Elsewhere (44)
Jeff Goldstein quotes Victor Davis Hanson on matters inexplicable:
Another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. […]
That [raises] the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well-off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.
The mysteries of the millionaire leftist have been pondered here quite often. It seems reasonable to suppose that our leftwing elite aren’t vehemently opposed to their own status, influence and unusual wealth, which often exceeds that of those whose “unjust rewards” they publicly denounce. It seems they merely object to the wrong kind of rich people. Which is to say, people whose views and backgrounds may differ from their own. Maybe Alan Rusbridger, Jeremy Irons and Polly Toynbee, for instance, imagine themselves as part of an exempted nomenklatura – as consultants and advisors, clearing the road to our egalitarian utopia, where their influence and status will grow accordingly. Or maybe they’ve simply managed to construct personalities that are impervious to their own kleptomania and colossal hypocrisy. Which would also explain why Rusbridger, Irons and Toynbee are so comically unprepared for having their own affairs considered in any way relevant.
Nearly ten years on, Johnathan Pearce, Nick Gillespie and Tim Sandefur reflect on terrible events and inadequate art:
What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Centre at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.”
And Jan Blits revisits the University of Delaware’s infamous “social justice education” programme:
At every opportunity students were told that their identity, first and foremost, is not “human,” but this or that ethnic, racial, religious or sexual group: “Native American,” “Hispanic,” “black,” “Asian,” “white,” “male,” “female,” “Muslim,” “Hindu,” “gay,” straight,” and so on. Whites and males were singled out and publicly shamed for their “privilege.” […] Students were also forced to behave like bigots and spew forth stereotypes about members of other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups. When students objected that they were being forced to say things they didn’t mean, the [resident assistants] told them that they were saying what, deep down, they really thought. The obvious purpose of this exercise was to shame whites in general, and white males in particular. But, in fact, minority students especially hated the exercise, because it was in their name that other students were being unfairly shamed and abused.
Details of the pathological race fantasies at the heart of Delaware’s “social justice” programme can be found here, including the belief that “the term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States.” Students’ accounts of their tribal indoctrination – referred to by its proponents as a “treatment” intended to leave “a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness” – can be found here: “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate. The long-term effect is to teach conformity.” And if you believe such behaviour must be a one-off aberration, better think again.
As usual, feel free to add your own.
Yay, you’re back. (I missed my Friday fix.)
Here’s one.
“when a state run by a communist party tells the USA to spend less on… welfare, you start to get some idea just how strange the world has become and just how screwed the US actually is.”
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2011/08/samizdata_quote_860.html
PS – I’d forgotten about Jeremy Irons (“deeply socialist”) and his seven houses. Hilarious.
Sam,
“…you’re back.”
And much as I appreciate my readers, it was good to be away. Not a Guardian in sight. I even have an accidental tan. There’s now a very small chance I could be mistaken for a labourer.
“Here’s one.”
Related to that, see also Darleen Click on “pragmatic” conservatives:
“I’d forgotten about Jeremy Irons (‘deeply socialist’) and his seven houses.”
To be fair, it’s Mr Irons’ wife who calls herself “deeply socialist.” Mr Irons himself is undeeply socialist and merely wants other people to “drop their standard of living” and “spread [their] wealth about.” Perhaps he hopes to observe this noble redistribution from his private castle, which affords the perfect view.
I’m sure Mr and Mrs Irons would like my Georgism (Adam Smith capitalism would tax his viewing monopoly, not labour) even less than your libertarianism!?
“EU demands that Britain admit immigrants intending to go straight on to benefits.”
When students objected that they were being forced to say things they didn’t mean, the [resident assistants] told them that they were saying what, deep down, they really thought.
These people are actually scary. It’s pure Stalin. They really do want to be ‘engineers of the human soul’.
“They really do want to be ‘engineers of the human soul’.”
It would seem so, yes. But if these people want to be “change agents” – if they feel it’s their job to fix humanity, once and for all – then isn’t that the obvious endpoint? As one commenter puts it, keeping your head down won’t do; mere compliance isn’t enough. The students have to voluntarily sacrifice their probity. They have to love Big Brother.
As Theodore Dalrymple noted,
I think there has to be different reasons why each of the groups Artists, Politicians and Academics take up left wing positions.
For politicians it ends as a career. They fell in love with the idea that if only clever people like them were in charge all the problems would go away. That doesn’t really explain Jeremy Irons, Alec Baldwin or Sean Penn. I would guess that, their beliefs originate in guilt about how they made their wealth – they work in an industry where thousands struggle but only a minority achieve untold wealth. They must compare themselves with the people they met on the way up who had had equal talent but never got the breaks. They imagine that the whole world works like that. That any person on an assembly line is capable of being the CEO, just they didn’t get the breaks.
“Left-wing + wealth” is a phenomenon going back to the early 19th Century and the Industrial Revolution.
In a society with dynamic development going on, such as is generated by rapid technological change, a large share of wealth will go to innovators, changers, upsetters of the status quo.
People of that sort are not conservative. In the 1800s they were “liberals”, as opposed to the “throne and altar” conservatives, or the “squirearchy”. Many were outsiders – Jews for instance. Residual hostility to old racial, religious, or heredity elites is a factor.
Today a lot of such people are profound “social liberals”, and the welfare-state politics goes with that. There’s a lot of theophobia on the left – people who have a profound discomfort with religion, and express it hostility toward the “Religious Reich” etc.
Many tech millionaires fall into this group. Others are very individualistic, and hostile to traditional morality. They are innovative and independent in business, and in personal life as well, which puts them at odds with traditional constraints.
In the U.S., there has been an organized effort by wealthy homosexuals to fund challenges to Republican state legislators who were effective opponents of same sex marriage. These were individuals who made 9-figure fortunes in the IT boom or entertainment, and could now collectively drop several million $ into, say, an Iowa state senate election. (They have a perfect right to do so – but note that the issues which decide where their loyalty and their money goes are not economic.)
Another factor is that these people are already rich. Short of an actual Bolshevik Revolution, there is no chance of their not having as much money to spend on themselves as they could ever want. The negative consequences of their economic policies never affect them, and they perceive only the claimed benefits to the deserving.
Great blog. Bookmarked!
Had not heard about the University of Delaware. Wow. Just wow. What is really fearful is imagining the infrastructure, culture, and the number of conversations by thousands of people required to produce this curriculum.
As to the Leftist Hollywood elite, I believe it begins as a psychological reaction to cognitive dissonance.
Marx was fantastically, absolutely wrong. But he was simple. And almost paradoxically, he gives an explanation to a wildly compensated actor the reason for their virtually undeserved fame, self-indulgence, and riches. If you aren’t going to feel guilty or grateful and humble enough to feel lucky about your success, you can at least become a socialist and call the whole system unfair.
I assume the same argument goes for a certain type of person who is born with a spoon in their mouth. I know of several trust fund kids worth upwards of $100 Million. For those that think about it, life is a little tough for them. For there is no reason at all to believe they deserved it. It is difficult to imagine such a life, for those of us who have earned who we are every step of the way.
The whole life experience is otherwordly, with little sense of accomplishment or self-validation. No wonder the attraction to a simplistic socialist life view is so attractive. Their exposure to real America, both corporate and Main St. is both inherently rejected and by unfamiliarity, shallow.