A short addendum to yesterday's post:
I came across an article in Compact this mornng entitled "The Roots of Right-Wing Progressivism" that supplements what I was trying to say yesterday. My point is not that the demos, i.e., populist sentiment, in its choosing Trump was correct or wise in the usual sense of those words–clearly it was not. The point is that there's a truth in that choice that needs to be read correctly, and my reading is that the choice for Trump was an effort to put a check on elite progressive excesses.
So what do we mean by progressive?
This article lays out how, dating back to the the 19th century, progressivism was understood mainly in a technocratic key. It meant technological progress, not democratic progress, progress that actually benefited the demos.
Indeed, the resemblances between late-Victorian anti-democratic progressivism and the Silicon Valley political mindset run deep. For both, the chief adversary is the forces of stasis. Maine saw the advent of democracy as portending the return of “traditional society,” because the demos, which was so in thrall to customs and prejudices that it couldn’t appreciate “improvement,” would stymy creativity and bring to a halt “new ideas, scientific invention, and scientific discovery.” All society would thereby be reduced to “unchangeableness” and “immobility.”
Similarly, today’s right-wing progressives declare their opposition to stagnation and the valorization of tradition. Second, both tie this disposition, which would bind down merit, exploration, and ambition to the dead level of the masses’ present comforts and habits, to a kind of sentimentalist acquiescence to popular fears and desires that would inevitably bring with it “collectivism” and “socialism.” Finally, both have as little patience with a false, parasitic elite as they do with popular ignorance and irrationalism: Late-Victorian liberals-turned-right consisted largely of figures who, in their younger years, had waged war against the vestiges of the aforementioned “Old Corruption”: the nepotism, sinecures, patronage, and perks that they believed had characterized a sclerotic older regime in church and state. Likewise today, Silicon Valley rightists place among their antagonists the mediocre, insular apparatchiks of public bureaucracy and the world of NGOs and universities, who have lost a sincere appreciation for “merit” and “striving.”
The progressive anti-democrat or anti-egalitarian is a distinct and enduring archetype. It’s always been hard to categorize such people, but they are a leading and recurrent character in the story of especially Anglophone political philosophy. Today’s right-wing progressives sound much like an older kind of disaffected liberal afflicted with an Übermensch complex; they are the latest iteration of a familiar type: the intellectual convinced that the greatest threats to a better future are the forces of leveling, sclerosis, and complacency that weigh down the dynamic few—just now convinced, as well, that they can reverse aging or digitize the soul.
Well I don't know about you, but I trust the instincts of the demos to check these wannabe John Galts, these Promethean nerds, these arrogantly foolish best-and-brightest, who in their hubris think they know better when they just don't. They are playing with forces, or more accurately, these forces are playing with them in ways about which they have no understanding.
Technological Progress is not the most important thing. Human moral progress is, which is the key to true human flourishing. That’s the “Rescuing Aristotle” argument, and it’s the key to my understanding of the word ‘progressive’. But these guys have no concept of that because for them the human is just a postmodern desiring machine.
The irony, of course, was pointed out by Kendrick Lamar the other day when he addressed the demos and its desire to check the TCM —
“The revolution’s about to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy,”
That's not the fault of the demos, but the fault of the Left for failing to play its historical role. And so Populist Reactionaries like Steve Bannon take the field unopposed. The fight now is between Reactionary Populists and Reactionary Oligarchs, and the Left is just standing on the sidelines scratching its head wondering what’s going on.
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