I’ve always known that the French aristocrats, in the years before the revolution, were a bunch of foppish twerps. You probably did too.
But now, reading Simon Schama’s Citizens and Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism I’m here to say: They Lied.
When King Louis XVI appointed an Assembly of Notables in 1787 to Do Something about the French regime’s money problems, the princes and dukes and bishops came up with a pretty sensible plan.
And, according to Liah Greenfeld, the French nobility was all in favor of the Enlightenment ideas that drove the revolution. Partly this was because, like Catherine the Great in Russia and Frederick the Great in Prussia, they wanted to be “everything’s up to date in Kansas City.” Partly it was because the nobility had been stripped of power and status by the rise of the absolute monarchs like Louis XIV, the Sun King. The nobility was looking to matter again, and the Enlightenment ideas looked like a good horse to ride. So, in a way, the nobles were allied with the rising bourgeoisie in the runup to the Revolution. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.
Obviously this does not apply to our modern educated nobility. Our modern educated nobility is in the saddle of power and doesn’t propose to get its butt out of the saddle. And the educated nobility is completely uninterested in new ideas, because any new ideas would reduce its power.
On the religious and cultural front our modern nobles utterly deplore and sneer at the culture of the ordinary middle-class commoner. And they delight in corrupting the children of the commoners with the sexual depravity of the wokeys and the LBGTs. I would say that a wise ruling class, while whooping it up in its own cultural bubble, would at least pretend to honor the simple superstitions of the peasants.
On the political and economic front the educated nobility is utterly oblivious to the needs of the ordinary middle class for a stable and growing economy in which ordinary people can wive and thrive. And, incidentally, oblivious also for a path for the lower class to rise out of the ghetto into the responibility culture of the ordinary middle class with its jobs, families and suburban homes.
Look, I get it. Ruling class needs a war. Our ruling class’s war is the war on climate and the war on systemic racism.
But, word to the wise: it’s one thing for FDR to trick us into a World War with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, that NOBODY, and I repeat, NOBODY saw coming. Because people rally to the colors when you gin up a attack on the homeland — even if NOBODY saw it coming: it’s in the genes. But I tell you geniuses, this fake climate change thing is not real enough to get people to sacrifice their sons and their SUVs. It ain’t gonna fly, not with $10 gasoline and contractors forced to convert their F-150s to electric. And as for systemic racism: well, I don’t think that Hispanics are buying it right now, and I figure that east Asians are right in the middle of dumping the Democrats for a generation.
But the big thing that just seems crazy cakes to me is the current Democrat spending binge. Didn’t they realize back in 2020 when they were ginning all this up that it wasn’t going to end well? The simple answer is, of course, no they didn’t.
But why? The answer is, of course, that educated class people are taught, from the cradle, that When in Doubt, Stimulate. With big spending and cheap money. Yeah! The science says so!
For most of my life, I bought the narrative that, well, Keynesian stimulation sorta works, at least enough that educated people can buy into it.
But watching Art Laffer yesterday kinda blew all that away. Because he made it Real Simple. Said he: If you increase taxes on a rich person he will have less money to grow his business. So you shrink the economy. If you incrase spending on a poor person, he will be less inclined to look for a job. So you shrink the economy.
This is, in fact, what happened with the last few Democatic stimuli. They were all “disappointing.” They were about doing the wrong thing and they made things worse.
But as I say. Politics is all about fighting the enemy and then distributing the loot afterwards. So of course after the politicians win the election they gin up another spending program to distribute to their supporters. Only, the taxing and spending make us poorer: not necessarily absolutely poorer, but just poorer than otherwise.
“Taxing and spending make us poorer.”
It’s weird, isn’t it, that the glorious new ideas of the 19th century, of socialism and social insurance, that everyone agreed were the very epitome of advanced social cooperation, ended up as anti-social, replacing social and hierarchical relationships witdh flat out power relationships, simply the way that politicians bought their elections.
The problem is, of course, not just that our leaders are corrupt, riling people up with imaginary enemies, and buying support with loot and plunder. The problem is that they are utterly innocent. They go around patting each other on the back about how advanced and compassionate they are while their politics and their governance Makes Things Worse.
As this piece reminds us, a chap like Paul Krugman can live in the liberal bubble and have no idea that there is a reality outside the liberal shibboleths.
Of course, we all live in a narrative of lies, because otherwise life would be too hard. That’s what Nietzsche means when he writes in The Will to Power that
Metaphysics, morality, religion, science -- in this book these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies: with their help we can have faith in life.
OK. That works for 97.2 percent of us. But all societies need to tolerate a few crazy nutcases that get outside the Overton Window without permission and try to figure things out, just a little, before the roof caves in.
And when the rulers harden up and say absolutely no deviations from the official narrative: that’s a “tell” that things are about to break.
I tell you want a good ruling class looks like. It looks like the Duke of Wellington “persuading” the House of Lords to pass the Third Reform Bill of 1832 and expand the franchise in Britain. Not that he hadn’t spent the last five years opposing reform.
Do you think that our liberal friends will rise to the occasion at some point in the next five years? We shall see.