To lose one election to Trump may be regarded as a misfortune…
After four decades of running the show, a reckoning has arrived for the moralistic but shamelessly self-dealing professional-managerial class
(Current) home page of Trump’s website
Two-minute video summary
(Scarily good) AI-generated podcast
Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded… In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged… the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality.
Amazon blurb for Mus al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
So, it’s pretty clear that white liberals just basically hate white people. I’ve also personally seen white liberal hatred of white southerners, often wishing that the entire region would collapse to the bottom of the ocean.
In my estimation, if white people are upset about anti-white sentiment, they should look at whites on the left… The relationship between Blacks who hate whites, and whites who hate themselves, is a symbiotic one. White individuals, and organizations, come to these people on their hands and knees begging for salvation. Meanwhile, these white saviors bask in their own moral superiority - typically over other whites, but often also Blacks - wagging their finger at everybody with one hand while patting themselves on the back with the other… It hasn’t occurred to white people that actually no, no one is required to want the bullshit multiculturalism that they are obsessed with, to enjoy their company or to view the world through the same racial/cultural lens that they do.
Kitty’s Corner, 18/10/24
Whenever I run drafts of these Musings through ChatGPT and ask how they might be improved, The Chatmeister (we’re coworkers on nickname terms nowadays) tells me I should make my screed more reader-friendly by clearly stating my thesis upfront.
So, here it is:
Professional-managerial-class (PMC) culture has been collapsing under the weight of its contradictions since at least 2016. That disintegration will accelerate with a second, difficult-to-rationalise-away Trump victory.
Smart players on the Left and Right are manoeuvring to nudge the neopopulist backlash in their preferred direction.
Laying down markers
Bestselling novelists are often asked where they get their ideas from. Sadly, I’m not a bestselling novelist and nobody asks me where I get my ideas from. But as it happens, I usually ‘prompt’ my weekly rant by setting aside a few articles on a topic, thinking about where I agree and disagree with the claims put forward, then letting fly. However, I’ve collected so many think pieces about the looming political realignment of late that I can only offer a reading list this week.
David Brooks, New York Times
Background: NYT columnist employed to challenge the belief system of smug NYT readers
Argument: NYT-reading types fail to recognise just how self-righteously self-serving they appear to non-NYT-reading types
Money quote: In an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organisations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers… the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on. These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview – a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique. The more the Democrats embrace the priesthood’s orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters, including Hispanic and Black working-class voters… The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one… The problem for Trump is that he is even better at repelling potential converts than the Democrats… The problem for the rest of us is that we’re locked into this perpetual state of suspended animation in which the two parties are deadlocked and nothing ever changes.
Freddie deBoer, Freddie deBoer
Background: Ballsy Marxist writer willing to confront uncomfortable truths
Argument: Journalists must address inconvenient facts but don’t because they have personal and professional incentives not to
Money quote: Writers who work in media, defined broadly, have an intrinsic professional responsibility to be willing to say unpopular things, especially things unpopular with other members of the profession… As media has financially collapsed, the number of seats in the musical chairs game has shrunk, making for a more and more competitive job-seeking environment, which further deepens the perceived risks of saying things that your peers don’t want to hear. Twitter specifically and social media generally have taken dynamics that once existed within a given workplace (cliquishness and social pressure and gossip inside of a specific newsroom) and extended them to the entire profession… Writing as a profession tends to attract people who are more introspective, internal, and socially isolated, which can intensify the desire for professional writers to find community with and approval from their peers.
Yasha Mounk, Yasha Mounk
Background: German-American political scientist and author
Argument: Either the Republicans or Democrats could easily have built a “broad electoral coalition” by, respectively, moving to the economic left or cultural right. But they haven’t because that would antagonise core constituencies. Except the Republicans, under Trump, have embiggened their tent.
Money quote: The [Republican] party used to enjoy a distinct electoral advantage among a broad swath of the educated suburban middle class. Since Trump’s rise, those voters have been decamping to the Democratic Party at a rapid pace. Some of this may have been inevitable. Trump’s willingness to break with the party’s orthodoxies on questions of economic policy—for example by proclaiming in the 2016 primaries that he does believe the state has an obligation to help Americans access high-quality healthcare—alienated parts of the party’s erstwhile base, but resulted in a net gain of votes. In electoral politics, some trade-offs are inescapable, and this was probably the smart end of the bargain.
Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin
Background: Pollster, recently authored On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything and ’24 reasons that Trump could win’.
Argument: Trump could win
Money quote: Though the reasons for this are much debated, voter perceptions about the economy lag substantially behind objective data, and growth in take-home income has been sluggish for many years for the working class amid rising corporate profits…
Populism is often a highly effective strategy, and many Trump voters are indeed “deplorable” in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term…
Illegal/unauthorized immigration increased substantially during the first few years of the Biden/Harris administration amid a rising global backlash to immigration…
Harris ran far to her left in 2019, adopting many unpopular positions, and doesn’t really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances…
The cultural vibes are shifting to the right, and the left continues to pay a price for the excesses of 2020 on COVID, crime, “wokeness,” and other issues…
Many men, especially young men, feel lost amidst declining college enrollment, contributing to a rightward shift and a growing gender gap.
Trust in media continues to fall to abysmal levels. One can debate how to attribute blame for this between longstanding conservative efforts to discredit the media, a secular decline in trust in institutions, and various overreaching and hypocrisy in the press. But it’s hard for even legitimate Trump critiques to penetrate the mass public…
Democrats’ college-educated consultant class has poor instincts for how to appeal to the mass public, while Trump has done more to cultivate support among “weird” marginal voting groups…
Harris has been running on vibes and has failed to articulate a clear vision for the country. It might have been a good strategy if the “fundamentals” favored her, but they don’t.
Noah Smith, Noahpinion
Background: Academic turned econ blogger
Argument: Progressives spent a long time overplaying their hand, setting the stage for a reactionary backlash
Money quote: I spent pretty much all of the 2010s — my first decade as a writer and pundit — advocating for various progressive causes… I called for expanded immigration, national health insurance, and a bigger welfare state, extolled the benefits of diversity, cheered for a revival of labor unions and stronger antitrust, criticized mass incarceration, dreamed of a phase-out of fracking, and even endorsed reparations for slavery… But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years. Others still seem like good ideas, but I’ve been dismayed at their botched implementation where they were tried. And many progressive ideas simply don’t seem like they’ll be able to win majority political support in the near future. It’s looking more and more likely that America is headed for a more conservative decade.
Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish
Background: What Rogan is to podcasting, Sullivan is to political blogging.
Argument: Kamala can’t and won’t win, but I’m voting for her nonetheless
Money quote: It’s weak sauce compared to Make America Great Again, Cut Your Taxes, End the Wars, and Deport All The Illegals. Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough… this, I fear, is who she is: reactive, insecure, with no real inner core. And the more you are exposed to her vacuousness, the more the whole fakery of it all sinks in, and the less conceivable she becomes as a president.
Connor Tomlinson, Courage.media
Background: “Reactionary Catholic Zoomer”
Argument: The liberal arrangements put in place by the victors of WWII and, more recently, the neoliberals are rapidly eroding
Money quote: The rights enshrined in different political and technological conditions have been strained beyond credulity… As David Starkey states, they exist now not to protect individuals, but to enable aggrieved ‘minorities’ to attack ‘majorities’. There exists a painful contradiction between the story Brits tell themselves: victors of the Second World War, but penalized by costly immigration and cultural degradation. Any complaint is met with accusations of being “Far Right”, a racist, and a Nazi… Whereas Britain’s Empire lasted three hundred years and ended the transatlantic slave trade in the single most expensive humanitarian venture in history, America’s subsequent attempt to play world-police has been less successful. Failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are within living memory for Millennials and Gen Z. It should surprise nobody that those for whom the Second World War presses less on their conscience are most inclined to question the shortcomings of its resulting consensus.
