A Brief and Sad History of the Modern Left

1950s through 1960s – The Sexual Revolution. With the advent of what used to be called The Pill, many believed that everything had changed. Sex was no longer tied to childbirth, and could be purely recreational. For obvious reasons, this idea was attractive, regardless of its innate pausibility. In order to make this happen, of course, "conventional morality" could and should be changed. Feminism too emerged from this notion, along with its milder masculine equivalent, "the Playboy philosophy"—women were now "freed" from men and children and into the world of work.

1970s through 1980s – The Right to Choose. For whatever reason, darn it, women continued to get pregnant. Nature was not cooperating. Rather than abandon the "sexual revolution"—too many people had too much invested in it now—unrestricted abortion became necessary to keep the dream alive. This was an important watershed—it now because necessary, in order to stay on the left, to dismiss not just "conventional morality," but morality plain and straight up. Here is where  the left split with the religious generally, and became openly anti-religious. Homosexual rights emerged at this time, mostly as a stick with which to beat
"conventional morality" as "prejudiced."

1980s through 1990s – Postmodernism. Though it became well-known as a specific, named, doctrine only circa the 1990s, "postmodernism" appeared almost immediately and concurrent with the move to permit abortion, as its necessary justification. I remember hearing it espoused already in the early seventies, and specifically as a justification for abortion. In a nutshell, the doctrine is this: there is no truth, and there is no right and wrong. One chooses to believe what is convenient. At this point, the left became, not just explicitly immoral, but also, for all intents and purposes, insane. It turned its back on reality.

1990s through 2010 – The Culture Wars. Postmodernism ended all chance at dialogue. When there is no possibility of appealing to conscience, evidence, or reason, a raw struggle for power is all that is possible. By embracing postmodernism, the ruling professional elite and those in power also generally removed all moral restraints and restraints of conscience on their own actions--an attractive thing in itself, for them. Postmodern thought therefore systematically and intentionally destroyed all ethical traditions, at least for those who bought in to postmodernism, leaving in academics, politics, and the professions, in places of power generally, only the reckless exercise of narrow self-interest and power for its own sake. This is crucial--ruling elites must be bound by a strong ethical tradition, or all hell breaks loose.

The present – The Tea Party. The great mass of the people are partly shielded from the intellectual currents of the day by class prejudice, ignorance (not stupidity) and lack of interest. Unschooled human nature, happily including basic conscience and common sense, is stronger here. This can be a good thing, when the intellectual elite has gone bizarro. To the average man, the left and the professions, inevitably, are progressively now revealing themselves—largely thanks to the new light and improved communication of the internet-- to be by and large both immoral and insane. This is also a matter of some immediate practical interest. When those in power are visibly incompetent and acting selfishly, the common man has every reason out of sheer self-interest to rebel. 

Meanwhile, having rejected dialog and debate, contact with reality, and all tests of reason and evidence, the left and their client professions have systematically stripped themselves of any tools they would need to respond sensibly or to defend their position. They can only jabber nonsense.

This is interesting, if sad, as history; I think it is also interesting as a model of how insanity probably develops in an individual as well. A false premise leads one into sinful acts (the sexual revolution). Rather than repenting and returning to the path, one tries to cover up and to rationalize (abortion). This inevitably leads in the end to turning one's back on all objective checks—on God (postmodernism). One loses all touch with reality. Madness ensues.

Slow Train Coming

My friend the left-wing columnist is stumped, he admits, by the recent US midterm elections. He attributes them to “unfocussed anger” from older people in the US upset over America's supposedly declining power in the world.

No kidding.

This is pretty dramatic evidence that there are two distinct cultures in contemporary North America, and at least one of them is completely ignoring the other.

In fact, my friend's reaction in and by itself seems to dramatically prove the validity of the concerns of the Tea Party.

Unfocussed anger? These elections had a laser focus like nothing I had seen in my lifetime. Not only were the issues laser-clear since early summer, but this election was almost perfectly predicted in the polls. In two sentences, here's the message:

1. Stop spending money, and
2. You're not listening and you don't care.

This is so obvious it is in the name of the “Tea Party” movement. Moreover, a nearly spontaneous mass movement like the TP appears to be has to coalesce around something that is pretty obvious to a vast mass of people, or else it is not going to happen. How is it then that, even if left-wingers do not agree with this perception, they cannot even be aware of other people having it? Obviously, they are not in fact listening, and they don't care. That is, they are not listening to anyone outside their own little clique, and they don't care what anyone else thinks if they are outside this clique. They are, in other words, a self-interested ruling class.

