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So what if people realize this, so long as they still need the credential Academia issues to get hired?
So what if the ordinary people no longer trust or listen to “experts” — so long as the elites continue to listen, they can in turn use their power to force ordinary people to obey “expert opinion” whether they “trust” it or not.
Except, how are they actually hurting it?
I don’t see how people can look at how these folks keep doing things that hurt their electoral position, and not see that as evidence that elections don’t matter. These people aren’t (all) blind or stupid. Why assume that they’re missing what’s obvious to you, rather than taking it as evidence that they know something you don’t?
I have a pet analogy I like to use. Suppose I see a nice black car with tinted windows run a red light… right past a cop car. I then think “how blind must that driver have been, to have missed that obvious cop car.” Only, as the cop car first turns to pursue, then drops that pursuit, it becomes clear that the driver probably knew about the cop, and that I’m the one who missed something, the very thing the cop came to see: the diplomatic license plates, indicating the vehicle is covered by the Vienna Protocols and diplomatic immunity, and the cop can’t ticket its driver no matter how he violated the traffic laws.
Again, if these people don’t care about hurting their electoral chances, maybe they have a reason not to care.
This is actually a problem the right needs to work on and I wish them all the best in their efforts to do so. Credentialism is bad for society no matter the political valence in my view.
There's a very real way in which losing legitimacy and perceived respect damages the authority of a governing elite, and that authority is required for the elites to maintain power. Have you read up on any of the historical analogues to the current system? Elites that lose the respect of the governed don't usually get good endings.
Decreasing their own credibility and increasing support for opposition figures, as well as supporting and encouraging ineffective and counterproductive forms of political activism.
I don't believe they're blind or stupid at all - they're stuck in a massive coordination problem, and some of the more lucid ones actually put up blog posts or articles talking about it. A lot of them are aware of the issue, they just can't do anything about it without destroying all their social relationships, employment prospects and ability to live a quiet life. You can be an expert poll forecaster that had a perfect track record working for the Obama campaign, but even posting your extremely well justified advice on winning elections and protesting effectively will get you harassed out of polite society! Current left wing political activism exists largely to fulfil social and personal needs rather than to actually effect change in the world, and those goals are more highly prioritised than actually achieving anything.
I'm totally open to the possibility that I'm missing something, and I also don't think this is an exclusive reason. But it is convincing enough for me and I've spoken to people in academia (off the record) who agree with me here.
How so? All you need to maintain power is sufficient ability to punish disobedience, so as to sufficiently incentivize compliance. How did feudal nobles maintain power over vastly more numerous serfs? (See the German Peasants' War.) How much "perceived respect" did beaten-down eastern European serfs really have for their overlords?
Which historical incidents do you think are analogous to our current situation? Because I think the historical analogies are things like the Stellinga, late 10th century Norman peasants —
— the Jacquerie, the Merfold brothers, Carinthian peasants, the Bundschuh movement(s), the "Poor Conrad" leagues, Turkish Celali, or any number of other situations on Wikipedia's "List of peasant revolts" where the result box is red and reads "Suppression of the rebellion."
When some 300,000 or so angry German peasants rose up in "Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution of 1789," did the aristocracy attempt to win back the peasants' "trust" and "respect"? No, they sent out 6,000–8,500 knights and mercenaries to suppress the peasants, killing a third of them (while themselves taking "minimal" losses), and after the rebellion was crushed, they "restored the old order in a frequently harsher form" and cracked down on the peasants even harder, leading to "a reduction of rights and freedoms of the peasant class, pushing them out of political life."
Again, the only "credibility" they need is the ability to credibly threaten punishment for those who disobey them.
What opposition figures are there that they need possibly worry about?
They don't need political activism, and as various people (including Curtis Yarvin) have pointed out, modern "political activism" is a sham that only "works" when it serves to provide the elites a pretext to do something they already wanted to do anyway.
Again, I see them not caring about winning elections, and take this as evidence that they don't need to win elections, that losing elections does little-to-nothing to their power, and that elections don't matter. Why don't you?
They don't need elections or "activism." They have all the power they need via their control of the institutions, first and foremost the massive Permanent Bureaucracy in DC, which is now fully insulated from any mechanism of "democratic" control.
They act like they don't have to worry about losing their power because they can't lose their power. They are so powerful, nobody on Earth can stop them.
Yet check out the comments under the latest army recruitment videos that stopped targeting liberals, but went back to targeting the traditional red regions. Many parents from military families state that don't want their children to join the army anymore.
The current elite is not Prussian. They don't see honor in soldiering and their culture rejects guns and law & order. They can't hire mercenaries anymore like in the olden days. So who is going to suppress the peasants, when police and the soldiers are peasants? Why would be elite be able to count on them when the peasants truly lose faith in the system?
