Linking to a Sesame Street celebration of “Latinx culture,” Antonio García Martínez quipped:
One of the great mysteries is how every elite institution, from universities to corporations to media to even Sesame Street, all spontaneously coalesced on the same narrow set of values all of a sudden.
In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace, Martin Gurri notes, nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine:
The cult of identity, properly understood, consists of a series of platitudes and stereotypes invariably leading to gestures of repudiation and calls for the ritual purification of society. By definition, there can be no missionaries of identity. True believers have shown little interest in persuasion: their faith has spread not because of clever arguments but by relegating rival creeds beyond the pale of moral consideration. Hence the obsession with nomenclature — with the magical force of words.
Conversion has entailed drastically different experiences, depending on where you stand in the social pyramid. From below, at the level of the young professional and the college student, the cult provides a vision of truth and a source of meaning in a romantic struggle against the systemic evil represented by the rest of us. From above, at the level of high government and corporate officials, ostentatious adherence to the cult is a tool of control.
The dance between the generations has been awkward. Young activists are eternally on the hunt to identify and attack injustice, typically revealed by the utterance of certain taboo words. They dwell in a world of weakened religious and family ties, and their idea of community is a website. The cult of identity fills an existential void and raises up the young to be the vanguard of avenging virtue in a sinful world. This cohort is driven by the urge to purify — that is, by negation to the edge of nihilism.
Older institutional types, on the other hand, have seen their influence and authority plummet over the past decade. Of this vertiginous fall from grace, Trump was merely a symptom, not the cause. The digital age will not tolerate the steep hierarchies of the twentieth century: these will either be reconfigured or smashed. Stripped of the splendor of their titles, panicky elites have cast about for some principle that will allow them to maintain their distance from the public.
The puritanical slogans pouring out of anti-Trump protesters must have sounded, to this group, like an opportunity. They could reorganize society on woke values, with themselves in charge as high commissioners of purity. They could trade institutional authority for social control. With uneven measures of sincerity and cynicism, the cult of identity could be appropriated by power.
The young, as might be expected, despise these graying warriors, whom they consider hypocrites tainted by the very sins of racism and privilege they pretend to oppose. Periodically, woke institutions like Google and the New York Times are shaken by revolts from below, and liberal governors and CEOs get consumed in inquisitional fires. As a matter of unromantic reality, however, protesters need elite politicians and executives to be the applauding audience in the theater of grievance: they have no choice but to rely on the institutions to expand their reach and adjudicate the cult’s contradictions into some sort of bureaucratic order.
The elites, just as naturally, fear and detest the youthful zealots, whose proximity has an effect similar to that of a ticking bomb. Yet every political system needs fear-inducing enforcers. The elite class learned long ago that it inspires mostly scorn, so it has conscripted true believers to be the attack dogs of virtue and the digital SWAT teams that will keep the rabble quiet on behalf of a purified establishment.
This is the uneasy bargain that, in García Martínez’s phrase, “spontaneously coalesced” during the Trump years and today rules over every prestigious corner of America. For all the differences in age and status, the two groups come from the same stock: upwardly mobile, hyper-educated, and largely white. It’s really a family arrangement among parents and children in the upper echelons of the great American middle class.
Together, they constitute a small minority of the electorate. Between them, they control the commanding heights of politics and culture, and they may possess the means to intimidate a surly public into silence.
[…]
Christianity advanced on the strength of a double-edged strategy. From above, the government redirected its subsidies from pagan to Christian institutions, creating a potent incentive for the upper classes to see the light. From below, mobs of exalted souls ransacked pagan temples while the police stood by, intimidating ordinary people into abandoning the old gods.
But the process took generations.
The universe will not allow a society to go any length of time without an elite. But it doesn’t have to be a particular elite.
The fall of an elite and its replacement with a new one appears to be sudden, but that’s only because most of the process is hidden from view. Julius Caesar didn’t actually come from nowhere. Nor did Martin Luther. Nor Lenin.
“the obsession with nomenclature — with the magical force of words”
Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt (who worked closely with Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles conference) wrote a book titled Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. Excerpt:
“Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech…He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or music — except in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it…He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.”
“The digital age will not tolerate the steep hierarchies of the twentieth century: these will either be reconfigured or smashed.”
This isn’t exactly true. What “the digital age” — especially, ubiquitous telecommunications — actually does, in a lot of cases, is to enable a higher degree of *centralization*. This began with radio communications in the early 20th century, when the decision-making authority of naval captains and admirals began to be subordinated to the higher commands and political leadership onshore — indeed, even earlier, with constraints on the autonomy of ambassadors and diplomats enabled by undersea cable telegraph. We see the phenomenon today in a typical chain store, where decisions that once would have been the province of the store manager — decisions on inventory, for example–are now centralized to experts and computer systems at corporate headquarters. The vogue for “big data” will surely accelerate this.
My wife, who recently retired from academia, used to teach Spanish and Latin American culture. In her circles she had never heard the word “Latinx.” The word itself is a clear example of white racism and cultural aggression. No Latino or Latina will use it.
Our young are so ignorant that they do not recognize how unique English is in its near lack of gender.
“One of the great mysteries is how every elite institution, from universities to corporations to media to even Sesame Street, all spontaneously coalesced on the same narrow set of values all of a sudden.”
It’s mysterious to those who are the targets, naturally by design; and it’s ‘mysterious’ to those whose job prospects depend on not noticing.
“True believers have shown little interest in persuasion: their faith has spread not because of clever arguments but by relegating rival creeds beyond the pale of moral consideration. Hence the obsession with nomenclature — with the magical force of words.”
And it worked well for Nazis who constantly shouted “Juden” and “untermenschen” and for Communists, who shouted “kulak,” “wrecker,” “bourgeoise.”
Words are magic, they conjure into existence whole classes of enemies to be pillaged and murdered, and grant the power to feel good while you’re doing it.