The Essayist #17: The Oppressor is Named.

Back when I was in college, I thought long and hard about the inherent oddities of my position: there I was, the military brat, the second of my surname to go to a university, and I was studying to become...what, exactly? A Foreign Service Agent? A perma-student? What was my productive work? Where did I belong? With my leftyish friends, embracing Derrida and Foucault, or with the kids in the College Republicans who tended to hold me at arm's length, and at any case never got drunk on Monday nights playing Diplomacy while extensively quoting Monty Python?

Twelve years, 7-8 jobs, and a long time earning my living as a teacher later, and I know what I am; precisely the term Lenin used when he arrived at Finland Station: a man of letters. An intellectual. But this discovery has not lessened the tension of my life one bit.  I am, as I was then, a rebel against my class.

But can such a class actually exist? Have not the intelligensia existed since the rise of the Sumerian scribes? Yes, and yes. And I'm not the first to say so. The Volokh Conspiracy here quotes the critical-theory journal Telos on the rise of New Class theory:

The history of class struggle, which had been history altogether, had culminated in the victory of a proletarian class that in turn had ushered in—or was well on its way to ushering in—a classless society. Or so the grand narrative went. To talk of a "new class," then, conjured up the unquestionable epistemology of class analysis, while simultaneously challenging the notional outcome: instead of the end of the state and classlessness, one was stuck with police states and a new class that, while eminently cooler than the Bolsheviks of yore, still exercised a dictatorship (of the not-proletariat) while skimming off the benefits of unequal power. The phrase turned Marxism against Marxism during those decades when the fall of the Berlin Wall was not even imaginable.

This is the basis of my main critique of Marx, which is that he failed to see the logic of his own argument. Knowing that economic changes cause the new controllers/producers to replace the old, he somehow decided that a self-aware proletariat would upset this dynamic and undo the stratification of society. He failed to see the rather obvious contradiction in he, an intellectual, exhorting workers to revolt while pretending that, if they listened to him, they would not continue to do so and so put him in power over them. Lenin, ever the realist, did address this contradiction, with his doctrine of the "revolutionary vanguard" which operated outside any law of God or man, but would melt away when no longer needed. In effect, he kicked the can down the road.

The new class transition to linguistic, cultural, and technocratic expertise unfolded during the profound shift toward a symbolic service economy—new class ascendancy took place during the era of the dramatic decline of manufacturing and the concomitant shift of unionized labor organization primarily into the public sector—and it privileges capacities of semiotic manipulation over material production or even military prowess. Its signature contribution to foreign policy is "smart power," a term that nobly implies that boots on the ground are dumb and that some—still elusive—strategic rhetorical eloquence will make enemies vanish without ever firing a gun, since language is its ultimate power. The corollary economic policy is negative, defined by discourses of environmentalism that imagine achieving greener national spaces by exporting dirty manufacturing and energy consumption to the developing world: not in our backyard.

Barak Obama would thus be the New Class Man par excellence: vaulting himself to the highest office in the land by dint of his professorial prowess; his empty resume irrelevant in the face of his uncanny ability to appear wise enough to govern. Note the way the reaction of many to his sudden unpopularity is the quiet complaint that America is Ungovernable.

Note also the satisfying irony of those friends of mine who went in for Derrida hoping that it would free their minds from the tyranny of language. Quite the contrary; the tortured casuistries of post-modern academic writing render language an impenetrable fog, on which meaning must be strenuously imposed. It makes language the focus, rather than the medium, of all discourse. Don't believe the hype: the po-mos are the real logocentrists.

Post-Modernism in film is no less tedious for all its spectacle.

Other ironies abound:

Paradoxically, the conservative critique of the new class could make the "Marxist" move of pointing out how universalist claims masked particularist interests. What ensued was a decades-long conflict between, on the one hand, advocates of more enlightened and ever more expansive administration of society, and, on the other, proponents of reduced state oversight, defenders of society against the state, and the deregulated market against the long reach of political power.

