The New Republic has a bizarre article half-endorsing the new left-wing craze for “milkshaking” political candidates they disagree with. The author ends with:
“I personally oppose violence in all forms, so I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to throw a milkshake at the nearest racist I encounter. But I don’t need to believe in it to recognize how effective it is at shaming the far right.”
That is surely, praising with faint damn.
But more interesting than the moral depravity is the odd assertion that the act of throwing a milkshake at an opponent is “effective.”
We do not yet know the results of the British EU election. Voting is today. On what basis can the tactic already be declared “effective”?
This, I think, is a key to the mindset of the modern left. It does not even care what the general population thinks. “Effective” means that the tactic is popular among leftists.
They genuinely see themselves as a ruling elite, and only what they think matters.
They are perfectly clueless about other views: they do not know, because they do not want to know, because they do not care. A party that is leading the polls, or a policy choice that holds majority support, can nevertheless be branded, like Nigel Farage and Brexit, “far right.” By any measure other than obliviousness, this is a contradiction in terms.
It should be obvious we are dealing with a self-designated, self-aware, elite; roughly, the professional class. My friend Xerxes was once quite open about it with me. I pointed out the illogic of expecting American voters to obediently accept the proposition that others should decide things for them. His response was that of course we should be ruled by an elite. And it of course includes him.
Another leftist friend, a book publisher, warned me against going down the same road as Jordan Peterson with my book on psychology. Yes, sure, he’s now a bestselling author, rich, and perhaps the world’s most famous public intellectual. But, don’t you see, he’s lost the respect of his colleagues?
There is a conscious us-them divide here: the professionals are aware of themselves as a class apart, and are acting for class interests, not in the interests of the whole. They even openly dislike ordinary people. They are the enemy, the “deplorables,” the rednecks, with their guns and their religion, and must be kept in their place. Making common cause with them is class betrayal.
Which may explain by itself the hatred for Farage, Trump, Benjamin, Peterson, or Tommy Robinson. Damned uppity peons.
Marx, purposely or not, got the classes wrong. He saw the Industrial Revolution as a transfer of power from a ruling landowning class to the bourgeoisie, who would in turn be replaced by the proletariat .Yet the landowning class were never the ruling class. In France, for example, they were the Second, not the First, estate. The First Estate, the acknowledged ruling class, was the clergy. So too in India: the top of the caste system was never the Ksatriyas, the Rajas and the landowning nobles. It was the Brahmins, the priests. In China, there was not even a landowning class. Everything was simply run by the Confucian mandarins.
“Priest” or “clerical” or “mandarin” here does not imply only religious office. Our term “clerical” best this ground: this was and is the educated class, the knowledge workers. In Biblical terms, the scribes and Pharisees. Other classes may or may not have had more material comforts, but the clerical class has always held the power. They have always run things, made and enforced the laws, run the businesses, and the schools and universities.
They have run things based on a monopoly, or rather, cartel, on information. Knowledge was their commodity, what they had to sell. Ideally, when the system was not corrupt, this knowledge was in principle available to all comers, and members of this class were admitted purely on their academic merit. But there is at all times a natural and inevitable incentive, among members of this class, to abuse their power, set their own prices for their labour, and to withhold knowledge from others in order to preserve their position.
To the extent that this has been a cartel, to the extent that this ruling group has been corrupt, the new information technology more or less blows that cartel apart.
There is no more cartel on raw knowledge. The information that once was the special preserve of a few is now generally available with a quick Google search. The “long tail” of the Internet also plays a part, revealing that what the “experts” now say is commonly the opposite of what they were saying a few years ago. In many professions, a striking lack of any real knowledge or expertise is being uncovered.
The more corrupt elements of the professional elite are reacting to this by circling the wagons. Realizing that the common people are growing suspicious, they are increasingly understanding the common people as the enemy. And more definitely seeing their own interests as against those of the common people. Hence the radicalization we are seeing on the left.
Their resulting utter disdain for others outside their group makes them peculiarly vulnerable to misjudgments. The
New Republic author writes:
“Nothing animates the far right or shapes its worldview quite so much as the desire to humiliate others—and the fear of being humiliated themselves. It’s why alt-right trolls, projecting their own sexual insecurities, enjoy calling their opponents “cucks.” It’s why they rally around blustery authoritarian figures like Donald Trump who cast themselves as beyond embarrassment, shame, or ridicule.”
This is a magnificent example of projection. It is the leftist elite who so values social prestige. The left, like my publisher friend, is all about status, prestige, and being accepted as part of the group. It is the professional elite who fear humiliation, as they are exposed as having no special knowledge.
One of the keys if not the one key of Trump’s popularity is exactly that he seems impervious to humiliation. Marco Rubio tried, and died. Trump visibly just does not care what the elite thinks. Milkshakes? He’ll serve milkshakes and hamburgers at the White House. Humiliating news reports? He’ll just call the press out for “fake news.” He’ll say what he likes, and damn the tut-tuts from the tidy drawing rooms.
The left, in sum, is growing increasingly blustery and authoritarian, and Trump defies it—making him, despite his own wealthy background, a folk hero.
The same is true of Nigel Farage. The present author has the source of his appeal completely inverted; it is because, instead of putting on airs, he is shockingly frank. Benjamin and Robertson campaign in jeans and T-shirts; hardly pretending to be posher than they are. They make it the basis of their appeal that they are outsiders, ordinary working-class guys, not part of the establishment. So the left thinks the way to defeat them is to make it clear to the common yobs that they are ordinary guys, and not part of the establishment?
And those on the right do not call opponents “cucks.” Whether you think it right or not, they call others on the right “cucks,” for being too timid or obsequious to the elites, not ideological opponents.
Note too the uncanny lack of insight in not realizing for an instant that anyone else might just as easily use this milkshake tactic: so long as a single, solitary figure disagrees with any candidate, he can fling a milkshake at them. It is not just that the left does not seem to be listening to anyone else: they cannot even mentally acknowledge, it seems, that they exist. Not even one of them.
So flinging a milkshake says absolutely nothing about the candidate; it could happen to any candidate. It tells us something about the assailant, or their opposition, if it generally approves, and it is not a noble thing. It suggests that they feel they and their views are more important than anyone else’s and must be obeyed without question. The public must conform to their solitary views, or next time, they will vote them all out and elect a new general public.
The left, which is to say by and large the current professional elite, is committing suicide before our eyes.
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