Bigotry, Snobbery, and the New Left
The Old Fault Line Between Populism & Elitism Have Merged into One Waste Product without the Product
To take a brief break from high-flown metaphysical matters, I offer the LDL readers a hot take on the uniqueness of the present political situation and curiosity of “derangement” over America’s 45th president. Bigotry is the common waste product of populism and provincialism; snobbery of elitism and cosmopolitanism. We now have a band of elitists whose superiority rests on their claim that—wait for it—they feel less elitist and superior than the deplorables.
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Bigotry and snobbery, often confused and mutually interchanged, in fact represent the excesses of opposite spiritual-political impulses. Snobbery is the social and political expression of elitism, which attends any self-conscious attempt to distinguish oneself from the animals through personal cultivation. As the medieval crucible of modern Europe faded from memory, snobbery came to replace martial savagery as the shiboleth of aristocratic excess, even as Christian Europe had been proclaiming all along that something wholly other than any worldly attainment elevated a man above the animals and bestowed his spiritual dignity. But “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare” (Spinoza)--and any who truly pursue excellence can become awkward or stuffy (or worse) around those with no impetus to do so, in the way that many people are awkward and unskilled at entertaining children. Children are just living--following their instinct, like an animal, without some self-consciously external standard to constantly shoot at and measure one’s position against. Elitism always feels compelled to justify itself because it is defined against what is ‘common’--the only original meaning of the word “vulgar”.
Bigotry, in contrast, is a spiritual compensation, a ‘rectification’, rather than a waste product. It follows from a liminal or latent self-consciousness that is incomplete, but aware of its incompletion. People crave to feel what the Christians used to call “justified”—to be one of the good guys in a world all too manifestly unsaturated by them. But without being, doing, or believing anything with transformative spiritual power, a bigot must elevate himself in toto on account of extrinsic characteristics. The last gasp of the pre-modern world was breathed in the American Civil War--by the 1880s industrial capitalism was a fait acompli to be managed, not a possible world order to be contested--and from that point, even in the South, much less the old Northeast, the economic and political elites were never really bigoted in the true sense of that word. Their elitism was class-based, and the ruffian barbarism of the Ku Klux Klan was considered hopelessly low-class.
Bigotry has something unself-conscious and hysterical about it; snobbery has something measured and self-aware about it. Snobbery entails a contempt for the provincial; bigotry betrays a terror of the unknown and incomprehensible. Bigotry is not, strictly speaking, elitist: it is always the case in history that every community must look out for itself and its own in a jungle of barbaric competitors (whether military or, eventually, political-economic). Its problem is in identifying a false totem as the object of worship—something superficial, like race, rather than genuinely spiritual, like a faith, tradition, or civic covenant that genuinely binds a community together and distinguishes it from the jungle of outsiders. And because it always partly knows its totemic identification to be false, facile, free, and not truly spiritual, it has an element of peremptory and compensatory insecurity that is all too obvious and discomfiting to a social elite.
Snobbery is the reaction of those who know themselves to be economic, intellectual, or political elites and feel put upon having to share shelf space with those they consider vulgar—those who are ungoverned by an external standard of excellence, but only rather by their own untutored sensibilities. Bigotry is the reaction of those who know themselves to be ordinary, not-elite, and feel put upon having to share shelf space with those outside their (self-conceived) tribe--covenantal outsiders propped up as co-conspirators or useful idiots by their overlords (in the sense that Schopenhauer meant when observing that tyrants and the masses are natural allies, like grandparents and grandchildren). Every polity in history has had commoners and elites, whether or not those titles were formally enshrined. Commoners know they are fighting for scraps, and take umbrage at sharing them with those outside the polity as properly defined (immigrants in cities, alien elements or bourgeois bandits in the governmental bureaucracy, etc.): their lot is modest enough as it is. It is one thing to tolerate forced obeisance to elites of the same tribe, but another to tolerate sharing their provisions with those who lay without it.
