Read the Room

Reacting to Class Blind Spots

Journalists seem trapped in a world of narrow class concerns and political ideals. That echo chamber must be growing increasingly stale, but the believers don’t seem to want to disengage from their shaky assumptions. They MUST believe these things because those beliefs (and the feelings of righteousness belief bestows) are integral to their identity. Politics is about survival for the poorest, and policy tradeoffs for the middle, and status & identity for the top.

As part of my job I regularly survey a number of new sources, most of them (of course) at least moderately left wing. That is the fundamental divide among Americans, which has mostly been uneasily sidestepped or altogether ignored by progressives: salesmen, laborers, lower middle class families, builders, the working class, police, firemen, soldiers, and technicians are almost never woke. Professors and journalists and graphic designers and studio heads are.

What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.

-George Orwell

Plenty of people are somewhere in the middle but social justice ideology is a strange creation: you’re either with it or you’re not. You either believe that systemic racism is a huge problem in the U. S. (maybe the biggest) or you don’t. You either believe that gender identity is the only useful construct for sex-based public policy, and illegal immigrants should be treated as if they’re citizens, and quotas and set-asides for nonwhite and female employees and students and supervisors are good and should continue, or you do not. If you step out of line on any of these issues you will pay a reputational price in many workplaces (dissent = ignorance and bigotry; it is simply not tolerated by these people). This perverse system of incentives (agree or shut up, basically) has cowed millions of citizens over the past decade. Thousands have lost jobs, and relationships. This is the defining feature of social justice ideology: it is a worldview that admits no legitimate disagreement. It cannot abide a person or a party or a president which doesn’t conform, and any disagreement will be treated as a moral issue, not an epistemological one. ANYONE who presumes that opposition to their ideas is motivated by bigotry has probably been mesmerized by social justice ideology.

Obviously, many of these people happen to be ‘journalists.’

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-all this is indispensably necessary.

-George Orwell

I don’t want to spend time enumerating the logical and ethical counterpoints to their worldview here. I’ve done that sufficiently elsewhere. Instead, I want to characterize the tone of our media at this moment, and to give my pointed reactions… and advice. People who believe that they already possess all the important knowledge (which certainly described the social justice set-they have already settled the important policy goals for every social area and they will remain undissuaded by complications and contradictions) aren’t usually amenable to advice. But any progressive journalists who still truly believes that he/she has a firm grasp of reality (after being wrong about BLM, COVID’s origins, COVID policies, immigration policy, the effects of DEI, the trendline of American political evolution, the main source of political violence in the United States, the wisdom of using courts and bureaucracies to diminish Trump and his allies, Biden’s fitness, etc.) might want to pause. Take a breath. Look back at the past few years. Now, ask yourself: how much to I really know? Probably not as much as you think.

This article (link on the graphic) is by Ms. Lennard (below).

I won’t respond to it at length but I’m struck by a pervasive fantasy on the left: the popular organizer. These people (in their accounts) are forming networks, marshalling resources, organizing events and building communitarian resiliency (perhaps I’ve been reading too much of their material).

The reality that I’ve observed is rather: a bunch of idealistic and not very canny young people aflame with ideals… but unfortunately bound by a (self-assembled) world of professional ambition and consumerist living and (above all) a hunger for status. These people spend all day on X, or they make upper 5-figures working at a non-profit, or they teach classes at a rich school or university-but none of them actually do anything (anything that makes real political change in the world, I mean)! Certainly they never sacrifice or interact with the working class they talk so much about-or they wouldn’t be so confused about Trump supporters. They never risk anything. Despite all their talk of ‘systems’ and ‘privilege’ they happily enjoy their privileges and live tightly within those systems. They seem to believe that changing labels for stuff or posting on Instagram or wearing certain t-shirts will eventually push society over the tipping point. It’s not that they don’t know what revolutionary activism is. They certainly do, but it’s hard. They’re living a fantasy of progressive activism, but one that (inconveniently) includes dating apps and Spotify and vacations and Uber Eats and mixed drinks and a hundred other distinctly non-proletarian elements. They’re far more enthusiastic about Queer Theory and Anti-racism and indigenous peoples (as ideas, of course-not as real people or actual groups) because those are easy banners to display for their crowd and don’t require them to actually make any changes in the real world. Their ideas don’t require them to surrender any class privileges or much money, whereas real egalitarian ideologies certainly would. Convenient! Every one of these people (that I’ve met) lives in richer neighborhoods and spends lots of money on nonsense and has never sacrificed anything significant (job, apartment, college placement, clean background check, safety) to further their revolutionary ideals. More to the point, they live the same empty and consumption-driven lives as every other youngish person… they just complain about systemic racism and climate change more. Activism can be a powerful tool… but not with these folks manning the barricades.

