[I’m fine but have been on an academic writing binge for the past several days that left me no energy to blog. And when I do, I cringe at my own typos that my bleary eyes can’t even notice anymore.]
(A) Arnold Kling (see below) responds to a very long essay by one N. S. Lyons. about how the political systems of the West and of Communist China are increasingly starting to resemble each other:
Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.
This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.
All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.
The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…
Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears offer in the People’s Republic of China.
[…]
Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place. . .In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.
…That previous order, which has been referred to by scholars of the managerial revolution as the bourgeois order, was represented … by the petite bourgeoisie, or what could be described as the independent middle class. The entrepreneurial small business owner, the multi-generational family shop owners, the small-scale farmer or landlord; the community religious or private educator; even the relatively well-to-do local doctor: these and others like them formed the backbone of a large social and economic class that found itself existentially at odds with the interests of the managerial revolution. […]
Arnold Kling comments:
Think of what has happened to the primary care doctor in the 21st century. Burdened by insurance company paperwork, forced to work with complex, alien systems for keeping electronic medical records, and squeezed by low reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid, the independent practitioner flees into the waiting arms of the large hospital-run provider networks. The managerial revolution wins again.
Lyons contrasts the cultural values of the managerial class with those of the bourgeoisie.
“bourgeois values consisted of a mix of conservative and classical liberal values. … an aversion to top-down control; an accepted diversity of regional and local folkways and traditions; a general mythic ideal of spirited individualism and energetic self-reliance; a counter-veiling tradition of tight-knit family life and exceptionally widespread participation in a proliferation of thick religious, community, and civic associations and affiliations (as most famously described by Alexis de Tocqueville); “Protestant work ethic,” and an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues; an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership as central to republican self-governance and the national character;”
I [Arnold Kling] would say that the attempt to defuse accountability is the Achilles’ heel of the soft managerial regime. As I once wrote,” I predict that you will only see high trust where you see effective accountability. I challenge you to point to an institution or segment of society that is accorded high trust with little accountability, or vice-versa.
The trust-accountability correlation helps us to understand the process of trust breaking down. Trust breaks down when accountability systems decay.“
[…] I would note that this concept of internal vs. external locus of control has come up a lot in my recent reading. There are those who claim that progressive ideology, including the oppressor-oppressed framing and the claim that people need “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” serves to guide people toward the unhealthy mindset of an external locus of control.
Safetyism is utterly typological of managerial societies everywhere, soft or hard, in Sacramento or Shanghai. At the top, a managerial elite is naturally obsessed with total control – with running society like their envisioned machine… For the professional managerial middle, doubting or deviating from the rules and procedures of the bureaucratic machine is not so much inconceivable as unimaginably immoral and déclassé…From below, the social atomization, empty relativistic nihilism, and learned helplessness produced by managerialism cultivates in the masses a constant state of anxiety; in an attempt to relieve this anxiety many among them then themselves demand greater and greater managerial control over life be exercised from above.
I say, and I think Lyons would agree, that our elites are caught in a vicious cycle in which as their prestige falls, their use of dominance strategies increases. (Recall my essay on prestige, dominance, and propriety). The soft managerial regime gets harder. But that will cause some of us to push back. At the end of his essay, Lyons hopes that we will “tear the false order of managerialism and all its poisonous ideological spawn root and branch from the world forever.”
Let me add a take I’ve heard from ex-Soviet immigrants here. People grumbled about the Tsar, but put up with him as long as he was able to keep the country: (a) fed; (b) safe from foreign invaders. When he was no longer able to do even those, his days were numbered.
I would say, it is no coincidence that the less the “managerial elite” is able to deliver the basics, the more pushback they get.
(b) On a tangentially related subject, the NYT’s token “conservative” commentator David Brooks — 0bama’s Knight of the Pants Crease, remember? — had a rare moment of self-awareness where he wonders: what if we [i.e., the “journalistic” neo-clerisy supporting the neo-feudal rule of the managerial elite] are actually the baddies?
Both Powerline and their exiled co-founder, Paul Mirengoff, have great, part sarcastic and part serious, takes on this. Mirengoff (now blogging at “Ringside At The Reckoning”):
[blockquote]
Brooks writes:
We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
The elites impose policies that benefit themselves and hurt the less educated:
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
At the cultural level:
We change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
Therefore:
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
Brooks gets a lot right in his column, but I think he misses some key points. In the end, moreover, he, like Trump, patronizes what he calls the “less-educated classes” by over-emphasizing their victimization and downplaying their agency.
One important point that Brooks understates, nearly to the point of discounting, is the degree to which the resentment of Trump supporters is rooted in cultural issues — the product of the “educated class” trying to shove its non-traditional values down their throats. Upper class kids have always had the advantage when it comes to admission to top colleges (more so before the 1960s than since). I doubt this has ever fueled much resentment.
What fuels resentment is having one’s religion and one’s values mocked and over-ridden. This, the modern professional class does with a vengeance.
[end blockquote]
(c) Developing story (link from Mrs. Arbel): are Israel and Saudi Arabia truly on the way to open normalization? (It’s almost an open secret here that there is sub rosa cooperation between them.) Will the 0bama retreads populating the Biden regime unwittingly or willfully sabotage a normalization process they are allegedly midwifing?
Spin, strangeness, and charm 