At the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, the right and left need each other—the right, to get shaken out of its complacency and fatalism; and the left, to learn that human nature will always defy its fondest imaginings. The Holy Grail is somehow fusing the best of both, but corporate bipartisanship always seems to end up combining the worst.
“Most have the best of intentions, and honestly feel they hold a monopoly on truth. To punish and censor and take things away are for people’s own good in the crucible of global citizenship, and only a crank or bigot could possibly object.”
> Having grown up on the left, and tried to devote my career to it, what’s happened to our institutions has been heartbreaking. The progressives I’d known had cared about listening to ordinary people and pursuing policies to improve their standards of living. Yet, except for rhetoric, that’s largely gone now—today’s thought leaders and policy makers tend to be dogmatic technocrats, disproportionately from very privileged backgrounds, eager to impose managed decline and the latest ideological fads on a public they see mainly in the abstract.
Except you still don't seem to have any idea why this happened. The problem is not the people in the institutions, the problem is the structure and in many cases the very nature of the institutions themselves.
I agree that much of the problem is baked in the cake of institutions -- the iron law of oligarchy and all that -- but institutions are also ultimately the accumulation of humans and their decisions. When I started my career, professional progressives were much more thoughtful and intellectually honest than they are now -- some of that has been institutions setting up perverse incentives, but a lot of it is humans who could do better not bothering to do better.
Exile, what is your opinion of Joel Kotkin's division of the country into the oligarchs, the clerisy and the yeomen? These are analogous to the First, Second and Third Estates of pre-Revolutionary France. If Kotkin's analysis is sound, then that would explain many of the attitudes of the clerisy who work in your credential factory.
To discover how Kotkin distinguishes the oligarchs from the clerisy, consult his book "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." The main distinction is that the oligarchs are much more wealthy than the clerisy.
Jun 29, 2023·edited Jun 29, 2023Liked by The Ivy Exile
The problem with using the word "oligarchs" for the wealthy is that it implies that they're the ones making decisions. This is generally not the case, and the few billionaires who do manage to acquire enough independent power to make independent decisions, like Elon Musk, typically go against wokeness.
Jun 30, 2023·edited Jun 30, 2023Liked by The Ivy Exile
You claim that the wealthy are not oligarchs and do not support wokeness. Then, you would have to account for the many examples to the contrary. George Soros, for example, has funded the campaigns, to the tune of $30 million, of many local District Attorneys whose liberal policies have enabled the recent crime wave. In 2018, Soros donated $3.6 million in D.A. races in California alone. In the 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg donated $419 million to campaigns around the country. Look at the MSM. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are the hobbies of internet billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, and these newspapers are decidedly woke in their editorial slant. The Atlantic Magazine is the mouthpiece of Steve Jobs's widow, Laurene Jobs. Harper's Magazine lives on the patronage of the MacArthur Foundation. I can't blame the clerisy for knowing which side their bread is buttered on, but their service to the oligarchs has brought them rejection by the yeomen. The reason so repellent a personality as Donald Trump can nevertheless be startlingly popular is that the yeomen see him as their ally against the clerisy's contempt and oppression.
George Soros is a special case. The MacArthur foundation is a foundation, i.e., controlled by a committee of clerists. Most political donations of the kind you mention are basically extortion. If you think people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates have significant power, look how they get screwed in divorce proceedings.
> I can't blame the clerisy for knowing which side their bread is buttered on,
"Look how much money all the local businesses give to the mafia, the don must be their agent".
The example of Jack Dorsey is instructive here. He founds twitter to be a free speech platform, then when it becomes popular enough to be a threat to the clerisy, Obama's Justice Department comes down hard on twitter and the other social media companies, forcing to hire a bunch of "diverse" people who then function as woke commissars inside tweeter, who gradually take control of the company from under him. Then when a billionaire comes along with the combination of will and connections to be somewhat more independent of the clerisy, he sells twitter to him and goes on to start a new social network, nostr, designed from the ground up to be uncensorable.
Hi John, I like Kotkin and find those very useful conceptual categories, would only add that there's tons of roiling competition within each column and across regional particulars and that there are probably fourth/fifth categories of people not working. But yes, in my experience the clerisy is pretty much as described!
That is an interesting idea, Exile. The yeomen, clerisy and oligarchs compete not only among these groups but also within each group. I conjecture that whether you're a yeoman, oligarch or clerk, the competition you are in is more obvious to you than the competition within the other groups. E.g., a yeoman real estate agent competes both against other real estate agents and against HUD clerisy but the former is more obvious to him than the latter.
I think that's accurate, John, and an additional wrinkle is that people are not always conscious of and/or honest with themselves about how much their class interests intersect with their ideals and lifestyles. Many among the oligarchy and clerisy emotionally identify with abstractions of the yeomanry and the poor, and genuinely believe that their agendas will eventually be good for everybody, even as their policies hurt those groups in the present.
“Most have the best of intentions, and honestly feel they hold a monopoly on truth. To punish and censor and take things away are for people’s own good in the crucible of global citizenship, and only a crank or bigot could possibly object.”