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So your position is that the ancien régime is still in power in France? All hail the Sun King! I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there aren't any more peasants in the world and the regimes you're describing have in fact fallen over and collapsed. That form of social organisation just isn't viable in a world with guns and explosives, and it was put in great danger from the existence of the crossbow.
Pre-revolution France.
Elites hold less power than you think, and the ability to threaten that punishment very rapidly goes away when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the military. If the Deep State revealed itself publicly tomorrow and then announced they were taking over the country to save it from Trump, they wouldn't get their way - they'd engender too much resistance. They are forced to act conspiratorially because of the resistance their goals would generate if made public.
Donald Trump.
A lot of modern forms of political activism are indeed worthless and don't do anything. But that doesn't mean political activism is useless - the Stern Gang and Lehi managed to achieve their goals despite not being part of the elite.
Not only do they not act like this at all (ever read the Strzok texts or any of the classified material/emails wikileaks put out?) they are currently trying to prosecute Trump to take him out of the race because they know that they'll lose if the election was held right now, and their strategies to neuter his political effectiveness won't work a second time. How long did the Roman republic last after they were forced to assassinate Caesar?
That was because of those collapses were all in the Age of the Gun. Many writers have noted the correlation between whether a society, at a given time, is more "aristocratic" or "democratic," and whether its methods of war-fighting are more capital-intensive or labor-intensive, respectively.
I remember once reading a legal paper on the 2nd Amendment, specifically the debate as to whether it's about a right of the people to own civilian weapons for hunting/personal defense, or a right of the people to have the means to overthrow a tyrannical government, with both views finding support in the writings of the Founders. The author's position was that the Founders clearly meant for it to do both, because they lived in a time when the means of meeting both goals pretty much overlapped — "civilian" guns were also useful as weapons of war, the weapons of war were broadly affordable, and it did not take much time or money to turn a "militia" of ordinary civilian riflemen into an effective war-fighting force. Hence, why they thought we could do without a standing military, relying entirely upon the general citizenry for national defense. But, the author then noted, changes in military technology over the centuries mean that no longer holds. The modern "tip of the spear" soldier is an expensive, well-equipped, highly-trained elite. Our jurisprudence has, in practice, favored the "personal defense" goal/interpretation of 2Am over the other… because it's the only one that's remotely practical in our present world. The Age of the Gun was already on its way out during the First World War. (Hence, why you get people arguing that we're now entering the Age of the Drone, with drone operators as the "new knights.") It's been slow, and papered over by various illusions, but over the last century, we've all been becoming peasants again.
What makes you think they would?
What form do you picture this "resistance" taking, and why wouldn't those who engage in it not end up arrested for said crimes (or, at the extreme, meeting a Waco/Ruby Ridge fate)?
Even if he somehow gets elected, Donald Trump will be even less effective in his second term than his first, because they're not being taken by surprise this time, and they've been preparing to more effectively #Resist him — or any other GOP president.
The "powers" of the president are all dependent on having large numbers of people in DC enforce his decisions and orders. If they all simply don't…
They might not have been elite, but they had people who were part of the elite in agreement with those goals — if they didn't, they'd never have won. This is a point Boot makes about guerrilla warfare in Invisible Armies; one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for a guerrilla force to win is for some portion of the "elites" on the other side to sympathize with them. I'd argue that the only reason the American Revolution succeeded is because too many on the British side, like Burke (and, I would argue, the Howe brothers) were sympathetic to the American side.
Again, it only works when it provides some portion of the elite an excuse to do what they want anyway.
Why not?
Trump is not our Julius Caesar. At best, he's the Gracchi brothers. And just who is our Augustus, then?
Caesar was Lincoln. Augustus was FDR. The first destroyed the Republic by choosing civil war, winning the war he started, and then getting assassinated for his trouble. The second consolidated power into an imperial executive, ruled for decades, and left the empire shaped in his image.
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Agreed.
But if history is any indication our Augustus is still a good generation or two away.
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Back in the commie days you had to join the Party, if you wanted to be anything above a grunt, and plenty of people did for precisely that reason. Plenty more regarded Party membership the same way one would regard a confession of enjoying some good kiddie-diddling.
Now, I believe that this can actually continue in perpetuity, if the people on top stay on top of their game, but it doesn't strike me that the Western elites are capable / have the means to do that. They've made several bets that didn't pan out, with AI being the latest one they're putting their hopes on, which might explain all the doomerism / utopianism around the subject.
Yes and no. Insisting on a top-down view of society will leave you as half-blind as insisting on a bottom-up one. Even an absolute monarch's power is limited, no matter what his law says.
On the other hand, this is a point I wholeheartedly agree with. There's limits to this as well, but currently it's people insisting that Western democracies are meaningful that are closer to being wrong.
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