From “What Happened to America?”:
How … did America come to be run by a cabal of super-rich “oligarchs”, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and “journalists” who sneer at the list [of traditonal American values] and reject it, in deed if not in word?
It happened one step backward at a time. America’s old culture, along with much of its liberty and (less visibly) its prosperity, was lost step by step through a combination of chicanery (by the left) and compromise (by “centrists” and conservative dupes). The process — the culmination of which is “wokeness” — has a long history and deep roots. Those roots are not in Marxism, socialism, atheism, or any of the other left-wing “isms” (appalling and dangerous they may be). They are, as I explain here, in (classical) liberalism, the supposed bulwark of liberty and prosperity.
An “ism” is only as effective as its adherents. The adherents of (classical) liberalism are especially ineffective in the defense of liberty because they are blinded by their own rhetoric. Take Deirdre McCloskey, for example, whom Arnold Kling quotes approvingly in a piece that I eviscerated….
That drips with smugness and condescension. And it wildly mischaracterizes the wealthy “elites” who have taken charge in the West….
All that McCloskey has told us is that she (formerly he) views his/her way of life as superior to that of the unwashed masses, living and dead. Further, holding that view — which is typical of liberals classical and modern (i.e., statists) — he/she obviously believes that the superior way of life should be adopted by the unwashed — for their own good, of course. (If this isn’t to be accomplished by force, as statists would prefer, then by education and example. This would include, but not be limited to, choosing a new sexual identity if one is deluded enough to believe that he/she was “assigned” the wrong one at birth.)
It is hard to tell McCloskey’s attitude from that of a member of the “woke” elite, though he/she undoubtedly deny being such a person. I am willing to bet, however, that most of McCloskey’s ilk (if not he/she him/herself) voted enthusiastically for “moderate” Joe Biden because rude, crude Donald Trump offended their tender sensibilities (and threatened their statist agenda). And they did so knowing that Biden, despite his self-proclaimed “moderation”, was and is allied with leftists whose statist ambitions for the United States are an affront to every tenet of classical liberalism, not the least of which is freedom of speech.
Thus the unrelenting attacks on Donald Trump — the leading symbol of Americanism, anti-”wokeism”, and anti-statism — which began before he became president, persisted throughout his presidency, and have intensified since he left the presidency. The attacks, it should be emphasized, have been and are being conducting by officials and agencies of the federal government.
If Trump is to be silenced, so are his followers. Bill Vallicella depicts the horror that is to come:
With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police except for the state police, confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 Project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, suppress religion, and so on into the abyss of leftist nihilism.
To which I would add: overriding and penalizing objections to allowing transgendered “men” into girls’ and women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports; suppressing parents who object to such things and to the teaching of critical race theory; penalizing small businesses who object to forced participation in the “celebration” of LGBTQ-ness; the raising and arming of a vast cadre of IRS auditors and enforces; and on and on.
A leading example of the oppression is the elite and official response to Covid: mask mandates. Martin Gurri spells it out:
Three days after the mask mandate was struck down [by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle], on April 21 [2022], Barack Obama delivered the bad news about “disinformation” to a Stanford University forum on that subject. His unacknowledged theme, too, was the crisis of elite authority, which he explained with a history lesson. The twentieth century, Obama said, may have excluded “women and people of color,” but it was a time of information sanity, when the masses gathered in the great American family room to receive the news from Walter Cronkite…. Those were the days when a “shared culture” could operate on a “shared set of facts.”
The digital age has battered that peaceable kingdom to bits… [w]ho had the authority to make projections and recommendations[?]
Online, everyone did. People with opinions that the former president found toxic—nationalists, white supremacists, unhinged Republicans, Vladimir Putin and his gang of Russian hackers—could say anything they wished on the Web, no matter how irresponsible, including lies. A defenseless public, sunk in ignorance, could be deceived into voting against enlightened Democrats.
Total blindness to the other side of the story is a partisan affliction that Obama makes no attempt to overcome…. [H]e never mentioned the most effective disinformation campaign of recent times, conducted against Trump by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in which members of his own administration participated. He simply doesn’t believe that it works that way. Disinformation, for him, is a form of lèse-majesté—any insult to the progressive ruling class.
How are we to deal with this “tumultuous, dangerous moment in history”? Obama was clear about the answer: we must recover the power to exclude certain voices, this time through regulation. The government must assume control over disorderly online speech. First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech don’t apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter, he noted. At the same time, since these companies “play a unique role in how we . . . are consuming information,” the state must impose “accountability.” The examples he provided betray nostalgia for a lost era: the “meat inspector,” who would presumably check on how the algorithmic sausage is made; and the Fairness Doctrine, which somehow would be applied to an information universe virtually infinite in volume.
Obama views disinformation much as Fauci does Covid-19: as a lever of authority in the hands of the guardian class. Democracy, he tells us over and again, must be protected from “toxic content.” But by democracy, he means the rule of the righteous, a group that coincides exactly with his partisan inclinations. By toxic, he means anything that smacks of Trumpism. The former president’s speech was vague on details, but it left all options open. Who can say what pretext will be needed to expel the next rough beast from social media, tomorrow or the day after?…
Obama’s speech, in turn, took place four days before the apparent sale of Twitter to Elon Musk—at which point elite despair, always volatile, at last exploded in a fireball of rage and panic….
For a considerable number of agitated people, [Musk’s] goal of neutrality [on Twitter] was an abomination. Suddenly, “free speech” became a code for something dark and evil—racism, white nationalism, oligarchy, transphobia, “extremist rightwing Nazis”—all the phantoms and goblins that inhabit the nightmares of the progressive mind….
Following the Obama formula, the itch to control what Americans can say online was equated with the defense of freedom. Granting unfettered speech to the rabble, as Musk intended, would be “dangerous to our democracy,” Elizabeth Warren said. “For democracy to survive we need more content moderation, not less,” was how Max Boot, Washington Post columnist, put it. “We must pass laws to protect privacy and promote algorithmic justice for internet users,” was the bizarre formulation of Ed Markey, junior senator from Massachusetts. The Biden White House, never a hotbed of originality, recited the Obama refrain about holding the digital platforms “accountable” for the “harm” they inflict on us….
The second theme follows from the first. The elites are convinced that their control over American society is slipping away. They have conquered the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the entirety of our culture; yet their mood is one of panic and resentment….
[But] Starting with the onset of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, elite fortunes took an almost magical turn. The pandemic frightened the public into docility. The Black Lives Matter riots enshrined racial doctrines that demanded constant state interference as not only legitimate but mandatory in every corner of American culture. The malevolent Trump went down to defeat, and the presidency passed to Biden, a hollow man easily led by the progressive zealots around him. The Senate flipped Democratic….
From the scientific establishment through the corporate boardroom all the way to Hollywood, elite keepers of our culture speak with a single, shrill voice—and the script always follows the dogmas of one particular war-band—the cult of identity—and the politics of one specific partisan flavor, that of progressive Democrats….
Are we on the cusp … of an anti-elite cultural revolution? I still wouldn’t bet on it. For obscure reasons of psychology, creative minds incline to radical politics. A kulturkampf directed from Tallahassee, Florida, or even Washington, D.C., won’t budge that reality much. The group portrait of American culture will continue to tilt left indefinitely.
But that’s not the question at hand. What terrifies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster. They fear diversity of any kind, with good cause: to the extent that the public enjoys a variety of choices in cultural products, elite control will be proportionately diluted.
And the left, in its panic about the possible loss of control, is trying to tighten its grip on ideas and on its ability to make the “masses” do its bidding.
It is happening here. And it may be unstoppable.