Some time last year, MSNBC featured a panel of economic experts loudly disagreeing online; as one often also sees on Fox News.

This, indeed, is the Fox News trademark; it is why they can call themselves “fair and balanced” and why the average person agrees with them. Yes, their commentators are all or almost all conservative-leaning; but that is not relevant. What matters is that they consistently have spokespeople on for both sides of any issue; so that people can feel pretty confident they are hearing all sides of the issue, from the horse's mouth, and any commentary is clearly labelled as such.

Besides getting both sides, and being respected for thinking for themselves [“We report; you decide.”], people love the excitement of hearing such arguments. MSNBC, more recently, has carved a niche for themselves by imitating the Fox format, but featuring star commentators resolutely on the left.

It is striking, and pathological, that the “legacy media,” print or broadcast, rarely does this. If and when they host what they purport to be two sides of an issue, it is usually faked, and this is visible from the plain fact that the two commentators usually agree on most things in their discussion. The permitted grounds for debate have been severely limited before the debate itself can begin. This is a visible attempt to limit public discourse, and it speaks directly to what the Tea Party and the midterm elections were all about.

To get back to MSNBC: one of the speakers, Rick Santelli, during a heated exchange when everyone was offering different opinions on the best economic path to follow, just threw up his hands and started repeating loudly and clearly, “STOP SPENDING! STOP SPENDING! STOP SPENDING!” Then he walked off camera.

Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7PwbxcDbs

It was a marvellously clarifying moment; it was the Tea Party in one simple sound bite; and so dramatic it was rerun many times, and garnered close to 200,000 hits on YouTube. I've heard the slogan repeated as a catch phrase a lot of times since, in what I think it a deliberate allusion: “Just stop spending.”

Few political messages in history have ever been clearer. Yet, even though it was on MCNBC, their own house channel, the left, and my friend, missed it altogether.

We are in a worldwide recession.

It is the worst since the Great Depression.

The average person is hurting.

A lot of people have lost a lot of money through over-borrowing; that's what happened in the housing bubble.

What do we all do when times get tough? What _must_ we all do? Basic, kitchen-table economics: we cut back our spending.

Yet everyone has recently been watching the US government increase spending and borrowing to unprecedented levels.

Americans know they or their children will be left with the bill.

What about this is hard to understand?

Here's another good video on the issue, as it affects Britain—where the new government has been behaving far more responsibly than the Democrats in Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gd6-zfeeaM

Granted that the left or Obama or the Democrats may subscribe to Keynesian economics. Keynes may even be right, or partly right—though most economists these days seem to believe he was wrong. Even so, why on earth would the left or Obama or the legacy media think they could go extravagantly against common sense without bothering to present their argument clearly and humbly to the general public every step of the way? This speaks to being out of touch. This speaks to a sense of privilege, of a right to rule.

The second, broader, issue of being out of touch was crystallized recently by an essayist in the American Spectator:

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print

It was picked up and pushed hard by Rush Limbaugh on talk radio; it was rushed into book form over the summer.

I think Codevilla's argument is actually a bit less than coherent; but it picked up on and laid out a growing sentiment in the US public, the same sentiment that generated the Tea Party movement.

The idea is strong and growing, in the US and across the developed world, thanks to the Internet busting what had been an information cartel, that the world is being run by a ruling class that looks out for its own interests, not the interests of the world or the general public, and deliberately limits access to information in order to sustain its power. One important result is that government is not truly representative. Hence the “Tea Party” reference: it's about taxation without representation.

This ruling class, however, seems to me to have sealed their own doom, through a spectacular complacency. The newspapering business is classic: it is not really that traditional newspapers are doomed by the technology. The technology ought to expand the market and boost the business, because it makes the product cheaper. The problem, rather, is that no one wants the product; and they now have alternatives. By contrast, new technology has done nothing to slow down talk radio—a positively antique medium--or Fox News. Instead, news organization after news organization is sinking into insolvency because of complacency and a sense of privilege which prevents them from stooping to see or react to the world as it really is; or indeed stooping to interest themselves in the wishes or needs of their audience.