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This is a fairly entertaining piece… but it’s equally discouraging. It fully reflects the progressive perspective. That’s fair enough, of course, but what I find discouraging is that the writer doesn’t even seem to understand that other perspectives exist. The idea that most Americans (including more or less every Trump voter) would watch the bishop’s speech and see the presidential reactions and just think “what a nut-that lady was kind of obnoxious” doesn’t even seem to occur to the writer, even as a counterpoint. That’s because, to him, the bishop’s worldview is obviously valid. If he were to admit the possibility that it’s wrong-dangerous and harmful-he might begin to broaden his view. He writes:

During an inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral Tuesday, Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, used her sermon to issue a direct plea to the new president, who sat stone-faced but also almost chastened in a front pew. Noting how he had told the nation during his swearing-in that he had “felt the providential hand of a loving God,” by virtue of his surviving two assassination attempts, Budde invoked the compassion and mercy of God as she called on Trump “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

The issues that were mentioned by the bishop (trans rights and immigration and crime) are understood to be political issues by most Americans-but those Americans sharply disagree with the bishop. They are less concerned with gay teens “fear[ing] for their lives” (why?!) than with teenage girls being pushed into medication and surgery by a reckless and almost cultlike culture. They are less concerned with the fears of illegal immigrants than they are with their own and their community’s. Empathy is irrelevant to policymaking. Acknowledge the fears of illegal immigrants, by all means. But-still deport them. Not because you hate them but because they’ve broken the law and their presence hurts our society. I will put this in terms that perhaps the bishop can understand: “for years millions of people have felt ignored, endangered, and impoverished by policies you supported and decisions they saw being made with their own eyes, which you sanctioned but which cost hundreds of lives and trillions of dollars. Now those people feel seen and validated… and safe. Praise God.”

The disconnect is apparent on MSNBC, where contributors fearfully highlighted the consequences of Trump’s executive orders: what will happen to trans people living as women who must go back to men’s prisons?

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

-George Orwell

The hundreds of women who have been raped by biological males in women’s prisons (forced to bunk with them and shower with them, and receiving nothing but disapproval from administrators and silence from MSNBC) have never been mentioned. After all… trans rights are human rights! They pre-emptively reject any possibility that their policies have had such an awful cost.

But of course they have.

The point of this story seems to be that no one is talking about Elon Musk or his shenanigans (personally I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk was trolling with his arm gesture but, if he was, the media walked right into the trap and further discredited themselves with their hysterics and schoolmarm scoldings). No one is talking about Musk… except this article, which is all about him. Plus dozens of breathless journalists’ stories. Also, every cable news network (often embarrassing themselves, as I already pointed out). Also, millions of folks on X. Wait, everyone is talking about Musk (at least in progressive news spaces)! And so are you.

In response, mainstream journalists and moderates eager to prove their resistance to hysteria were quick to scold progressives as "paranoid," insisting these people weren't "real" racists — despite their love of Trump! — but were instead pretending to be racist to get a reaction. They rarely paused to ask why someone who isn't racist would be fine with merely "pretending" to be racist, especially since acting like a racist tends to mean people see you as a racist.

