'The Village' Lost the Election

Via X, I learned of Nate Silver's essay titled, "The Expert Class Is Failing, and So Is Biden's Presidency."

It is well worth the read, but I'll note my dislike of the term expert class, despite its currency. It is a populist, demagogic phrase that is too easily weaponized for "class warfare" and for dismissing expertise as such. A better, but still imperfect term I'll use instead is Establishment.

The essay interests me, and probably would interest anyone else who has read philosopher Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.

Why? It echoes Peikoff's description of an establishment with one philosophical mode losing its grip in the face of rejection by the culture at large. In the below passage, the Indigo Blob is the collection of establishment-aligned institutions (and any intellectuals working within them): "the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia, and public health" and the Democratic Party and organized "progressives."

"The Village" is the Establishment, the bulk of the intellectual leadership of the Indigo Blob. It consists of what I believe Peikoff's mentor, Ayn Rand, would have called the intellectuals of the left, namely "the expert class of academics, journalists and like-minded types."

"The River," are entrepreneurs and other risk-takers, some of whom, if they are not outright intellectuals, are looking to support an alternative to the Establishment:

The Indigo Blob can weave superficially compelling narratives, often involving a lot of whataboutism. Biden pardoned Hunter? Well, what about Trump pardoning Paul Manafort? Those school closures were bad? Well, what about anti-vaxxers? Not on board with full-blown wokeness? Well, then you're in league with the fascists. But these stories have become increasingly desperate and implausible. The Indigo Blob suggested that it was "ageist" to be concerned about Biden wanting to be president until he was 86. It said that educated white men brought about Trump's victory, even though college-educated whites were actually the only group of men who didn't swing heavily MAGA.

And so these narratives have become unconvincing other than to a narrow group of Village midwits. Both the multiethnic working class and an increasing number of highly successful people like those in the River are seeing through the bullshit.

So now the Village has a double failure. Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly -- but it's also increasingly losing politically. If Trump's victory against a Harris campaign that literally ran out of ideas wasn't proof enough of that -- I'll have a long critique of the Harris campaign beginning later this week -- people are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities. Corporations that embraced wokeness have now done a 180-degree turn in the other direction. Saturday Night Live is back to making fun of Democrats. [links omitted]

This atmosphere distinctly reminds me of the chapter "What's Next?"

In the following passage, D, D₁, and D₂ can be taken to mean Establishment, and M to mean religionists:

The Weimar Republic had its own background tradition of M, Christians -- Lutherans, Junkers, et al -- who in the 1920s were out of power. The new Republic, which replaced them, was "the first modern culture," according to historian Peter Gay; regarded as the opposite of Christianity, it was a hotbed of pioneering D₂s in every intellectual field, including art and science, flourishing under the benevolent gaze of the new political establishment. The government was a coalition of three democratic parties, each a variant of D₁ and thus concerned primarily to secure concrete-bound compromises among pressure groups. Both types of D were against Hitler, but neither offered philosophic opposition, mostly because of their disdain for ideology, but partly also because of the continuous demands on the D₁s to cope with successive emergencies and pay their bills. In addition, it was difficult to argue with Hitler when both they and he agreed on the same conventional and uncontroversial code of ethics -- namely, the ethics of duty, of sacrifice to (German) society. Seeing all this and the economic disasters to which it led, the German people despised the Weimar Republic, ridiculed the politicians as unprincipled non-entities, and cursed the nihilists as "cultural Bolsheviks" (a term that mistakenly equates nihilism with Communism). Meanwhile, the German youth -- roving bands of seemingly ungovernable, guitar-strumming hippies (as they were called in the sixties) -- were disenchanted with everything adult. All these rebels, fanned by the public and nearing a boil, knew of only one alternative mode. With the triple trigger of the Versailles Treaty, the runaway inflation of 1923, and the depression of 1929, the nation voted that alternative into power. Like the rest of the country, the ungovernable youth at once fell into line. Hitler told them their duty, and they dropped their guitars. What they picked up instead we know.

Trump is not Hitler, but there are similarities in how this all played out: All branches of the cultural Establishment strongly opposed Trump without offering compelling arguments against him or (better yet) for a superior alternative. The Establishment was ineffective and widely scorned, and frequently and incorrectly equated with communists, with traditional (read: religious) values frequently and equally wrongly portrayed as "the opposite" (i.e., the antidote), especially as against the more outrageous causes of the left, such as the pandemic lockdowns/mandates and "wokeness."

We are in a precarious time, and the American people, faced with more of the same vs. a roll of the dice (my most charitable conception of what a Trump Presidency can mean) have understandably chosen the latter.

Advocates of freedom have been warned. We may not be even so lucky next time.

-- CAV

Updates:

Today: Corrected typos.