In systematically choking the flow of information for their class benefit, they have, inevitably, as ruling classes usually end up doing, starved their own members of the very information needed for their survival.

As a result, instead of trying in any way to counter the obvious popular concerns that appeared over the past year or two, the Democrats and the “legacy press” seemed to do, and still seem to do, their darndest to reinforce the impression that they are out of touch and do not care. It was all amazing to watch: like someone standing on a track with a milk train bearing down on him, and no sign of awareness visible on his face at all. It seemed the dramatic final proof that the elite were not in synch with the rest of us, and indeed that they were not competent. Everybody else saw it coming a mile off down the prairie.

Now, even after the election, we are all seeing columns from the left still wondering what happened and positing arcane theories. Frankly, most of them boil down more or less to stating publicly that the average voter is stupid and not competent to govern his own affairs. This is the tone of a ruling class, not used to communicating with the public, and not interested in doing so.

It is all like the apocryphal comment attributed to Marie Antoinette--”Let them eat cake.”

This is an over-generalization, but, on the whole, the Republicans in the US have tended to be the party of the individual, and to have appealed to voters as individuals. The Democrats have tended to be the party of groups and group rights, and to have appealed to voters as members of some special interest group—blacks, women, Catholics, Southerners, the elderly, Hispanics, teachers, unions, auto workers, gays, and so forth.

With the growth of the Internet and the information explosion it has made possible, it is no longer nearly as viable to appeal to voters as members of special interest groups. It is no longer nearly as possible to speak only to their supposed “leaders,” themselves members of your own ruling class, and expect the average member of the group to tug his forelock and vote the party line. People are more able now to look into each issue for themselves and form their own opinion.

And, having the clear impression now from what new information they have seen on the Web that they have been systematically lied to by their leaders in the past, they are very much inclined to do so.

As a result, overall, the Republican Party's approach begins to work better than the Democratic Party's approach. I expect this advantage to grow. The Democrats will have to reinvent themselves as something else to survive. The Republicans, on the other hand, may be supplanted by the Tea Party.

The same dynamic seems to be at work in Canada and Europe. There are exceptions, of course, but traditional voting blocs and deference to traditional authorities are fading.

I see it as a new chapter in human freedom and a further advancement in the democratic ideal, at least on a par with the Renaissance.

Democracy is Coming--To the USA

Angelo Codevilla has made a splash with an article in The American Spectator explaining why the Tea Party movement has gotten such traction (http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print).

His argument is that the current US popular rebellion is a reaction to the emergence of a new ruling class on America--a self-conscious class that thinks alike and sees their interests as alike and distinct from those of the common man. In the past, he argues, America's leaders were not at all homogenous. This was largely due to regional differences--a benefit of being a large country; and also because they had achieved their wealth and prominence through a variety of sources, public and private. That, he feels, is the thing that has evoked the spirit of the Tea Party.
Improved communications and transportation in the postwar years have indeed surely allowed the ruling class to homogenize, to stay more closely in touch, to collude. But the growth of government also matters, according to Codevilla: more and more of those on top are directly or indirectly drawing their wealth and influence from the same source, the public tax revenues. Even most "private industry" is now entirely bound up in the government machine: it becomes necessary to have the right government connections to meet all the latest regulations and qualify for all the latest government grants.

This is all nothing new, in world terms. Europe has always had a ruling class, and really made few bones about it. But it is new to America, and counter to American traditions.

Arguably, the problem emerged in Canada before it did in the US. At least since the debates on Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord, and the non-debate on abortion and gay marriage--it has been pretty clear to the average Canadian that there is a ruling class in Canada of politicians, academics, journalists, judges, bureaucrats, and business execs who basically agree on policies among themselves and seek to avoid putting matters they consider important up to any public vote. The people would only get it wrong.

Canadians kicked back, a bit, with the Reform movement. Not that it helped much. But this trend may not sit nearly as well, it seems, with Americans. They probably have a stronger tradition of classlessness and democracy.