If people WERE pretending to be racist (which was, I believe, usually not the case) the motivation would be obvious, at least to me: you and the rest of the milk-fed, elitist sissies who spend all day on X will further discredit yourselves, by spinning narratives that no reasonable American with any proximity to the street (black or white) could possibly buy. With every article you distance yourself a little farther from brown and black Americans, who mostly don’t want climate justice or equity or the queering of education-but rather want safe neighborhoods and business opportunities and good schools and decently-priced, quality homes. If only you could see it…

I want to highlight a few interesting details from these news sources. You can browse the New York Times or Slate or Salon at your leisure, but you will come away with a distinct suspicion: these are rich people! Maybe they’re not ‘wealthy’ in an American context, but they’re all rich within a global context and they’re nearly all educated and safe and financially comfortable. In other words, the issues they care about don’t directly concern them. They’ve come to learn about them from (college and) reading the New York Times and Slate and Salon. It’s a kind of virtue-signaling human centipede, where bad assumptions and victim hierarchies and editorial controls warp the narrative a little more with every passage through the creature. Normal people don’t read this shit, and that’s one reason why they’re all slowly going out of business (or would be, if it weren’t for government grants and pharmaceutical company spending).

MOST Popular? Olive Oil?

I work for a prison reform nonprofit. I’m always happy to see prison-related issues promoted. I just wish these people weren’t so goddamn naive, or so hostile to the great mass of average Americans. They don’t see themselves that way, of course, but they are nonetheless. Just ask them to account for Trump’s recent electoral victory, and listen to the bile flow forth. That is hostility.

The progressive worldview depends upon elevating certain issues to prominence and then ignoring or minimizing all others, plus all details or knowledge that runs counter to the worldview. OF COURSE equity is important! That’s the starting assumption. More equity=better, obviously. The fact that equity policies, when applied, make poor neighborhoods less safe and schools more chaotic and agencies less effective does not trouble them. Equity is important. That is the nugget of certainty that can never be uprooted. It is, quite literally, an article of faith. Apply this procedure to the dozen or so other progressive articles of faith and, voilà, you have yourself a worldview. Cushion that worldview from most practical concern and blin yourself to the real world effects of your favored policies… and you’ve got an ideology.

There’s a kind of creepy fascination these people have with hip hop and crime and drag and immigrants-but it’s fascination enjoyed from a distance. These are not the kinds of people who venture to the seedy world of social marginalization and paid sex and hard drugs that was the birthplace of drag. They almost never live in a neighborhood of hip hop fans. They only interact with illegal migrants while volunteering or employing them. They do not go to the same bars or churches as these people. They’re simply not ‘those kinds’ of people, and their presence would make everyone uncomfortable. These are educated, employed, therapized, and solvent citizens, who express their transgressive urge through voting, and through social media posts. The safety and prosperity of their lives is a constantly reflecting mirror, whose image they endlessly avoid. This is the profile of the mainstream media viewer/watcher, at this point. They’re good (even if they’re envious and rude and histrionic). They’re cool (even if they’re definitely not). These are the kinds of people who love ‘liberatory poetry’ and ‘teaching decolonization’ and ‘queer theater’. They appreciate these things as believers, and as psychological consumers. Coming into (controlled) contact with these issues give them a thrill of goodness.

Unfortunately, that thrill goes along with a tendency to see others as wrong, and ignorant, and bigoted, and mean. The fact that so many of the ‘others’ are now themselves brown and black causes these people no end of cognitive dissonance and harshes their ideological role-playing buzz. It confuses and upsets them.

Let me help: you fucking people have fairly easy lives (at least economically, where policy-making is most extensive and urgent). You don’t worry about debt collectors or homelessness or the ‘carceral state’ or educational inequities because neither you nor anyone you’re close to has ever really experienced any of those things. Millions of people who work hard and nevertheless languish on a lower tier of your bullshit professional status hierarchy (which you helped construct and maintain to elevate yourself socially) are now telling you, ‘Hey… You’re wrong. Come see what you’ve done.’ Such people are generally willing to talk to you. Will you listen?

Thanks for reading.