John Della Volpe, New York Times
Background: Director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics
Argument: Young men are now lunging right, just as young women have lunged left
Money quote: “I’m seeing the strong potential for a turning point in American political alignment. Unlike other recent Republican presidential nominees, Donald Trump is making young men a central focus of his campaign. If effective, his effort could peel enough away from the Democratic Party to transform the country’s electoral math for years to come… since the spring of 2020, the share of young men identifying as registered Democrats has dropped by seven percentage points, while those identifying as Republicans have increased by seven points… Take one young Pittsburgh man I met in a recent focus group. A college graduate working part time as a bartender, he felt weighed down by hopelessness, adrift in a country where rising costs, stagnant wages and lack of affordable housing have made even the modest ambitions of other generations feel out of reach for him. “Hope is great,” he told me, “but I see nothing for the future.”
Joan C Williams, The Guardian
Background: author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Clueness in America Argument: Elitist progressives should stop being so elitist and progressive
Money quote: Republicans have owned anti-elitist rhetoric in recent decades, using it to redirect anti-elitist anger away from economic elites towards cultural elites – the “Brahmin Left”, as Thomas Piketty calls us (I’m one of them)… For 30 years, Democrats combined vague praise of the “middle class” with neoliberal policies that embraced free trade, with little attention to its consequences for blue-collar jobs in the US… Culture wars work for Republicans because class is expressed through cultural differences, and Democrats unselfconsciously send out signals that non-college grads hear as elitist… Trump’s superpower is his ability to channel the hurt and fury of Americans (especially men) mourning the loss of the American dream: Americans are now 40 points less likely to earn more than their parents than they were a generation ago, with declines especially marked in the midwest. Trump doesn’t offer real solutions to their economic woes. What he offers instead is honor. He does this by drawing the Brahmin Left into openly insulting the intelligence and morals of his voters, whom Trump then defends, telling them: “I am your voice.”
Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
Background: Co-founder of Vox, politics/economics blogger, author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.
Argument: The American electorate is becoming less racially polarised, which is good, but mainly because Black and Hispanic voters, especially the non-uterus-having-kind, are drifting right, which is suboptimal
Money quote: The rightward shift of voters of color is genuinely difficult for many progressives to reconcile with their big picture view of American politics, and it underscores the need to try to be chill and assemble a big tent to win… Black Americans, like all groups of Americans, hold varied opinions on the broad range of topics discussed in national politics. There are even some questions where Black opinion is, on average, more conservative than white opinion.
Has the right-side-of-history crowd found itself on the wrong side of history?
One of the few advantages of being a man of a certain age is you realise the world can appear to be heading down a well-worn path for an interminably long time before abruptly shooting off in a remarkably different direction.
For the first decade or so of my life, I lived under a Keynesian dispensation. Then Bob Hawke and Paul Keating set about economically rationalising Australia.
For most of the first two decades of my life, the Soviet Bloc existed. Then, just around the time I graduated high school, it suddenly didn’t.
I was watching TV late one night as a 30-year-old when regular programming was interrupted with footage of planes slamming into the World Trade Center. I thought to myself, Well, this is going to change everything. And so it did.
People have spent four decades imagining a broadly unpopular, if PMC-friendly, mash-up of free-market libertarianism and social hyperliberalism would persist indefinitely. Some even argued that we’d reached the end of history and that there was no feasible alternative to fiscal conservatism paired with social liberalism.
Well, it seems Thatcher was mistaken and there is an alternative after all. After quoting so many pundits, let me conclude with the words of a poet:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Update: They were published after I wrote this, but if you want to read a couple of more articles arguing progressive elites very much sowed what they’re now reaping, check out this New York Times piece by Bret Stephens. (Money quote: The Electoral College. White racism. Black sexism. President Biden. Should Kamala Harris lose the presidential election next month, those will be among the more convenient excuses Democrats will offer for falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent… There’s truth in all of it. But it lets off the hook the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today).
And then read this one by Rod Dreher. (Money quote: I don’t see how we who plan to vote for Trump can deny that the man has little respect for traditional democratic, constitutional norms. So why do the Democrats’ and their media allies’ shrieking “He’s a threat to democracy!” fall so flat? In short, because what “democracy” means to them (and their Never Trump Republican allies), as well as their allies in Europe, is pretty much “do what we tell you, and nobody gets hurt.” Martin Gurri, the retired CIA analyst who never voted Trump, is doing so this time because he is alarmed by what the Democrats have become: “the party of control”).