Election: Take Four

by
Peter Radford
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from Peter Radford

Take four.
I continue to listen in on the conversation.

The election reverberates loudly around leftish circles. Recriminations mount. Criticisms fly. Finger pointing and over-analysis have become all too common. And this is after just a week. Imagine what a month can produce.

So far the central narrative seems to be that the Democrats have become isolated from the most consequential issues that regular folk feel are important. The explanation being that the party is now dominated by a relatively well-off college educated elite that is absorbed in a sort of political navel gazing that prevents to from hearing, seeing, and reacting to much more immediate and thus relevant issues.

The Democrats have become a party obsessed with pronouns, politically correct conversation, identity, and the rendition of grievances . Paying the rent and buying food are seen as trivial by comparison.

This separation of the party’s establishment from everyday life — especially true in the case of its academic wing — has given it an air of aristocratic detachment that makes ridicule of any attempt it makes to attach itself to the working class. There is an arrogant haughtiness in its condemnation of vulgarity in language. It is as if we need to cleanse our gutters of all the stereotypical jokes and epithets accumulated through centuries of contact with each other. We now need to spend our time watching what we say for fear of stirring up some potential slight, but we need spend no time at all on worrying whether those we slight can pay their bills.

Priorities are askew.

Not, though in the minds of voters. They are used to stereotypes. Indeed they realize that the elite stereotypes them daily as being the great ignorant and hopelessly prejudiced unwashed.

This narrative seems to sum things up well. The issues relevant to the well off are rarely those of the less well off. The luxury of prosperity insulates the elite from having to discomfort itself from engaging everyday issues. Besides, ever since the neoliberal revolution the well-off have demonstrated a considerable self-interest in avoiding engagement with everyday issues. They might, on occasion, express some sympathy with those less fortunate, but their actions give lie to the truth: they have benefitted mightily from the neoliberal turn in both politics and economics. They are the shareholding class. They are the global class. They benefit most from the tax code. They have the capacity to buy education and health services no matter the cost. And they run the corporations that determine policy-making once the elections are past. What’s not to like about being one of them? They own more than one home. They move freely between them. They put their savings into safe harbors where it avoids taxation and contributes nothing to the future of the nation. And so on …

They, in short, epitomize rent extraction at its antisocial worst.

And they have come to consider themselves as society’s intellectual arbiters. They value education. They use education as the lever to extract those rents from everyone else. They frame the conversation we are allowed to have. They determine the language that we are supposed to use. That it all appears from the outside to be a laughable example of group-speak seems not to bother them.

After all, gilded ages are meant to be fun and not serious moments of deep reflection. The twin caricatures of Davos and Burning Man capture perfectly the moment. It requires a great deal of effort to avoid the self- awareness that such events might benefit from. The stench of inequality that seeps out from both — and other similar events of open contempt for the working folk — overwhelms any supposed empathic sentiment that might be expressed from time to time to assuage whatever is left of the elite’s conscience. Self-indulgence matters more than that.

This election has brought all this to the surface. The ugliness and hypocrisy of the progressive ignorance of everyday life has been burst into the open by the work of a corrupt, immoral, and criminal plutocrat. His personal vendetta against the elite that shunned him and looked down on his vile habits and opinions has come full circle. Along the way he was able to rally everyone else similarly shunned and ignored.

The irony is that the potential upending of the elitist gravy-train might be brought about by the populist anger of a flawed egomaniac and his own bevy of plutocrats. The fawning behavior of endless corporate CEOs lining up to pay homage to the election’s winner says all we need to know about the truth, or otherwise, of their moral commitment.

But this was never about morals. It was always about money. The corporate and technocratic class carved out privileges for itself and then attached itself to the plutocrats in the hope that they could jointly continue to pillage society and to extract wealth from those below. It was always a false alliance. Plutocracy has its own goals. The useful idiots of corporate life, the lawyers, accountants, bankers, consultants, and other professionals are simply there to be deployed when necessary to bolster the top of the house. That class is disposable. It consists of superannuated middling sorts impressed by their own education. Yes, they are paid well. But when the defense of the gilded age becomes more urgent they can be sacrificed on the front lines.

And that’s what is happening now.

The plutocrats have reached beyond the educated elite and its self-referencing false morality and found alliance with the lesser sorts whose lives the elite ignored all this time. The stunning expense of this election, the obscenity of the flood of cash flowing through an erstwhile democratic process is decisive evidence that the plutocrats have turned on the elite. Where was the will of the elite to reform politics? Was the complacency and comfort afforded by those rents too much to generate the energy to turn off the spigot of corruption? Or was it that the elite was part supplier of the cash intent on buying the result it preferred?

Caveat emptor.

The populist economic policies about to be unleashed will hit the elite hard, and they will not have the necessary access to purchase exemptions the way that the plutocrats will. They will suffer the ignominy of being ignored. Their rents will degrade. They will become less influential. They will slide towards the middle.

And the voice of the intelligentsia will be drowned by the plutocratically owned social media platforms that spewed out disinformation to taint the conversation held over the past few months.

This is one aspect of the current conversation that is most revealing.

The sudden realization that the information bubble that the elite built around itself and which was supposedly full of obvious facts was not the same as that the plutocracy cast around the rest of the country has shocked some. This emergence of two sets of facts vying for attention has unnerved progressive commentators. Surely, they ask, do voters not realize how wonderful life is at present? They deploy a stream of facts to support this point of view.

No, the border is not overrun. No, inflation is not rampant. No, crime is not out of control. Yes, wages are up. And the stock market is booming. And so on. They proclaim. Can regular voters not see this? No, they cannot.

Why should regular voters believe an elite so detached from everyday life? Why should voters, many of whom face existential crises regularly, accept the views of those who lecture them daily? Why should the facts of the elite be the basis for choice when that elite cares not at all for what’s going on out there in the other world. The world the elite knows little to nothing about.

And cares less for. A world, for instance, where a booming stock market is more insult than useful fact.

What is the possible fate of the technocrats? Their “fact based” world is being torn apart by an emotion based alternative. They never used those facts to benefit the majority. They chose facts carefully to demonstrate their own value — by so doing they have devalued facts. After all the most urgent facts of all — economic inequality and the loss of opportunity — were never truly central in their conversation. Instead, they obsessed over culture and esoteric minorities. Despite the elite’s claims that it was defending democracy it had an aversion to engaging with majorities. This made defense of democracy a sorry and hollow sounding rallying cry.

So, for the first time in a while the Democrats failed even to win a majority of the vote. Their repudiation is complete.

Deservedly so.

Far from being a defeat for democracy, this was a resounding victory for the majority. That their leader is a corrupt autocrat is not their fault. That problem was the creation of a hypocritical elite.

As long as the denial about the past continues the re-invention of the left will be more prolonged and painful than it ought be. For a supposedly fact based group, our educated elite sometimes has an aversion to the most obvious facts. A long look in the mirror will help. But not too long a look. There is work to be done.

The people’s work.