Revolt Of The Elites Quotes

There is a superior unity of all those who despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible Tradition. These forces appear to be scattered and isolated in the world, and yet are inexorably connected by a common essence that is meant to preserve the absolute ideal of the Imperium and to work for its return.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.

The “routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart” strikes Kaus as an ominous development. So does their own “smug contempt for the demographically inferior.” Part of the trouble, I would add, is that we have lost our respect for honest manual labor. We think of “creative” work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter, and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life—hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise.

What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic

Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.

it has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.

The same benefits misleadingly associated with religion — security, spiritual comfort, dogmatic relief from doubt — are thought to flow from a therapeutic politics of identity. In effect, identity politics has come to serve as a substitute for religion — or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion. These developments shed further light on the decline of democratic debate. ‘Diversity’ — a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it — has come to mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. In practice, diversity turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.

Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view. It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic in other words, as politically suspect.

The issues that give rise to strident professions of faith on both sides of the ideological divide seem to have little bearing on the problems most people face in everyday life. Politics has become a matter of ideological gestures while the real problems remain unsolved.

Many young people are morally at sea. They resent the ethical demands of "society" as infringements of their personal freedom. They believe that their rights as individuals include the right to "create their own values," but they cannot explain what that means, aside from the right to do as they please. They cannot seem to grasp the idea that "values" imply some principle of moral obligation. They insist that they owe nothing to "society"--an abstraction that dominates their attempts to think about social and moral issues. If they con-form to social expectations, it is only because conformity offers the line of least resistance.

Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism—and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. “We know how to cure this,” as Brad had put it. “It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.

The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or "alternative" institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.

Far from putting doubts and anxieties to rest religion often has the effect of intensifying them. It judges those who profess the faith more harshly than it judges unbelievers. It holds them up to a standard of conduct so demanding that many of them inevitably fall short. It has no patience with those who make excuses for themselves--an art in which Americans have come to excel. If it is ultimately forgiving of human weakness and folly, it is not because it ignores them or attributes them exclusively to unbelievers. For those who take religion seriously, belief is a burden, not a self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status. Self-righteousness, indeed, may well be more prevalent among skeptics than among believers. The spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

To refer everything to a "plurality of ethical commitments" means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no one's right to make any demands on ourselves. The suspension of judgment logically condemns us to solitude. Unless we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.

It is probably safe to say that in strongly hierarchical societies the only people to whom something approaching nationalist sentiments can be attributed in pre-modern times is the ruling elite, and then only at times.

The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.

The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight.

The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else. Populism, as I understand it, is unambiguously committed to the

In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation, and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might thus demonstrate an opposite trajectory to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against

Today it is the elites...those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West.

The current catchwords—diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by goodwill and sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their achievements but by virtue of their sufferings in the past. Compassionate attention, we are told, will somehow raise their opinion of themselves; banning racial epithets and other forms of hateful speech will do wonders for their morale. In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people's self-image. What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?

Social criticism that addressed the real issue in higher education today - the university's assimilation into the corporate order, and the emergence of a knowledge class whose "subversive" activities do not seriously threaten any vested interest - would be a welcome addition to contemporary discourse. For obvious reasons, however, this kind of discourse is unlikely to get much encouragement either from the academic left, or from its critics on the right.

The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

The battle lines were now drawn: On one side, the elites of both parties, who had governed America for decades and supported big government and a globalist interventionist Foreign policy; On the other side were the populists—the ordinary Citizens who rarely got excited about politics, but were now mobilized in rebellion against a governing class they believed was arrogant, unresponsive, and unsuccessful. It was a revolt by the governed against the governing.

Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann’s pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions,” gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.

The political process is dominated by rival elites committed to irreconcilable beliefs [...] the politics of ideology distorted our view of the world and confronted us with a series of false choices between feminism and the family, social reform and traditional values, racial justice and individual accountability. Ideological rigidity has the effect of obscuring the views Americans have in common, of replacing substantive issues with purely symbolic issues, and of creating a false impression of polarization.

