in ’68 and wins the third presidential election he contests.

If the Bad Orange Man does win, it will be for various reasons. But one of those reasons will undoubtedly be tin-eared progressives. More precisely, those Leftists rich in cultural capital but poor in, um, capital capital who are behind what Damon Linker calls a “rolling moral revolution”.

Progressive political-cultural power
People get as fidgety talking about status as they do talking about class. But those who take a professional interest in the subject – anthropologists, advertising copywriters, novelists, political campaign operatives, property developers, sociologists – are under no illusions about humans being obsessed with where they and their tribe fit within the status hierarchy. They also understand that individuals and tribes that believe they are slipping down the greasy pole rarely react insouciantly.

Linker recently nailed it when recently exploring “The Political-Cultural Power of Social-Justice Progressivism”. He explored why the Left keeps losing and why it will likely lose on November 5, noting:  

[There’s] a common public culture all Americans share and take part in. It is governed by certain implicit norms and expectations that apply to everyone. But who determines those norms and expectations? The answer is that these days it is often progressive activists.

How do they accomplish this exercise of political-cultural power? I will admit that I’m not entirely sure. Something like the following process appears to happen: A group of left-leaning activists declares that certain words, claims, or arguments should be considered anathema, tainted as they supposedly are with prejudice, bigotry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or transphobia; then people in authoritative positions within public and private institutions (government, administrative and regulatory agencies, universities, corporations, media platforms, etc.) defer to the activists, adjusting the language they use to conform to new norms; and then, once the norms and expectations have been adjusted, a new round of changes gets mandated by the activists and the whole process repeats again, and again, and again.

I suspect that to many millions of Americans (and to lots of people living in democracies across the world where something similar is going on [my emphasis]) the process feels a bit like a rolling moral revolution without end that makes them deeply uncomfortable. That response is no doubt a function of right-leaning views among some voters. But I’d be willing to bet that for many others, the negative reaction follows from the sheer bossiness of it, with schools, government bureaucrats, HR departments at work, movie stars, and others constantly declaring: You can’t talk that way anymore; you must speak this other way now; those words are bad; these words are the correct ones. A lot of people are ok with this. But many others respond with: Who the f-ck are you to tell me how I’m allowed to talk? Who elected or appointed you as my moral overseer and judge?

The perils of lecturing from a position of relative privilege
Shortly after reading Linker’s piece, I came across this one in The Australian, written by Timothy Lynch, a professor of political science at the University of Melbourne. While puzzling over “Why is the progressive left losing the referendum wars” (i.e. Brexit, a Chilean vote on introducing a ‘green’ constitution, the Voice and, most recently, a referendum in Ireland to purge its 1937 Constitution of outdated language about the role of women and the nature of the family. Professor Lynch comes to much the same conclusions as Linker, noting:

Why are the sacred arguments of the progressive Left so vulnerable to popular disapproval? Protecting them behind university campus speech codes and corporate diversity training programs has not much altered their essential lack of support. The woke rewrite of social rules that have held dominion in human affairs for millennia seems to be reaching a natural, democratic limit…

The Brexit poll was meant to affirm the superiority of transnationalism. It did the opposite. Chile was obliged to validate a progressive interpretation of indigeneity and climate catastrophism. A majority demurred. The voice intended to racialise our politics. But the people voted not to. Irish progressives wanted old-fashioned gender distinctions to be erased. Its people voted to protect them… Donald Trump, now the confirmed Republican candidate, will run his campaign as a repudiation of progressive elite overreach. 

Why can’t progressive elites stop overreaching?
Practically minded Leftists (they do exist) often lament the Left’s tendency to purity spiral and spend more time rooting out heretics than welcoming converts. At this juncture – post-Brexit, post (and probably also pre) Trump, post all the failed referenda listed above – even the deepest-in-the-bubble progressive must be suspecting the culture war situation has developed not necessarily to the Goat Cheese Left's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Indeed, if you were to Google, for example, ‘Should progressives stop condescending to the working class?’, you might find around 2.5 million results, including ‘The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension’, ‘Stop patronising the working class’, ‘Are Liberals Too Smug? Nah, We’re Too Condescending’ and ‘The Democrats Begging Their Party to Ditch the Activist Left’. 

So, as both those on the Right and (sensible) Left are fully aware, the Left is losing political battles it could potentially be winning in no small part due to style rather than substance. (Well, OK, substance is important. I imagine those progressives who believe or pretend to believe there are 58 genders will continue to struggle to convince the Volk of that ‘fact’.)

But, like Linker, I believe it’s not so much the ludicrous claims well-educated Leftists often make but the unyielding arrogance with which they impose their dogmas on others that gets a (referendum/election-winning) majority of voters offside.  

At this juncture, you may be wondering why the progressives (shorthand for those well-educated but rarely well-remunerated types – academics, actors, journalists, mid-level public servants, musicians, writers, teachers – most drawn to identity politics cause célèbres) don’t simply pull their head in.

It’s now largely forgotten, but the Voice had majority public support at the start of the referendum campaign. It’s conceivable it could have got across the line if, rather than inferring anyone with concerns was a racist dickhead, progressives had “done the work” to “be better”.

But that would have involved humbling themselves sufficiently to explain to mainstream Australia how the Voice would operate and why it would be more successful than all the other failed schemes to address Indigenous disadvantage. It would have meant undertaking the unglamorous grunt work involved in slowly changing social attitudes, the slow boring of hard boards in Weber’s famous phrase. Progressives of the past were willing to do that tedious and thankless labour and achieved many noble and lasting victories as a result. 

