The New Authoritarians
Woke professionals acting as the indentured servants of a fearful oligarchy have become everything we were told to fear from Trumpism
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many Democratic voters felt baffled and betrayed. Pollsters and statisticians had predicted a decisive victory for Hillary Clinton, and her campaign had even attempted to elevate Trump because they thought he was the easiest candidate for her to beat. Conveniently, the Russian collusion narrative and allegations of white supremacy allowed the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and the media to avoid asking themselves how they had made such an enormous miscalculation.
"Woke professionals acting as the indentured servants of a fearful oligarchy" - how deliciously apt. Think of BBC stooges talking down to us and telling us off. As we know, it is almost standard for those woke professionals to accuse their opponents of extreme authoritarian beliefs they themselves are busily promoting.
As a result of this increased economic pressure, the class war waged by college graduates has become two-pronged. Not only is a nexus of Democrat-affiliated academics, NGOs, and bureaucrats waging a campaign against the “unenlightened” masses, but it is also engaged in evermore competitive intra-elite battles. These battles escalated with Trump’s election, but have reached a fever pitch since the beginning of the pandemic. Thus are woke professionals of all ages advancing evermore extreme positions to oust their competitors and vie for limited spots in the managerial elite. As these positions become more extreme, the people who hold them become more absolutist, cruel, and deeply undemocratic. In other words, they become everything we were once taught to fear from Trumpism.
6 comments:
Thanks for a good read. I value articles like this because they use concepts I can understand to explain things which, at face value, are inexplicable and worrying nonsense. It's like a doctor showing how really bizarre symptoms are explained by medical science.
I suppose I am still intrigued by the question of whether these people believe that blacks are always oppressed, or that some penile amputees are women, etc, or whether they know it is all nonsense to which they must pay lip-service.
It's always been about class war (history, I mean, not just current events). Read about Cliodynamics at http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/.
I suspect that all the courtiers competing madly to secure their place in the elite will eventually cause the Death of Woke(tm). Having said that it has been building for decades and may take years to roll back - but it won't go back to the same starting place.
I predict that Hunter Biden's Laptop is now being exposed to wider public notice because the Elite have realised that Sleepy Joe has to go, and they need an excuse to avoid criticism for choosing him in the first place. Kamala Harris should probably avoid ill-lit staircases too.
My reaction to the election of Trump was very different to all the people I knew. I knew very little about him, but was cognisant of the huge 'pile on' he seemed to incur the moment he was elected. I smelt a media rat. He appeared to me of being accused of things he wasn't particularly guilty of and the cries of action to be taken against him smacked of a frame up. He initially gained my approval when he was reported as saying that man made climate change was a hoax. Subsequently the things he actually did, sometimes unsuccessfully, appeared to me to be just what our western society needed for all his rather unpleasant persona.
I've always rather liked Donald Trump, as back in my working days, in property, building etc, there were plenty of personalities similar to him, doing roughly the same deals etc., and it never really phased me when he came on the scene, using similar rhetoric to some of the powerful developers we have in the UK.
As I have a built-in disgust of pompous politicians wrecking an economy built by men and women like Mr Trump, it's not difficult to lump all the woke-pros together and despise the lot of them in one fell swoop!
"limited spots in the managerial elite"
Indeed.
Having discovered that democracy can bite back, the new elites are using their economic and social power to bypass it.
Who, for instance, can you vote for if you think Net Zero is a crock of shit or that the State's reaction to Covid was massivly ott, or that there shouldn't be a permanent war on private cars, or that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, end of?
The answer in every case is nobody, because those things have been taken out of the political arena and moved into a higher one where the various blobs hold sway regardless of who gets elected to our increasingly irrelevant parliaments.
We are seeing a historic power shift away from the people (again!) and we haven't even noticed.
Sam - I find it easier to see belief as an allegiance which can be cynical but is always open to change as social pressures change. What goes off in woke heads is a mystery, but possibly not a great deal goes off. Still mysterious though.
DJ - that's right, it won't go back to the same starting place, never does. It may be that Hunter Biden's Laptop was always being kept back in case Biden had to be replaced, but it still seems odd that he was ever elected. It doesn't pass the smell test, never did.
Tammly - that was my reaction to Trump and it was enormously disappointing that so many people just sucked up the propaganda about him. Even now, most seem to think the propaganda was sound information.
Scrobs - yes, a New York property developer was bound to be very tough and abrasive but people should have seen through that and seen a President who was better than they deserved.
Peter - well put, the new elites are certainly using their economic and social power to bypass democracy. As you say, if we wish to change something important there is no electable party we can vote for in order to do that.
Post a Comment