... careerism tends to undermined democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience; devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise - the logical result of policies that equate opportunity with open access to places of higher consideration - is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the last best hope on earth.

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, as Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to accept. And because of this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment... And the choice that each of us made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death... And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered "No.

More than price depressions or war with the French, more than even machetes or guns, the sugar elite of Jamaica was most afraid of an idea: the consciousness spreading among the enslaved people that they deserved freedom and that it was within their power to achieve it. Literacy not only could give a slave a higher sense of worth and a new sense of self-awareness. It could bring imaginative access to the broader world, an ability to communicate beyond the boundaries of the plantation, and perhaps the means to spread a conspiracy across long distances.

The war is not between Republicans and Democrats or between conservatives and progressives. The war is between the frightened and what they fear. It is being fought by the people who perceive themselves as controlling nothing. They are besieging the people they perceive as controlling everything. We are in the midst of a Perception Insurrection, or, depending on how you perceive it, a Loser Mutiny. The revolt against the elites targets all manner of preeminence—political elites, business elites, media elites, institutional elites, and, kind reader, you.

Early admirers of the market - Adam Smith for example - believed that selfishness was a virtue only if it was confined to the realm of exchange. They did not advocate or even envision conditions in which every phase of life would be organized according to the principles of the market. Now that private life has been largely absorbed by the market, however, a new school of economic thought offers what amounts to a new moral vision: a society wholly dominated by the market, in which economic relations are no longer softened by ties of trust and solidarity.

The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted. This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.

In the nineteenth century wealthy families were typically settled, often for several generations, in a given locale. In a nation of wanderers their stability of residence provided a certain continuity. Old families were recognizable as such, especially in the older seaboard cities, only because, resisting the migratory habit, they put down roots. Their insistence on the sanctity of private property was qualified by the principle that property rights were neither absolute nor unconditional. Wealth was understood to carry civic obligations. Libraries, museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals, and other civic amenities stood as so many monuments to upper-class munificence.

why the franchise is today limited to discharged veterans?” “Uh, because they are picked men, sir. Smarter.” “Preposterous!” “Sir?” “Is the word too long for you? I said it was a silly notion. Service men are not brighter than civilians. In many cases civilians are much more intelligent. That was the sliver of justification underlying the attempted coup d’état just before the Treaty of New Delhi, the so-called ‘Revolt of the Scientists’: let the intelligent elite run things and you’ll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility.

The difficulty of limiting the influence of wealth suggests that wealth itself needs to be limited. When money talks, everybody else is condemned to listen. For that reason a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation. Social and civic equality presuppose at least a rough approximation of economic equality. A "plurality of spheres," as Walzer calls it, is eminently desirable, and we should do everything possible to enforce the boundaries among them. But we also need to remember that boundaries are permeable, especially where money is concerned, that a moral condemnation of great wealth must inform any defense of the free market, and that moral condemnation must be backed up with effective political action.

Meritocratic elites find it difficult to imagine a community, even a community of the intellect, that reaches into both the past and the future and is constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation. The "zones" and "networks" admired by Reich bear little resemblance to communities in any traditional sense of the term. Populated by transients, they lack the continuity that derives from a sense of place and from standards of conduct self-consciously cultivated and handed down from generation to generation. The "community" of the best and brightest is a community of contemporaries, in the double sense that its members think of themselves as agelessly youthful and that the mark of this youthfulness is precisely their ability to stay on top of the latest trends.

Meanwhile the revolt of Russian officers in the so-called Decembrist movement of 1825 owed much to injured Russian national pride at the Poles being given freedoms denied to the Russian elites. In the century which followed 1815 the Poles contributed much to the Russian Empire’s economy. In political terms, however, both the Polish and Jewish populations of the former Duchy of Warsaw caused the Russian government many problems. Nor was it even clear that the annexation of the Duchy had strengthened Russia’s strategic position. On the contrary, by 1900 it could be seen as a potential trap for the Russian army. By then the German settlement of 1815 also looked a mistake from the perspective of Russian interests. A France bordering on the Rhine would have eased many Russian concerns about the challenge of Germany’s growing power.

