My Liberal Neighbor is Worried About Insurrection
Because Democracy
I just happened to run into a liberal neighbor this morning on the way to coffee with my Greek friend.
She didn’t come out and say she was fit to be tied about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, but she seemed to be real concerned about insurrection and civil war. For her it seems like the US has entered a new and chaotic age after decades of tranquillity. And she exchanged a “Democracy!” with someone we met as we walked around north Seattle’s Green Lake.
My response was a cunning misdirection that my family has been on the run for the last century, starting when my 16-year-old dad left Russia in 1918. So I don’t really experience the idea that everything was copacetic until yesterday.
But the encounter did alert me to the fact that good blue-city liberals can’t believe what they are experiencing. I think that we deplorables and pond scum need to really realize just how flummoxed our liberal friends are.
Rolling back Roe v. Wade? Are you kidding?
Reaffirming Second Amendment gun rights? “Inconceivable!”
And now I was reading that the Supreme Court may roll back the power of the adminisstrative state in another decision due before the end of the session. If true, that would be the unkindest cut of all.
And I just finished Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed which takes the reader blow-by-blow through the world view of our liberal educated betters. In the book he takes us through the culture, the beliefs, the politics of the educated ruling class and how everything that it thinks and does interlocks to justify its top-down ruling culture.
It’s all about declaring a “crisis,” then legislating (or Supreme Courting) a solution, and then pooh-poohing anyone that that dares to suggest that the solution has Made Thing Worse.
It wasn’t until I’d finished the book that I realized that Sowell has defined a new “three layer” theory to go along with Orwell’s Inner Party, Outer Party, and Plebs and the Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates in my reductive Three Peoples theory. His three layers are:
The Anointed: educated elitists whose vision of the world is always right.
The Benighted: Gosh, I wonder who that is, dear deplorables.
The Mascots: yes, that’s the same as the “oppressed peoples” of the Allyship narrative and my Little Darlings.
Through it all, Sowell keeps maintaining that the top-down system cannot work, because life is just too complicated for tippy-top elitists to keep all their ducks in a row.
And if you don’t believe me, then what do you think has happened to the Biden administration? It came into office and implemented just about every educated-class activist agenda item imaginable. It’s going to Change the World! Pity, because they chose just about the worst moment since the Crash of 1929 to do all this: after the “haha money printer go brrr” of the COVID stupidity.
See, if I were Ron Brain, Biden’s chief of staff, I would have got all he players in a room and read them the facts of life, that this is not the moment to do everything from killing the fossil fuel industry to making the world safe for transgenders. First, I would have said, we have to get the economy on an even keel, with low inflation and positive growth. Then we can launch the Lagonda.
Now you may say: how come you, Chris Chantrill, know this but the brainy brains of the Dem Anointed don’t? You may indeed wonder about that; I couldn’t possibly comment.
Here’s a possible answer to that. Again, it comes from my conversation with my neighbor. I was asking about young people she was working with. She’s an architect and she complained that the young architects are all anxious to be creative, but are absolutely useless at putting instructions onto architectural drawings to make clear to the contractor how do do it. They are not convinced about the need to communicate their creative ideas to the contractor and not too keen on the hard work involved.
Yep. It’s only too easy to be a visionary Member of the Anointed, with creative ideas to bend the arc of history towards justice. Anyone can do that. But actually making something work: that is a horse of a different color.
That’s why I am so impressed with a guy like Elon Musk. Taking the idea of reusable rockets and spacecraft from conception to design to development to actually making it work is about the most astonishing thing in our age. The easy part is the creative moment of “let’s make a reusable rocket.” Actually making it work. Wow. And wow.
Of course, if our rulers would descend from the clouds and read a book like The Vision of the Anointed with an open mind they would realize that their top-down model does not work, never did work, and anyway Makes Things Worse.
And at some point, the top-down model fails so badly that it ushers a ruling class off the stage of history. Typically a ruling class and its supporters in such a situation start worrying about insurrection.