There is hope.
> Having grown up on the left, and tried to devote my career to it, what’s happened to our institutions has been heartbreaking. The progressives I’d known had cared about listening to ordinary people and pursuing policies to improve their standards of living. Yet, except for rhetoric, that’s largely gone now—today’s thought leaders and policy makers tend to be dogmatic technocrats, disproportionately from very privileged backgrounds, eager to impose managed decline and the latest ideological fads on a public they see mainly in the abstract.
Except you still don't seem to have any idea why this happened. The problem is not the people in the institutions, the problem is the structure and in many cases the very nature of the institutions themselves.
I agree that much of the problem is baked in the cake of institutions -- the iron law of oligarchy and all that -- but institutions are also ultimately the accumulation of humans and their decisions. When I started my career, professional progressives were much more thoughtful and intellectually honest than they are now -- some of that has been institutions setting up perverse incentives, but a lot of it is humans who could do better not bothering to do better.
> but a lot of it is humans who could do better not bothering to do better.
Because those institutions select for certain types of humans.
I think RFK Jr. is trying to take that forgotten lane. I am not optimistic the powers that be will allow him to succeed.
And even if the powers that be allowed him to take power, his own instincts would probably doom him.
For the record, Freddie DeBoer's link to this post is a bad link.
Thanks for the heads up!
I wrote such a long comment here I ended up making it into a post.
This is a great, thought provoking article.
https://broguesbritannicus.substack.com/p/why-centreism-cannot-save-us
Exile, what is your opinion of Joel Kotkin's division of the country into the oligarchs, the clerisy and the yeomen? These are analogous to the First, Second and Third Estates of pre-Revolutionary France. If Kotkin's analysis is sound, then that would explain many of the attitudes of the clerisy who work in your credential factory.
I'd say he's wrong. The clerisy *are* the oligarchs.
To discover how Kotkin distinguishes the oligarchs from the clerisy, consult his book "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." The main distinction is that the oligarchs are much more wealthy than the clerisy.
The problem with using the word "oligarchs" for the wealthy is that it implies that they're the ones making decisions. This is generally not the case, and the few billionaires who do manage to acquire enough independent power to make independent decisions, like Elon Musk, typically go against wokeness.
You claim that the wealthy are not oligarchs and do not support wokeness. Then, you would have to account for the many examples to the contrary. George Soros, for example, has funded the campaigns, to the tune of $30 million, of many local District Attorneys whose liberal policies have enabled the recent crime wave. In 2018, Soros donated $3.6 million in D.A. races in California alone. In the 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg donated $419 million to campaigns around the country. Look at the MSM. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are the hobbies of internet billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, and these newspapers are decidedly woke in their editorial slant. The Atlantic Magazine is the mouthpiece of Steve Jobs's widow, Laurene Jobs. Harper's Magazine lives on the patronage of the MacArthur Foundation. I can't blame the clerisy for knowing which side their bread is buttered on, but their service to the oligarchs has brought them rejection by the yeomen. The reason so repellent a personality as Donald Trump can nevertheless be startlingly popular is that the yeomen see him as their ally against the clerisy's contempt and oppression.
George Soros is a special case. The MacArthur foundation is a foundation, i.e., controlled by a committee of clerists. Most political donations of the kind you mention are basically extortion. If you think people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates have significant power, look how they get screwed in divorce proceedings.
> I can't blame the clerisy for knowing which side their bread is buttered on,
"Look how much money all the local businesses give to the mafia, the don must be their agent".
The example of Jack Dorsey is instructive here. He founds twitter to be a free speech platform, then when it becomes popular enough to be a threat to the clerisy, Obama's Justice Department comes down hard on twitter and the other social media companies, forcing to hire a bunch of "diverse" people who then function as woke commissars inside tweeter, who gradually take control of the company from under him. Then when a billionaire comes along with the combination of will and connections to be somewhat more independent of the clerisy, he sells twitter to him and goes on to start a new social network, nostr, designed from the ground up to be uncensorable.
Hi John, I like Kotkin and find those very useful conceptual categories, would only add that there's tons of roiling competition within each column and across regional particulars and that there are probably fourth/fifth categories of people not working. But yes, in my experience the clerisy is pretty much as described!
That is an interesting idea, Exile. The yeomen, clerisy and oligarchs compete not only among these groups but also within each group. I conjecture that whether you're a yeoman, oligarch or clerk, the competition you are in is more obvious to you than the competition within the other groups. E.g., a yeoman real estate agent competes both against other real estate agents and against HUD clerisy but the former is more obvious to him than the latter.
I think that's accurate, John, and an additional wrinkle is that people are not always conscious of and/or honest with themselves about how much their class interests intersect with their ideals and lifestyles. Many among the oligarchy and clerisy emotionally identify with abstractions of the yeomanry and the poor, and genuinely believe that their agendas will eventually be good for everybody, even as their policies hurt those groups in the present.