If the rise of Trump has shown us anything, it's that the regular folks, the non-elites, still have a voice. The people Richard Nixon referred to as the Silent Majority sure seem to be re-asserting themselves - a phenomenon where former President Trump is, really, a symptom, rather than a cause.
But there's little reason to deny the fact that Donald Trump has given voice to concerns a lot of folks have been harboring for some time now - concerns about our country, the direction it's taking, and most of all, the self-appointed elites that are taking our nation down this road.
Tuesday, at the Free Press, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri penned some interesting thoughts along these lines.
The elites are driven entirely by the impulse to control. They detest democracy, which keeps getting in their way, and much prefer a golden ideal they possessively call “Our Democracy”—their own rule in perpetuity. Individual rights are unfortunate legacies from a simpler era. The First Amendment, for example, they see as “hamstringing the government in significant ways.” By the way, that was Ketanji Brown Jackson talking, a Supreme Court justice whose job it is to defend the Constitution. Freedom of speech does hamstring government, that’s perfectly true—but only to the elites (who hate the sound of normie voices) is it a bad thing.
What is the conflict about?
The conflict is about many things, but chief among them is the conflict between those who neither toil nor spin and those who do; at the one extreme of this we see purple-haired Gender Studies majors bragging about their mental illnesses and proclaiming the beauty of morbid obesity, while on the other we have the carpenters, pipe-fitters, oil-field workers, farmers and all the other regular people who produce everything that the elites live on.
Take a look at the signs waved by some of the protestors, rioters, and arsonists plaguing our major cities today. Take a look at some of their positions – anti-capitalist, anti-business, anti-freedom. Now take a look at the protestors themselves. Ask yourself how many of them actually do any productive work. What do they produce, other than strife?
That's the point of Mr. Gurri's piece.
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”
That is, in summary, the source of our nation's current woes: It's all about control with the would-be elites. It's always about control - from guns to steaks, it's about control.
It's as Robert Heinlein said:
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort
Good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes, and that's largely because fences have a primary purpose of keeping our stuff where it belongs and keeping the neighbors' stuff where it belongs - on each party's property. And that's a key difference; most of us regular folks want autonomy over what is ours; we want to control our lives and our property, to produce, to trade - while the elites want to control us in all of those respects and more.
That, I think, is the appeal of a populist like Donald Trump - or like Julius Caesar. The charismatic populist leaders give a voice to the regular folks; Trump's own slogan, "Make America Great Again," means to many that the goal is to make us great again. Trump's appeal to many is the perception that he will put us back in control of our own lives and our property, to set us free to produce, to earn, and to keep what we earn.
That's the basis of the current societal conflict; it's a conflict between producers and consumers; between the mainstream and the would-be elites. And the resolution of any such conflict is predictable when you consider one fact: They need us. We don't need them.
Some people have foreseen the rise of the elites; one of them was German philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose 1922 work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) I've been re-reading, and finding it more prescient than ever. Spengler writes:
To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the æsthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes,than all the pickings and stealings of present-day “arts and crafts,” architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the Cæsars—their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves—is preserved or not.
Spengler makes some good points. The Eloi in our modern society seem to be characterized by outlandish clothing and body modifications, for the affectation of bizarre art and architecture. The rest of us - not Morlocks, as we lack the requisite underground lifestyle, not to mention cannibalism - prefer the more everyday things in life. We take pride in our homes and keep our lawns clipped and our trucks clean. We teach our kids to read and write and do math, and we like movies and television shows that entertain, not preach.
We are also the ones that produce. And the latter-day Eloi would be well advised to remember:
They need us. We don't need them.