The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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Will’s effort to save the right from statism brings to mind the critic Kenneth Tynan’s description of T.S. Eliot’s midcentury bid to revive verse drama, which Tynan compared to the exertions of a swimming instructor demonstrating various moves while standing in an empty pool. The call for judicially imposed anti-statism represents the desperation of elite libertarians who are beginning to lose some of their influence on the American right after having masqueraded for decades as conservatives. This is absurd. There just can’t be many white police abolitionists who came to that position after thinking, “You know, my surest route to a cushy government job would be to march in support of radical criminal justice policies that have little hope of near-term passage, but which would, in theory, free up fiscal space for investment in social services.” But in 2016, along came an anomaly that has overturned all the classifications and categories that you have so adroitly analyzed: donald trump.

There seem to be two dominant strains in the High Commentariat (my term for those like Lind or Jan-Werner Mueller or Jason Stanley or Corey Robins whose views get published in reputable outlets like the PS or the NYT rather than babbling incoherently in social media posts). Most belong to the alarmist school of thought: US political institutions including the Constitution are decaying and rotten and something radical must be done about it immediately or else democracy will die. Eugenic ideology was used to justify quotas limiting Jewish and nonwhite immigration to the United States in the 1920s. It was also invoked in support of the compulsory sterilization by state governments of more than 60,000 Americans. Later, the same ideology legitimated the genocide of millions of Jews and Romani people by Hitler’s Germany. Discredited after World War II by association with Nazi racial-hygiene theories, ideas about superior and inferior races, and explanations of social phenomena in terms of heredity, disappeared from academic thought and public discourse and survived only on the outer fringes of the right. ML: There are two working classes, divided by geography and to some degree by origin, in the US and many western European countries. In the expensive hub cities, there is a largeAmerica could use more incisive critics of professional-class liberalism. But only the GOP has use for intellectuals who preach “ bothsideism” in populist tones. Unfortunately, Lind’s penchant for doing the latter mars his efforts to serve as the former. Thanks to various defects in our system of government, there are only two viable political parties in the United States. The leadership of one is currently trying to take money away from capitalists and invest it in public infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, at-home care for the elderly, and a monthly child allowance for all non-rich families (among other things). This party has also advanced legislation that would make it easier for working people to vote in elections and organize their workplaces.

Big Tech companies have managed to maintain an image of being cool and politically enlightened, even though they’re now more similar to how IBM was in the 1960s. A certain amount of bribery is involved, through the largesse they throw around in academia, in think-tanks, in the media and among politicians. And that influences the way people perceive them. Large corporations focus on all the issues that are considered left wing today. In the 1960s and 70s, race, gender and class were the trinity of the American left. Now class has been conveniently dropped, so it’s all race and gender, all of the time.A sense of the scholarly rigor of the “race-realist”/human-biodiversity movement is provided by a 2000 exchange in VDare between the writer Razib Khan and Sailer. Khan wrote: Most of the evidence also seems to point to New World Indians’ scoring slightly below whites. Thus, Mestizos (white-Indian mixes) would have slightly lower IQs than whites, while Eurasians (white-East Asian crosses) would have slightly higher IQs. The correlation between the increasing blondeness of high-IQ Eurasians would be somewhat mitigated if the less intelligent Eurasian men happened to import intelligent East Asian women to make up for their competitive disadvantage on the marriage market, while the more intelligent Eurasians would marry less intelligent blondes (i.e., European derived females). Finally, Lind does not weigh any issues other than his chosen three as a legitimate basis to choose a candidate. This is a rather large hole in his argument. After all, even if you hold Democrats responsible for every left-wing tweet about racism, green energy, and transgender rights, and even if you consider the Republican stance on all three issues preferable, it does not necessarily follow that one must vote Republican, as he insists.