We can have a revolution to kick out the Ancien Régime and replace it with some nascent form of government by the people. We can fight a Great War to knock out the Tsars and Kaisers, send the last Hapsburg to exile on Madeira, and make the world safe for democracy. We can storm the beaches of Normandy and Okinawa to defeat fascism and create a United Nations to hopefully keep us from irradiating each other to death. But we can never create a society in which the rich and powerful outnumber the rest of humanity, and therein lies the permanent problem for conservatives in a representative system.
Any government that derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed is a challenge for a small class of elites who don’t want to lose their status or their privileges, and you’ll never find a majority for an ideology that says that the rich should always get ever-richer while the rest of the realm contemplates bread riots.
We’ll always have a class of elites. For a democracy to work, most of those elites need to buy into the central idea behind representative government. Legitimate power derives from the people, and the people have the right to toss out anyone who doesn’t please them. But this isn’t exactly the natural state of affairs. That’s why we have elite institutions that try to inculcate a sense of noblesse oblige in the children of the rich.
But for every Kennedy clan success story, our country also has a George Hearst nightmare. A good portion of our elites have dedicated their lives not to the noble American project but to figuring out how to extract every last mineral out of the earth, buy up all the newspapers, buy off all the judges, sheriffs and politicians, and manufacture consent in the public for their rapacious greed.
When the right adopted fusionism– the merger of Goldwater libertarianism and social conservatism- in the 1960’s, these greedheads finally found an answer to the problem that had plagued financial elites since The Great Depression. They found a way to cobble together enough votes to begin undoing The New Deal. This is what the Conservative Movement has been about from the beginning, and it’s the direction its soldiers have been marching whether they’ve known it or not.
But any movement based on using lies and superstition in the service of a cynical elite will eventually reveal its un-democratic nature. And that’s when some of those soldiers will realize that they’ve been fighting for a fraudulent and dangerous enterprise.
As one of my favorite bloggers, driftglass, explains in a 16,000 word treatise on former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, this class of people will wake up to find itself in a “perpetual state of shock that his Republican Party is full of Republicans.”
In the end, Trump’s nomination did not rip the heart out of the Republican Party because Trump is the heart of the Republican Party. And as of this writing [Gerson’s] mighty band of Compassionate, “Sam’s Club” Conservatives who were going to end this madness have proven to be a politically impotent rounding error, while damn near 90% of your Republican Party stands firmly and enthusiastically behind President Squalid Prejudice.
For driftglass, the central story of the last forty years has been a failing elite that refused to understand the direction the Reagan Revolution was inexorably headed, and no group has been more guilty than the permanent class of Washington insider media pundits. I’ve always thought this diagnosis was spot-on, and the evidence for it keeps pouring in.
But there’s a limited sense in which I find them blameless. The problem is not per se that we have an elite group of people who seem to never get fired no matter how wrong they are, but that the institutions they serve have been failing even as their job is to extol those institutions’ virtues. Regardless of whether our government is good or bad, evil or virtuous, there will always be a class of people who have risen to the top of their field whose responsibility it is to inculcate trust and support for the system. This class came off looking pretty good when America defeated the Nazis. It shook itself out of its stupor in the Civil Rights, Vietnam and Watergate eras to defend what’s best in our system. But it was no match for the rot that set in after Reagan launched his project.
The central problem we have is that our country was hijacked by the George Hearsts of the world, which is why we wound up in Iraq, saw the global economy collapse, and have a major political party that can’t admit that climate change is a threat to life as we know it. It’s why we have a monopolized economy and Fox News and hate radio. It’s why half the people are walking around with some kind of prion disease eating out their brains.
It’s hard to look good defending America’s virtues when its leaders keep doing face-plants. And when there is one side of the equation that has the vast majority of the responsibility for the shape and direction of the country, the effort to be even-handed about the politics of it all winds up becoming a myopic kind of moral cowardice we call “both-siderism.”
I’d like to believe things would truly be better if our elite class of pundits would just come out as stridently against the Republicans as any Upper West Side liberal Democrat. I think that might help, but it’s too late for that and that’s not their job. Their job is to sell the American people on the merits of the system, and if the merits just aren’t there because the whole thing is being sabotaged, then they just become good salesmen for a defective product.
There’s another kind of media and there always has been in this country. It isn’t beholden to power but is dedicated to challenging it. It’s countercultural by nature, and sometimes to a fault. They don’t exist to tame the rich and appease the poor but to question everything, including the things that deserve praise and preservation. The worse things get, the better they look and the easier it is for them to boast that they had everything right while the insiders and elites were either idiots are selling people a bill of goods.
They’re great at telling you what’s wrong, but not so proficient in telling you what should be done instead. At their worst, they’re cynical naysayers whose job description almost precludes them from being satisfied or offering praise for anyone or anything. They can be so dedicated to the idea that this country is a pile of shit that they’d be genuinely disappointed to find out otherwise.
Everyone has their place and gets their rewards where they can find them, and we should remember that when we’re reading all the various news articles we encounter every day.
A healthy country has a healthy elite that is worthy of its position and privileges, and we don’t have that right now. We can make things more meritocratic, but I know we can’t create a system where the media elites don’t exist in the exact same place they are right now, so maybe the solution isn’t to wish they were better but to find a way to make the system worth defending again.
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