Switch up the comparisons
Michael Goldfarb in a public post on Facebook:
Are you tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons? I’m tired of the Germany 1933 comparisons. Let’s shift to the China 1966 and the Cultural Revolution comparison with Chairman Don instead of Chairman Mao and MAGAts in place of Red Guards. The liberal elites across media and the academy being purged and forced publicly to admit ideological errors and bend the knee to the new dispensation.
It’s not a completely farfetched analogy. An aging and increasingly senile Chairman Don makes cultural, economic and increasingly physical war on American society and is aided and abetted by his own Gang of Four: Stevie Miller, Russ Vought, Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth. The rest of the cabinet and both houses of the MAGA Congress make up a rubber stamp Central Committee, more independent minded Republicans having been purged.
An elite centered around the Ivy League and its regional cousins has grown wealthy and complacent and lost touch with the “people” or “peasants” and are being punished. Struggle sessions are the public humiliation in social media and abuse on podcasts and so-called 24 hour news channels against which it is impossible to defend themselves. The majority are keeping their heads down lest they find themselves losing their privileges (as they did during the years of the Hollywood Blacklist — Scoundrel Time as Lilian Hellman dubbed it).
That’s Trump’s one talent, I guess: being evil in all possible ways. A virtuoso of kakk.
You could even add that just as Nixon visited China to normalize relations with Mao as the Cultural Revolution with its depradations was in full-swing. America’s fellow democracies, chief among them the European allies (pride of place to Britain) troop to the White House to emphasize all is still normal in their relations with Trump.
Including that revolting ring-kissing exercise at Windsor the other week. That should never have happened.
This whole thing irks me. It is not ‘elite’ to be educated, except that we have redefined the word. A lot of people use the word ‘elite’ to mean ‘people I don’t like’ or ‘people who don’t agree with me’. We continue to villainize education (and always throw wealth in there, but even in the Ivy League, the profs don’t make as much as those in the illiberal elite who have seized the reins of the government).
The ‘liberal elite’ have not ‘lost touch’ with the rest of the country; they never had any times when they were ‘in touch’. We effectively have at least two countries – those who are classed with the elite and those who aren’t. There are probably other divisions that could be made, but it is just a fact of life, a truism if you will, that those who are working in academia don’t comprehend the rest of the country. It is also a fact of life, more a trumpism than a truism in this case, that the wealthy business class is also out of touch with the rest of the country…and have every intention of staying that way. Just because Trump has learned how to speak (shout, rather) in ways they understand and relate to doesn’t mean he is ‘in touch’. He has ZERO comprehension of what the middle class is going through, let alone the lower class. And he likes it that way. His people are with him totally. They may or may not know a bit about the rest of the country, but it doesn’t matter, because those people don’t count.
Yes, the ‘liberal elite’ is not ‘in touch’ with the rest of us. Yes, the ‘liberal elite’ is lost in an ivory tower. But it is hard to ignore the reality that the ‘liberal elite’ wants to help make the country better for all of us, even if they screw it up sometimes, while the ‘illiberal elite’ will eat the rest of the country for breakfast and sweep the remains into the local trash can (no recycling bins for them, thank you very much).
On one hand, we have educated, mostly compassionate people who make the mistaken assumption that people who are not them are largely like them. On the other hand, we have the (also Ivy League educated for the most part) sociopaths who lack compassion and don’t give a shit about the rest of the people, people they know are not like them and never will be, people who would like to have a share in what they have, and the main goal is to ensure they never get it.
I find the liberal elite annoying and pretentious at times, badly mistaken at others, and dangerous on one or two issues.
I find the illiberal elite infuriating and condescending at almost all times, badly mistaken most of the time, and dangerous at all times.
Who would I want to throw my hat in the ring with?
A lot of the problem is that the two groups aren’t talking to each other (‘liberal elite’ and the rest of us being the two groups) and aren’t listening to each other. The right wing talking points get parroted like they are gospel, and we go into elections with the conviction that the country is about to fall apart any moment, and we need to find the candidate who can best keep it together. The media feeds the frenzy about no differences between the parties, ‘liberal elite’ who don’t listen (never mentioning the ‘illiberal elite’ who won’t listen), and other things like emails, women who don’t know their place, an education system that is leaving white males behind, and all sorts of other things that in most cases are either wrong or aren’t worth electing a dictator over. The media doesn’t do a good job of reporting that so much of what Trump and his people say is a lie. They’ve done this since at least Reagan.
The problem? The media has grown wealthy and complacent. They rely for their continued access on the very people they are supposed to cover. Democratic presidents are not in the habit of throwing journalists under the bus (though it has been known to happen, I imagine, though I can’t call to mind any specific incidents right now). Republican presidents will do everything they can to destroy those who cross them, and Trump has taken this to a new level. Cowardly, wealthy, and extremely out of touch, the media is falling down on its job.
All that coupled with a clunky electoral system that awards more votes to those in largely rural states, and this current situation might have been inevitable. But until we put our fingers on the real problem, we won’t solve it.
The real problem: American people are woefully unfamiliar with how and why the government works, who in the government is responsible for what, and how much they rely on government services. They don’t pay much attention to news, except to follow a few blogs they agree with. They don’t know much about critical thinking, because the schools have been bamboozled into believing that critical thinking was imposed on the world by white, colonialist, patriarchal men at the expense of ‘other ways of knowing’. History has been whitewashed. Political science and Civics have pretty much disappeared. People lock themselves into a bubble of like-minded people, and get mad at things that aren’t the problem, while ignoring a huge 900-pound gorilla in the living room that is the problem.
Sorry for the length of my rant. I didn’t plan to write so much.
Michael Goldfarb is of course being ironic.
Or to put it another way he’s ventriloquizing. It’s Trump who sneers at the libbrul ayleets who went to Harvard.
I know Trump is, but I also hear a lot of liberals who do it; I think it’s sort of a form of white guilt for the educated.
This sentence isn’t parsing for me. Who are being punished? It reads like the Ivy League, out-of-touch wealthy are being punished. If so, what are the peasants doing in that sentence? I’m confused.
Elite are so special they’re plural and singular at the same time.
maddog, he’s mimicking the Cultural Revolution jargon about the elites losing touch with the workers and peasants.