For this new ruling class, Codevilla observes, "Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the 'in' language -- serves as a badge of identity." Under the camoflage of "avoiding discrimination," this "politically correct" speech really serves to demonstrate whether or not you have gone to the right schools, read the right newspapers and magazines, attend the right cocktail parties, and buy in to the class consciousness and the class agenda. No wonder, then, that "speech codes" are most severe on college campuses. This is the main thing colleges are there to teach: the proper pc principles to hoist you into this ruling class. Can't have party members breaking ranks.

Hence in turn the "culture wars": these have been a symptom of the fact that the emerging ruling class has, more or less deliberately, created a separate culture very different from and hostile to that of mainstream America, or Canada. different languages is only the start. There is also the matter of differing religions. Mainstream America, one way or another, solidly believes in God; the ruling class holds all religion, but especially Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism, to be bad.

Codevilla relies on several figures to come up with an estimate that the ruling class plus its loyal supporters add up to about one-third of the American population; two-thirds are hostile to it.

I think we must concede Codevilla's basic point: there has been a growing class consciousness among those at the top in America (and Canada). But, we might say, so what? Does it matter so much that there is a ruling class? Probably not, so long as 1) admission is open to all based on merit, and 2) its interests are the same as the interests of the country as a whole.

America's new ruling class certainly claims that admission is based purely on merit: that it its basic premise. It is because they assume this is so that they see a right to intervene in private affairs generally. Because they are "experts," better educated and smarter than the rest of us, we are all better off if we cede some of our decisions to them. Things like wearing seatbelts, taking medicines, what TV channels we get to watch, and so forth.

Is it so? Codevilla argues that it is not, on the grounds that the grade inflation in the "best" schools, those that graduate the ruling classes, is so severe that they really make no distinctions on merit at all. If there is any selection, it must happen before that point, in high school. And "affirmative action" has seriously distorted the selection process at that level, away from merit. At both the high school and university level, conformity to class dogmas seems to have largely superceded academic merit as a selection criterion. If this is not a class, it is a party, a club, or a syndicate. You don't get bad marks for turning in a shoddy essay, any more. You get bad marks for failing to espouse the right views in it.

Secondly, it is clear that the ruling class itself sees its own interests as diverging from those of the nation as a whole. In fact, it is a hallmark of the new ruling class, one of the shibboleths for membership, that they view with contempt all the traditions and traditional values of the nation as a whole. the message is clear: the commitment to class must supercede the commitment to nation.

There are some tangible examples of this in the news recently. One symptom is the rather disturbing discovery that the average salary of federal government employees in the US is now double the national average. That's a pretty clear departure from the notion of a "public service": servants do not usually make twice as much as their masters. That is a ruling class.

Another is the bizarre recent trend in retail: bargain outlets are struggling, while luxury firms are doing well. This is the reverse of what has previously always happened in a recession. It shows clearly that this time, the pain is not evenly distributed; instead, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Specifically, given a Keynesian approach, governments boom during a recession. Given that government workers are now about the richest sector of the economy, and larger in numbers all the time, this means a boom in luxury items.

This also makes it quite clear, however, that the interests of the ruling class are now very different from the interests of those they rule; that their cheif objective now is to exploit the country, not to advance its interests.

Hence, indeed, the need for a Tea Party.

It seems to me, though, that Codevilla is missing one important factor in the mix, a more hopeful one. The same technological forces that allowed a ruling class to form a generation or two ago, are surely now about to doom it. The improvements in transportation and communications are now at a point where the bulk of ordinary people are able to communicate with each other and organize without reference to the ruling class. This is exactly what the Tea Party has shown.

Step-by-step: In the slow-motion implosion of the "mainstream media," we are seeing a crucial pillar of this ruling class being taken out of the mix--the Ministry of Truth, their control over news and information. Soon, I expect the collapse of the conventional education system, its second pillar--already shuddering from incursions by homeschooling and online learning. The Internet can potentially completely privatize learning, making it essentially a small business, teacher-to-student, bypassing the indoctrination monopoly of the ruling class, just as the information monopoly has been turned.

The Tea Party, in turn, is kicking hard at the party system, the pillar of power within elected government. It is showing itself apparently able to organize politically quite effectively from the grassroots, through cellphones and Facebook and email, mostly without the ruling class political professionals. It may not work this time; it may be co-opted; but it will work next time, or the next.

It's all a snowball rolling downhill. It will get bigger. It is all the Sixties running in reverse, but raised by the power of ten. And God alone knows where it will end.