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The British literary circle of Kinglsey Amis against which Christopher Hitchens defined himself shared elements of the old Republican Party brand, of which George H.W. Bush and his father were emblematic in their refined snobbery (George W. veered dangerously into class-debasement with his traditional American South style Bible-thumping, which made his own father demonstrably uncomfortable.) The Religious Right always made the establishment Republicans uncomfortable, for the same reason as Reagan and Nixon’s West Coast anti-intellectualist populism did. The traditional Republican kingmakers were Northeast upper crust elitists who typically wanted political protections and education for black Americans, but certainly not for them to marry their sons or daughters. Racial progressivism was a sign of social class, the ability to afford a disinterested concern for the benighted. Snobbery is not shrill or really even hateful; it comes from knowing oneself to possess something others don’t, not a compensation for lacking it. It is the soft contempt of the aristocrat free from the constraints around the junior levels of the game of life. It is the baggage that separates the mere high achiever from the one who has made the “second turn” of spirituality, back toward equality with the ordinary underachievers, represented in Christianity by the personage of Jesus Christ.
From the very first iteration of Americanism’s dialectical tension, represented by Hamilton and Jefferson, the Northern (Federalist—>Whig—>Republican) faction was elitist, and the Southern, Jeffersonian was populist. This is largely, if not entirely, explained by the simple fact that the North was much richer, because its urban Calvinism made it much friendlier to the emerging world order of industrial capitalism. Populism will always make elites and elitists uncomfortable because it is anarchistic and empowers people who are proud to be contemptuous of any traditional or cultural regulating hand, what Nietzsche called the “tensing of wills over great temporal distances.” America is truly exceptional in modern history for this reason alone—that its populists needn’t necessarily have been anti-religious or anti-traditional (indeed, William Jennings Bryan incarnates the American brand of millenarianism perhaps more than any other figure in its history)--although despite this, it’s not for nothing that Jefferson was the most “deistic” and ‘low Christology’ of the Founders in his religious beliefs.
The cheesy myth of the “party switch” during the Civil Rights era widely disseminated by minimally literate schoolteachers countrywide belies the source of the true change in the spiritual fault line of American politics during this time—namely, that the populists and elitists began to expedite their crossover. The matter was first confused in the era of Teddy Roosevelt and W.J. Bryan, each a cocktail of elitist and populist, conservative and progressive in almost perfectly opposite yin/yang ways. But the fault line reversal properly commenced with Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who made sense as crossover candidates of their party in the same way that it was easier for the “conservative” Nixon administration to go to China and form the E.P.A., or the “liberal” Clinton administration to pass NAFTA and the infamous Biden crime bill.
This crossover was not complete until the candidacy and election of Donald Trump—the hysteria, or “derangement” over whose success represented something new in America, and perhaps the world: the perfect fusion of snobbery with bigotry. The contempt for the middle and especially white lower middle class, whom Lionel Trilling called the class “an intelligentsia always finds it easiest to despise,” has all the earmarks of snobbery—based on a worldly superiority that is de facto rather than de jure—but also of true bigotry—because genuinely shrill, impervious to reason, contemptuous, and compensatory; and based on a superiority which it knows to be spurious, awarded by incident rather than genuine attainment of any kind, whether spiritual or material. The political and technocratic elites are not actually intellectually sophisticated in any real sense: their degrees are watered down, and their epistemology without exception a sum-of-its-parts. Those few among them who can be said to really know anything the commoners don’t are fetishistic experts in a particular subject—the only kind of sophistication even recognized by our culture anymore, and the last reserve of intellectual deference it still affords (“STEM”). It's not that those fields are intrinsically any more serious, demanding, or epistemically all-encompassing than the others, but only that they are much harder to simulate a course of without actually learning anything. And of course, very few of our elites have any real mastery in even these. Only in the twenty-first century could Ben Bernanke fail to prevent the most financially and politically expensive global con-job in human history, stop the bleeding only by setting up the next generation for a much worse version of the exact same cataclysm, and conclude by writing a memoir entitled The Courage to Act.