The Tea Party Movement is thus the result of decades of this conservative/libertarian critique trickling down into the blogosphere, and burping up again in (wait for it, wait for it) class struggle. It is the enemy of the New Class, and so of Barak Obama, but it would be short-sighted to assume that it represents nothing more than the partisan rage of an out-of-power GOP faithful. The willingness of Tea Partiers to criticize Bush & the Bank Bailouts, the explicit calls for a Jeffersonian understanding of federal power, the regular appearance of Paulites and other Libertarians bespeaks a general desire for the decentralization of political power. I should be very surprised if, should they catapult the GOP back to power in the next several elections, they will wipe their hands, considering their Mission Accomplished.

Indeed, a GOP that attempts to co-opt this new revolutionary vanguard without engaging in the serious work of delivering decentralization will suffer the same punishment, three or four elections hence, that it did in 2006 and 2008. I recall a conversation I had with a gentleman from the NRCC asking for a donation for the election cycle. He went into his usual boilerplate, and I stopped him with the fact of my frustration that for all its talk of small government, the party seems unable to actually shrink Leviathan. We shared a laugh at how difficult it all was, and never have I shared a laugh with someone I stood at a farther remove from. He had heard that before, no doubt, and agreed that it was regrettable, but what was one going to do? The whining of David Brooks and the rest of the GOP establishment reads easily as part of the rightish-wing of the New Class fretting at the notion that the rubes really mean what they say.

The complexity of the new class and its culture, however, is that while it sets out to administer society and establish bureaucracies to regulate social and economic life domestically, at the same time it attempts to ratchet down the political and military power that might be projected externally: a strong state toward its subjects, a weak state toward its enemies!

This weakness of the New Class explains its incomplete triumph; because it denounces material military and economic power, it leaves these things to its opponents. Thus Islamic terrorism sits nicely in the New Class' blind spot: reactionary in scope, cunning in operation, bloodthirsty in method. Our Alphas, convinced of their cognitive superiority, cannot conceive the potency of the archaic in any but the breeziest terms, and rather save their fight for those who took up the gauntlet that al Qaeda threw down. I am however obliged to point out that President Obama has, albeit schitzophrenically, embraced the war against al Qaeda, at least so far as Afghanistan is concerned. We do all a disservice to reduce all to caricature.

Likewise, opponents of the New Class will be foolish to assume that they rise to power through mere philosophical evil, and that overthrowing them requires no more than raising sufficient awareness and then mustering sufficient strength. That is Revolutionary thinking, and the ugly history of modernity ought to be enough to warn of the limitations of Revolutionism (of which the New Class is itself a scion). The Alpha administrators exist for a reason:

Most importantly, the transition to the culture of the new class has, in complex ways, taken part in the revolution of the new technologies, with the new class at first benefiting from them, thanks to their advantaging the educated and wealthy—that social inequality known as the "digital divide." But the new technologies, especially the new networks of communication, have undermined the former concentrations of media power and opinion-making, allowing for the emergence of new populist forces, decidedly not new class in their character and programs.

This dovetails into Andrea Tantaros' call for conservatives to storm the progressive Bastilles, and reminds us that human society is hierarchical. Diversity of the human experience and of human abilities means stratification into labor groups. That we should try to keep such stratification fluid does not mean we can blot it from the earth. Hence, elites exist. They always have and always will. Populism can check elites, and in extreme cases replace them, but it cannot govern without them. No American who honors the Founding Fathers should be blind to this.

And where does this leave me? Exactly where I was, forever trying to see the way round. I am no rugged pioneer individualist. I am a suburban doughboy who eats by the labor of others (in return for which, I teach their children), a grad student with a fat library and a skinny backyard. That I have chosen to embrace what I consider my calling would be folly if I did not see its limitations. We are all living in the leisure granted by those who came before us. The moment we cease to be worthy of that largess is the moment it begins to drift away. The hard wisdom of this is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me, and I will die in it, if need be, at the stake.