The Rise of the Resentniks: And the populist war on excellence.

2018/11/17 Leave a comment

Interesting take by Brooks. Always felt there was an element of resentment in Canadian conservative attacks on elites, and the exaggerated distinctions between the “anywheres” and “somewheres”:

There’s a powerful moment at the start of Anne Applebaum’s recent essay in The Atlantic. She’s recalling a party she threw on Dec. 31, 1999, at her home in Poland. Many of the hundred-odd guests were Polish, but others flew in from around the world for a weekend together, to greet the new millennium.

Most of the guests were conservatives — which in those days meant being anti-Communist and pro-market, but also believing in international alliances like NATO. The party was a great success, lasted all night and continued into brunch the following day. Everybody felt a part of the same team.

“Nearly two decades later,” Applebaum writes, “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party.” She estimates that half the people at that party are no longer on speaking terms with the other half.

For example, in recent years Applebaum has not had a single conversation with a woman who was once one of her closest friends and is godmother to one of her children. She tried to reach out to this woman and suggested they get together, but the woman refused. “What would we talk about?” she texted.

Those of us who came of age in conservative circles know exactly what Applebaum is talking about. The same kinds of rifts have opened up among conservatives around the world, in Britain, Italy, Germany and the U.S.

Some conservatives stayed on the political trajectory they were on in 1999. Others embraced populist nativism. They wandered into territory that is xenophobic, anti-Semitic, authoritarian. Still others were driven leftward by the reactionary revival.

What happened? This is the story I would tell.

During the Cold War, being a conservative was a moral cause. You were fighting Communist tyranny — aligned with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lech Walesa. But you were somewhat marginalized in your own society. Liberals controlled the universities, the news media, the cultural high ground, so the right attracted many people with outsider personalities.

Then with the election of Reagan and Thatcher and in the years afterward, conservatives built their own counter-establishment — think tanks, publications, broadcasting outlets. As conservatism professionalized, it despiritualized. After the Soviet Union collapsed, conservatism no longer had a great moral cause to rally around. It became a technocratic, economics-focused movement concerned with small government and entitlement reform. Compassionate conservatism and the dream of spreading global democracy were efforts to anchor conservatism around a moral ideal, but they did not work out.

Many conservatives simply could not succeed in the new conservative counterestablishment. In any meritocracy, there are going to be a lot of people who lose out and do not get the glittering career they think they are due. Sooner or later those people are going to rise up to challenge the competition itself and to question its idea of excellence. “Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the ‘system’ is unfair — these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right,” Applebaum writes.

At the same time, they resent how spiritually flat conservatism has become. “The principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community,” Applebaum continues.

In such a situation, you’re almost bound to get a return of blood-and-soil nationalism. The losers in the meritocratic competition, the permanent outsiders, seize on ethnic nationalism to give themselves a sense of belonging, to explain their failures, to rally the masses and to upend the meritocracy.

In office, what the populist nationalists do is this: They replace the idea of excellence with the idea of “patriotism.” Loyalty to the tribe is more important than professional competence. In fact, a person’s very lack of creativity and talent becomes proof of his continued reliability to the cause, as we’ve seen in the continued fealty to King Trump.

While there is a sprinkling of good professionals in the Trump administration, they are there by accident, not by intent. Many of those staffing the White House could not get a job in any normal Republican administration, which selected people according to any traditional criteria of excellence.

And now, as Trump reshuffles his administration yet again, we see the remnants of the B and C teams replaced by members of the D team. Over the past few days, there’s been a lot of gossip over whether Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will keep his job. But it almost doesn’t matter, because from here on out, it’s Whitakers all the way down.

If conservatism is ever to recover it has to achieve two large tasks. First, it has to find a moral purpose large enough to displace the lure of blood-and-soil nationalism. Second, it has to restore standards of professional competence and reassert the importance of experience, integrity and political craftsmanship. When you take away excellence and integrity, loyalty to the great leader is the only currency that remains.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Anne Applebaum: In Britain, anti-Semitism is back | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

2018/02/15 Leave a comment

Applebaum on the mainstreaming of antisemitism and some of the possible reasons:

Anti-Semitism is back. Not just as a nasty little fringe sentiment, and not just in the Breitbart comment sections. Not just in social media either, although anyone who posts or tweets and has a Jewish-sounding surname (and even many who don’t) has had to get used to the fact that social media is a perfect conduit for language that would once have been too filthy to use.