But I fear today’s progressives are rather a different breed to their forebears.

A two-front class war
Progressives possess lots of cultural power but rarely enjoy equivalent economic power. As is often observed, it’s now not uncommon for a plumber to earn more than a professor.

In terms of the traditional class hierarchy, the scholar is superior to the tradesman who sticks his arm up S-bends. However, four decades of neoliberalism have acted as a solvent on many things, including traditional class hierarchies.

The professor may continue to be more esteemed than the plumber in polite society. But we’ve moved to a neoliberal dispensation where money talks and bullshit walks, and the plumber is earning more money than the professor. (Feel free to replace ‘professor’ with ‘teacher’, ‘journalist’, or ‘mid-ranking public servant’; it’s the same story.)

The professor and the plumber are unlikely to mix in the same circles. However, the professor, a relatively modestly paid member of the cultural elite, is likely to come into regular professional and personal contact with well-remunerated members of the corporate elite.

This is the humiliating situation the contemporary progressive finds themselves in – out earnt by both sections of the working class, whom they regard as stupid and reactionary, and the ‘corporate’ faction of their university-educated class, whom they regard as civilised but morally compromised.

I suspect it’s this feeling of being encroached upon from above and below and a gnawing (but not necessarily conscious) terror that their social status is inexorably ebbing away that now drives many progressives.

I don’t doubt most progressives are well-intentioned and sincerely aspire to create a kinder, gentler world. But humans, even the most idealistic ones, tend to act in ways that further their self-interest. Even when they convince themselves they are acting from only the purest of motives, as progressives invariably do.

If I’m arguing contemporary progressives aren’t solely motivated by a tender concern for sacralised victim classes, I must suggest at least one other motivation. Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn I believe it all comes down to shifting class dynamics.

The new priestly class  
Many readers will be too young to understand how important religion used to be. That’s a whole other Musing, but please take it on trust that there used to be a goodly number of individuals – at least one in every village – who were modestly remunerated but possessed a great deal of cultural power and were held in high esteem.

These individuals were called priests. Or, if you want to be less specifically Roman Catholic about it, the priestly caste. While holy men have always tended to be much poorer than, say, merchants, they used to possess significant cachet due to their role as, among other things, moral arbiters. (A shaman or witchdoctor who was asked, “Who appointed you my moral overseer and judge?” could self-confidently reply, “The Gods.”)

While I imagine few of them are conscious of doing this, progressives have increasingly been anointing themselves as the modern-day priests they imagine secular Anglosphere societies are desperately in need of.  

If you asked a progressive if they were, for instance, broadcasting their pronouns because they saw themselves as a modern-day religious minister, they would undoubtedly demur. However, if you strapped them to a lie detector and asked them, “Do you believe people in your position have a solemn duty to make your societies less racist/sexist/transphobic/climate-change denialist? And do you believe – by dint of your above-average cleverness, impressive educational qualifications, and the superior insight into The Truth you have gained through your work as an activist, artist, educator, communicator, lawyer and/or civil servant – you have all the right ideas about how societies should function?”, they would find it extremely difficult to dispute the proposition.

Where to now?
I’d argue it’s progressives’ understandable desire to nudge their own (economically flailing) tribe a few rungs back up the social status hierarchy that’s been generating much of the class friction that’s roiled the Anglosphere in recent decades.

Humour me for a moment and accept progressives are, generally unconsciously, positioning themselves as society’s (atheist-but-into-yoga-and-meditation) priests. What are the go-to criticisms of priests? The gentler charge is they are unworldly. The harsher accusation is they are smugly self-righteous and grossly hypocritical.

Nowadays, the things that unite the university-educated are greater than the things that divide them. A barista with a PhD in Gender Studies earning minimum wage and a CFO pulling down $350K still probably have more in common with each other than either would have with a coal miner on $150K. This is why the coal miner now votes for the ‘populist’ centre-right option while both the barista and CFO embrace the ‘woke’ centre-left one.

While some class antagonism inevitably exists between the corporate and cultural factions of the elite it’s not significant, in either sense of the word. Corporate elites think cultural elites are impractical; cultural elites think corporate elites are venal. But neither side gets too worked up about it. Indeed, as many, including me, have noted, corporate and cultural elites are increasingly on a unity ticket. There were just as many CEOs and tax lawyers barracking for the Voice as singer-songwriters and senior lecturers. Likewise, corporate and cultural elites are, albeit for different reasons, extremely enthusiastic about mass migration.

I’d argue what’s been roiling Anglosphere societies is the class conflict between the affluent unlettered and those struggling sections of the (lower?) middle class who believe it’s both their right and duty to rewrite social rules that have held dominion in human affairs for millennia.

The owner of a successful plumbing business is unlikely to react well to being dressed down by a young blue-haired barista who earns a quarter of what they do. Shockingly, rather than meekly accepting being reprimanded for their cisheteronormativity, they are likely to respond with, “Who the f-ck are you to tell me how I’m allowed to talk?”

Hence the outcome of recent referenda. (The cultural elite now have near-iron control of the epistemological means of production, but they remain an electoral minority. Even after several decades of mass university education.)

To conclude, I’d posit it’s a feeling of economic and hence status anxiety – ‘I might not be able to secure a well-paying job, or enter the property market, or get married and start a family, but at least I’m much more enlightened and moral than everybody else! Will someone now please give me a cushy six-figure DEI job that allows me to spend my days policing the worldviews, attitudes and speech of others?’ – that drives much current-day progressivism.

And I fear it will take many more defeats, including one on November 5, before progressives start reconsidering their worldview, attitudes and speech.