Ed West provided the quote about younger sons of Norman lords which became the SQotD for June 4th. He has now written a follow up piece, “Why the rich are revolting”
Today’s unrest involves two sections of US society, African-Americans and upper-middle-class whites, who together form the axis of the Democratic Party, but it is the latter who are far more engaged in racial activism. The “Great Awokening”, the mass movement focused on eradicating racism in America and with a quasi-religious, almost hysterical feel to it, is dominated by the upper middle class.
I knew that, but I did not know this:
That noble tradition of haute bourgeoisie revolution continues today, especially in the US. The Occupy movement, for example, is deeply opposed to the 1% but largely because they come from the 2-5%; Amy Chua cited figures suggesting that in New York, more than half it members earned $75,000 or more while only 8% were on low incomes, compared to 30% of the city. They also have hugely disproportionate numbers of graduates and post-grads among their members.
The wider Great Awokening, of which the 2020 disturbances are a part, is a very elite phenomenon, with progressive activists nearly twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree, and only one-quarter as likely to be black.
It’s a long read, but well worth it:
Bernstein and the Black Panthers
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to perhaps not so much repeat it as rhyme it.
The rich and bourgeois are always the revolutionaries.
Who were the revolutionary leaders and terrorists of most Russia in XIX century? : aristocrats, sons of royal families, liberal professions.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-history-of-russian-terrorism-dagger-and-swagger
If i want to be mischievous i would say that part of it that they hate that the common people and poor can have today access to stuff they could not get 10 or 20 years ago.
It was clear that when common people started to be able go to holidays everywhere, could fly, could get nice clothes there will be a backlash by the aristocratic and the left that depend on misery.
Since today the aristocracy cannot today distinguish from the crowd by means of possession, except for a big yacht, a thesis is that they started “luxury beliefs” to be able to distinguish from the commons: https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-status-symbol-for-rich-americans/
So we have the alliance of those that seem themselves as superior and the Marxists that only have reason to exist with an innumerable list of exploited and poor. People getting out of poverty irritates both the aristocrats and the Marxists.
“Everything has to change for everything to stay the same”
“There are 2 kinds of Fascists; Fascists and Anti-Fascists”
The young rich are just carrying out the Collectivism they were taught at their expensive schools and universities.
And their fathers are busy exterminating freedom using government bureaucracy or the Corporations – as the fathers are either high government bureaucrats, trial lawyers (often utter scum n the United States), or Corporate Mangers.
There is no conflict in the generations – the fathers are just as likely to ban “Gone With the Wind” and to rejoice in the burning of shops and the murder of small business people, as their sons.
American “Liberalism” is Marxism – and it is much the same in the rest of the West.
“But Paul – a Marxist state would exterminate the rich”.
I know that – you do not have to explain it to me.
But good luck explaining it to the Corporate managers.
They will just scream that you are “RACIST” and “cancel” you.
And when the senile puppet is elected in November, the United States will fall So will the rest of the West.
Antifa is made up disproportionately of privileged white trust-fund kids. It visits mainly-black neighbourhoods and trashes them, with assaults and murders and destruction of livelihoods (including assaults on blacks, murder of blacks and demonstrating that Black Livelihoods Don’t Matter). After they leave, poor black single mothers have further to walk to do their weekly food shop.
I can see why the Minnesota authorities went through a brief phase of claiming that the rioters were KKK white supremacists before as abruptly switching back to supporting the rioters when it became clear they were indeed Antifa.
Of course, this new revolution does also have black members. Some appear to be less intersectional than the white ones. The mayor of Seattle hopes the new state of CHAZ within her city will become a “summer of love” but the new ‘warlord’ of CHAZ seems to think this love should not be of an ‘alternative’ nature.
It is well known that there is a statistical difference of view between typical black ghetto and typical white ‘liberal’ communities on this point. Undeniably, few things could better show a genuine reduction of white cultural power and an elevating of black within the movement than his not being cancelled. And since the ‘warlord’ has already set up a border barrier round his district, introduced stop-and-frisk of suspicious people, and is excluding undesired immigrants to it, all without any criticism from supporters of the protests AFAIK, I don’t suppose anyone will be so ‘racist’ as to cancel him over some tweets.
There is also the slight problem that these movements can find it easier to set up an empowered leader than to take him down again.
As always, Orwell came up with a cogently pithy view of the historical place occupied by social hierarchies. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” has two extended essays, presented as extracts from ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’, and supposedly written by ‘Emanuel Goldstein’ – Big Brother’s bogeyman.
In ‘Ignorance is Strength’, we learn that,
Just as a sort of OT commentary: had a storm blown through Minneapolis and damaged upwards of 390 different properties, totally destroying many and emptying out the contents of most, we’d be watching hours of video covering this damage on our local news.
As it is, after the second night of rioting, we’ve hardly seen any pictures of damage. We see extensive coverage of bands of people “coming together to clean up and repair the signs of discontent”, presumably singing Kumbaya as they toil, but the cameras somehow capture the people carrying bags of debris without panning over any actual damage.
So, apparently, BLM was never at war with Minneapolis.
IIUC, the typical famous Beverly Hills resident approves when Antifa trashes poor districts – and insists their neighbours approve too (silence is violence) – but it seems they’re a bit “Not In My Back Yard” about it. Large gatherings are a duty – lockdown is so exempted for protestors – but not in Beverly Hills.
In 2009, Charles Murray posted a short essay. Using data from the General Social Survey, he had constructed an index of self-identified political alignment (from +100 (far left) to -100 (far right)) for six population segments: Lower Class, Working Class, Traditional Middle Class, Technical Middlem Class, Traditional Upper Class, Intellectual Upper Class). He graphed the results from 1972 (when the GSS started) through 2008.
In 1972, all six segments were in the range +2 to -7. By 2008, five of the six segments were in the range -3 to -14. Intellectual Upper Class went from +1 to +22. This trend was an almost perfect straight line across the period. If it has continued for the last 12 years, Intellectual Upper Class is now around +29.
I think this explains a lot.
“I can see why the Minnesota authorities went through a brief phase of claiming that the rioters were KKK white supremacists before as abruptly switching back to supporting the rioters when it became clear they were indeed Antifa.”
What? they are the same. And know very well what they are doing.
@luckylucky: Indeed. The Left can change narrative from one day to the next as if no one could remember the previous day. Each day they collectively arrive at the narrative that best helps the Party, and they trumpet it. This was invented by Lenin. This is just plain Leninism.
The KKK? Democrats. Antifa? Democrats. I say Democrats, but I might as well say communists. Democrats denigrating the “protestors” as the KKK? Well, yeah, because the KKK is old hat and they can pretend they weren’t Democrats way back when and aren’t Democrats now, and denigrating the KKK is cheap and easy and they might get a few cheap and easy points.
But this collective arrival at a common narrative process isn’t trivial. There are competing factions. This is a problem for the Left. One group can force the narrative into a track that hurts the Party’s chances in the elections — they do this because they want power within the Party, or because they don’t understand, or whatever. It’s a weakness. And it looks bad when the rate at which the narrative changes is too high, people in the middle get driven away. A small silver lining.