The best antidote is not to care; that is what the “block” button on Twitter is for. But when the sentiments begin to creep into mainstream institutions in European countries, then some deeper analysis is required. Here, I am going to bypass the would-be authoritarians of central Europe — some of whom have lately fallen all over themselves trying to live up to old stereotypes. I am instead going to write about reasonable, pragmatic Britain, where both major political parties have lately been incubating distinctly un-British forms of conspiracy thinking and paranoia.

Weird forms of anti-Semitism on the far left of the British political spectrum have been around for some time. The former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is famous for, among other things, having compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi. He also accused the Jews of collaborating with Hitler, a statement that got him suspended from the Labour Party last year. Once an outlier, Mr. Livingstone is now mainstream. Over the past couple of years, as the party has moved left, internal party squabbles have broken out over a Holocaust denier being invited to speak at a fringe event during a party conference, over a local council candidate who posted anti-Semitic comments, over a member of the Labour Muslim Network accused of the same and so on.

Some of the lines of paranoia seem to stretch back to the “rootless cosmopolitanism” propaganda of the old Eastern Bloc. Remember that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, is a former writer for the Morning Star, a pro-Soviet British publication that furtive-eyed young people used to hand out on street corners. Some of it seems to be coming from the Muslim community. There are constant calls to do something more about it — to stamp it out, to protest, none of which ever quite seems to solve the problem.

But the other side of the British political spectrum is catching up. Here, the sources of the conspiracy theories are different: the international alt-right and the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe. Nigel Farage — the pro-Brexit, anti-European friend of President Donald Trump and Steve Bannon — has mused aloud about the vast power of the “Jewish lobby.” The Daily Telegraph, once the reliably conservative newspaper of the English shires, has picked up that theme, too.

On Feb. 8, the paper ran an extraordinary front-page headline splash about George Soros, the Jewish financier, and his “secret plot to thwart Brexit.” The same story — also reported in more ordinary language in other British papers — in fact concerned a non-secret donation that is by no means unique. There are several anti-Brexit groups in Britain with private funding from wealthy people, just as there are several pro-Brexit groups with private funding from wealthy people.

The headline — in a newspaper owned by two genuinely secretive billionaires who live in what is considered an offshore tax haven — was accompanied by an article that repeated some of the slander about Mr. Soros that has been peddled for years, starting in Russia and then spreading west, including the fact that his foundation, which supports democracy and free speech in that part of the world, was chased out of Russia and Uzbekistan — as if that were a mark against it. The following day, the Daily Mail — a newspaper owned by a billionaire — and the Sun — a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a nonresident billionaire — picked up the same story with the same imagery. The latter referred to Mr. Soros as a “puppeteer.”

The most charitable explanation is that the Telegraph, in conjuring the age-old specter of a secretive Jew manipulating politics behind the scenes, did not know what it was doing. The less charitable explanation is that it was dog-whistling on purpose. The Sun and the Mail almost certainly could care less.

Still, this is new, even by the low standards of British tabloids. Why is it happening now? My best explanation is that the British, having unmoored themselves from Europe, are experiencing an unfamiliar sense of powerlessness. The campaign to leave the European Union told them they would “take back control.” Instead, negotiations with the EU have forced a humiliating series of concessions. Although the deadline is only a year away, the most important questions are still unresolved, because the ruling Conservative Party is too badly divided to resolve them. Hard choices on trade deals and the status of Northern Ireland have not been made because they will make too many people angry. The Labour Party, meanwhile, maintains strategic ambiguity and says  little.

As centrists and pragmatists retreat, wounded, from political life, new fantasies and fantasists blossom in the vacuum. Surely it can’t be the case that a directionless Britain is floundering; surely someone else must be to blame for all of this chaos and ill will. Some seek scapegoats, others uncover conspiracies. Maybe it’s unsurprising, then, that the oldest scapegoats and the most familiar tropes are among them.

via Anne Applebaum: In Britain, anti-Semitism is back | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with ,