The problem with modern political narcissism is that the power awarded by unvetted and anarchic products of human events has come to supersede power awarded by “nature”—whether talent in the fine, liberal, or martial arts, or the true loyalty commanded by superior generalship that ipso facto distinguishes the victors-become-kings from the ordinary barbarian. Nietzsche’s basic theme is no more nor less than this—that the fire of all evil depends for its sustenance on the oxygen of self-pity; and for the first time in human history people holding all the political power available can keep a straight face claiming to be licensed to revolutionary activity because hopelessly oppressed. It is not simply the commonplace savagery required of any set of rulers to retain order and justify their legitimacy. It would be comparable to the Old Southern elites, in the worst of their barbaric excess, pronouncing justification for additional looting and rioting on the grounds that they were oppressed by black supremacy.
But how can a snob escape embarrassment at such transparent compensatory energy as bigotry requires? Something changed in 2014 during the Ferguson, Missouri incident. It was almost like after a black man was elected twice—making America the only country in history to democratically elect an ethnic minority head of state not once, a possible fluke, but twice—the propagators of the oppression narrative panicked. They reacted the same way as the guardians of any cartel whose long and glorious reign can feel itself to be coming to an end, like the antebellum South Carolina “Fire Eaters”that baited the rest of Dixie into secession, the pre-WWI European aristocracy, or the music label recording industry at the turn of the third millennium. Instead of re-negotiating their position and accepting a pay cut, the only thing they could think to do was double down on exactly those elements which had become most screamingly outmoded. As long as some actual racial depredation continued in America with a genuine political element, they could breathe easy; they had a business, a cause, that was not entirely a scam. The Democrats’ claims about race in America went from exaggerated to hysterical at precisely the moment when their narrative’s underlying reality went from partial to fabulous. The new rising generation really didn’t care; they didn’t remember the old way and thought nothing of having a racial minority for president.
The entire identity of the mostly coastal, mostly-corporate urbanites derives from their fantasy of spiritual superiority and intellectual sophistication, and their contempt for those who retain a tribal loyalty to their country and its unique traditions. But in addition to any actual form of personal cultivation, they lack even true belief--what they have instead is, by their own admission, only opinion. True elites know they’re different; our elites know equally that they aren’t: they can hold only the opinion that their baubles and New York Times’ list filled bookshelves ought make them so. But that beef is against reality, not any actual modus vivendi or class of people. They lack the humility and common sense of the commoner, yet equally the sophistication and gentility of the aristocrat. Most old aristocrats were cads, but they all knew they ought not be. Our elites behave as though their squalor ceases to be squalid as long as it is they who commit it. So too with the extinction of journalistic “truth”: they do not strictly believe in external truth, nor feel ashamed at bald-faced lies about Trump, but rather insist that by serving their agenda and grandeur, these lies become a higher sort of truth. When right-wingers lie it’s because it’s war and they want to win; when the new leftists tell lies they believe that they cease to be lies. Hence the lack of outrage at Rachel Maddow’s audience at discovering they’d been lied to about the Russia hoax for two years: she was working for the same God as they, giving them fodder to bring their opinion into alignment with reality. If that doesn’t stick, try something else: at least she was trying.
This marriage of bigotry and snobbery was encapsulated by the last century’s universal solvent of political abuse, “bourgeois”, used with equal liberality by Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, and the waning aristocracy. Europe, unlike America (except for Switzerland and Holland, who were Calvinist and republican even before us), never managed to sacralize commercialism and the grubby middle-class enthusiasm for financial gain into a national religion, with room enough for the dilatory and niggling agrarian yeomen. And suddenly I feel less haughtily superior as a good American believer in republican government than I once did to the twentieth century Europeans who could not fathom that those demagogues who would come to ensnare them could possibly be any worse.