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Great assessment of the Enterprise setting. “And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’”
But you completely lose me at the CW bits.
Elites don’t demand either of those things. The traditional substitutes are money and power. Conservatives are quite willing and able to reward elites with such; populists are not. Intellectual and technocrat discomfort with MAGA was directly proportional to the amount of time it spent reminding them that they were class enemies.
In fact, this class consciousness was an essential part of MAGA’s positive vision. America is supposed to be great. We beat all our rivals, so what gives? It must be the liberal, coastal elites. Get them out of power so we normal Americans can resume our upward trajectory.
Wild material prosperity is a good start. Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.
It doesn’t appear to prevent social dysfunction, either. There is a direct line from the Chinese intellectual purges to the starvation of millions of peasants. Then China had to redevelop its own oligarchic class before it could play in the big leagues. Hollowing out institutions comes with consequences.
Wait, wait.
You gestured at all those examples of conservative populism, but now it’s “blue spaces” at fault? I don’t think you’ve properly made the case. Presumably, you’re thinking of critical theory, reparations, the intellectual backlash against America. But what you’re describing is just populism. Swap the word “blue” and you’d have the standard criticism of MAGA. It gripes, it does damage, but it has yet to build anything that lasts.
Do you believe that we are living in a state of "wild material prosperity"? If so, do you believe that people like Noam Chomsky and Gavin Newsom are the ones who created and maintain that state?
How would you respond if I were to argue that what prosperity we have is largely in spite of such people rather than because of them?
When talk about "the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces" I'm talking (in part) about spaces like this one, and opinions that I have read here.
Yeah, I’d say our material conditions are pretty close to the best in history. No, Newsom and Chomsky probably didn’t have much to do with it. I’d probably agree with you, in a general sense, that intellectuals consume rather than produce material goods, turning them into something else. I would say that such professions are the privilege of a ridiculously luxurious society.
But why those two? Why not the Clintons or the Bushes, political dynasties who went to Harvard and Yale? Why not Kennedies and Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rockefellers and Rothschilds? There are uncountable examples of wealthy, connected families with elite educations and real impacts on material and societal conditions.
Is Elon Musk “elite human capital”? Why not? He got his degree from the same school as Chomsky, and he’s made a hell of a lot more material difference out of it. How about other governors, like Ron DeSantis?
I don’t think there’s a convenient line around people like Newsom and Chomsky. Certainly not one which maps to Khesterex thinking. Conservatism, in the sense of cautious introspection, is not unique to elites; utopian idealism does not make one a populist.
On the other hand, if the Motte is your idea of a blue space…maybe we’re speaking a different language.
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...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.
Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?
Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.
The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.
And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.
I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.
We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.
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You're mixing up terminology here. The elites are people with actual power. "Elite human capital" are a bunch of influencers with status anxiety, a Joffrey Baratheon complex, and a hate boner for populism.
If that were the definition, why would conservative populists want to attract them?
I’m pretty sure that I’m using it as the OP did, which is much closer to the first sense.
Because they're Elite Human Capital, duh. They think they're all that, and populists not seeing their worth is evidence of how incapable they are.
The term was popularized by Walt Bismarck, an Alt-Right guy who, in the wake of the Charlottesville crashout, went to some all-white small town, and later wrote a substack seething about the normies there not being interested in his brand of politics. I think one of our posters even found the article, and was indirectly responsible for it going viral. Later it was picked up by people like Richard Hanania, and Alexander Turok.
https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist
Under "Reason #3"
Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.
Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.
More power to him on that front, but this part:
...Is kind of indicative of why this guy and people like him are not the future of Red Tribe.
He's a Blue. His values are Blue to the core. It doesn't matter if he were Von Neumann reborn; he doesn't want what we want, he isn't interested in our values and so he's never going to be on our side in any meaningful way. If he were supremely competent, then he'd be dangerous; as is, he appears mainly to be an instructive, cautionary example.
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Originally, "Elite Human Capital" meant, well, elite human capital. For example, the sort of people who became Communists in first half of the last century.
Any movement who wants to move somewhere should attract such people.
Yes. This is the steelman / nugget of truth in the EHC idea, but in practice "populists can't attract EHC" is a personal complaint at not being wined and dined by the plebs.
More than nugget. Whether you love or hate communism, you must admit that the old guard early 20th century communist veterans were among the most capable people in history (comparable perhaps only to 16th century Jesuits).
If it was year 1926, Communist agitator of the time would in open, no holds barred debate demolish whole Motte with ease.
More like: these people are my White brothers, but they care only about sportsball and fentanyl and struggle for Whiteness leaves them cold.
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