Mencius Moldbug refers to the modern shapers of public opinion, the university system and the mainstream media, as the Cathedral. The Cathedral is not mentioned in the Constitution — they wield no formal power — and yet…
Power is a juicy caterpillar. Maybe it looks like a twig to most of us birds, but Washington has no shortage of sharp eyes, sharp beaks, and growling bellies.We can see the answer when we look at the fate of politicians who have attacked the Cathedral. Here are some names: Joseph McCarthy. Enoch Powell. George Wallace. Spiro Agnew. Here are some others: Ronald Reagan. Richard Nixon. Margaret Thatcher.
The first set are politicians whose break with the Cathedral was complete and unconditional. The second are politicians who attempted to compromise and coexist with it, while pulling it in directions it didn’t want to go. The first were destroyed. The second appeared to succeed, for a while, but little trace of their efforts (at least in domestic politics) is visible today. Their era ends in the 1980s, and it is impossible to imagine similar figures today.
What we see, especially in the cases of McCarthy and Powell (the recent BBC documentary on Powell is quite good) is a tremendous initial burst of popularity, trailing off into obloquy and disrepute. At first, these politicians were able to capture large bases of support. At least 70% of the British electorate was on Powell’s side. This figure may even be low.
But Powell — Radio Enoch aside — never had the tools to preserve these numbers and convert them into power. Similar majorities of American voters today will tell pollsters that they support Powellian policies: ending immigration, deporting illegals, terminating the racial spoils system. These majorities are stable. No respectable politician will touch them. Why? Because they cannot afford to antagonize the Cathedral, whose policies are the opposite.
Recall La Wik’s [Wikipedia's] simple summary of the Lippmann system [from Public Opinion]:
The decision makers then take decisions and use the “art of persuasion” to inform the public about the decisions and the circumstances surrounding them.Of course, all politicians in all Western countries depend on the official press to promote and legitimize their campaigns. Powell and McCarthy had no direct channel of communication with the Powellists and McCarthyists. They had to rely on the BBC and on ABC, NBC and CBS respectively. It’s rather as if the US attempted to invade the Third Reich by booking passage for its soldiers on the Imperial Japanese Navy.
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You will not see the Times attacking Harvard, for example, or the State Department. They all have the same ant smell, as it were. The Times is not formally a government institution, as the BBC is, but it might as well be. If American journalism were coordinated into a Department of Information — as it was in World War I and World War II — and journalists were granted GS ranks, very little in their lives would change. As civil servants, they would be exactly as immune to political pressure as they are at present, and they would have exactly the same access to government secrets that they have at present.The Cathedral’s response to these dissident politicians thus took two forms, one fast and one slow. Both would have been effective; together, they were devastating. First, the “art of persuasion” — more dramatically known as psychological warfare — convinced their supporters that the politicians themselves were sick, awful, and weird, and so by extension was anyone who followed them. Second, the Cathedral itself adapted to the doctrines of Powell and McCarthy by making opposition to them an explicit tenet of the faith.
Since the Cathedral educates the world’s most fashionable people, and since it holds power and power is always fashionable, Cathedrism is fashionable more or less by definition. Of course, if you were fashionable, you knew instantly that Powell and McCarthy were on the slow boat to nowhere. But the unfashionable are always the majority, and they are not unfashionable because they choose to be. They are unfashionable because they can’t pull off fashionable.
As it became clear to all that Powell and McCarthy were “not done,” their fans disappeared. Their bases of support had been a mile wide and an inch deep. Their attacks on the Cathedral were pathetic and doomed, like taking on the Death Star with a laser pointer. Personally, both men were mercurial and unstable — Powell was a genius, the last real statesman in British politics, while McCarthy was an old-school hard-drinking politician with Roy Cohn on his team — and it is no surprise that none of their colleagues emulated their suicidal bravado.
As for the second class, the Thatchers and Nixons and Reagans, in terms of their own personal outcomes they were smarter. They attacked the Cathedral not across the board, but on single issues on which their support was overwhelming. Sometimes they actually prevailed, for a while, on these points — Reagan got his military buildup, Thatcher got deregulation, Nixon defeated North Vietnam.
Of course, the Nixon administration also created EPA, initiated the racial spoils system, and imposed wage and price controls. Thatcher got Britain inextricably into the EU. And so on. These semi-outsider politicians provide a valuable service to the Cathedral: while opposing a few of its policies, they validate all the others as a bipartisan consensus, which everyone decent is obligated to support. They thus do the heavy lifting of persuading their supporters, who probably wouldn’t read the Times even if they did trust it, to change with the changing times. And the times are always changing. And we just can’t not change with them, can we?