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

The prominent British statesman and scholar Edmund Burke (1729–1797) emphasized another fundamental characteristic of the civil society—valuing human experience, tradition, and custom. Burke was outspoken in his sympathy for the American colonists and condemned the oppressions of the British monarchy that led to the American Revolution. However, he was also repulsed by the French Revolution. Burke saw the latter as a revolt led by elites and anarchists who had as their purpose not only redress against French rule but the utter destruction of French society, traditions, and customs. Burke explained: “There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,—that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be known beforehand. Reform is not change in substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.

the late historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch in his book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. His description of the mechanics of democratic conversation is worth citing in full: The attempt to bring others around to our point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponent’s arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it . . . as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents’ minds—something that can only happen if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity, we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.

The quisling theme was also endemic in the revolt against black and Asian migrants. Immigration was proof that a treacherous elite was selling out the victory of the war. ‘The white working class are redrawn,’ as Schofield writes, ‘as victims of a traitorous state… This was, he insisted, an invasion not unlike that which was threatened in 1940.

Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland. Without Spanish support, the planters would not be able to sustain the slave system on which their economic power was based, nor would they be strong enough to crush slave revolts

In making sense of the East-West divide as it concerns the endorsement of cosmopolitan values, we should also bear in mind that in this respect the legacies of Nazism and Communism differ significantly. The German drive for cosmopolitanism was also a way to escape the xenophobic legacy of Nazism, while it could be argued that central Europe’s anticosmopolitanism is partially rooted in an aversion to a communist-imposed internationalism. This strange legacy explains why the revolt against cosmopolitan elites takes the form of criticism not only of Brussels but also of anticommunist sentiment, particularly in a moment when majorities have moved to the left in their economic and political views. (In western Europe, 1968 symbolizes the endorsement of cosmopolitan values, while in the east it stands for the re-birth of national sentiments.)

Cortés’s conquest of Mexico—and the plunder that came from it—threw Spain’s elite into delirium. Enraptured by sudden wealth and power, the monarchy launched a series of costly foreign wars, one overlapping with another, against France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571, discontent in the Netherlands, then a Spanish possession, was flaring into outright revolt and secession. The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of that nation: the Spanish Armada. The invasion was a debacle, as was the fight to stop rebellion in the Netherlands.

The revolution in Manila was being led by young intellectuals, sons of merchants and professionals who had been educated in Europe and who had planned their revolt using the theories of the French Revolution. Isio had long, scraggly hair, bare feet, and eyes that betrayed the many years of sadness and labor his people had endured. With a look of pity and incredulity, Salas finally asked, "How is it possible that you survived?

What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only bys debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.

Happy New Year, Cuban Style In Havana, Christmas of 1958 had not been celebrated with the usual festivity. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was filled with uncertainty and the usual joyous season was suspended by many. Visitations among family and friends were few; as people held their breath waiting to see what would happen. It was obvious that the rebel forces were moving ever closer to Havana and on December 31, 1958, when Santa Clara came under the control of “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, the people knew that Havana would be next. What they didn’t know was that their President was preparing to leave, taking with him a large part of the national treasury. Aside from the tourists celebrating at the casinos and some private parties held by the naïve elite, very few celebrated New Year’s Eve. A select few left Cuba with Batista, but the majority didn’t find out that they were without a President until the morning of the following day…. January 1, 1959, became a day of hasty departure for many of Batista’s supporters that had been left behind. Those with boats or airplanes left the island nation for Florida or the Dominican Republic, and the rest sought refuge in foreign embassies. The high=flying era of Batista and his chosen few came to a sudden end. Gone were the police that had made such an overwhelming presence while Batista was in power, and in their place were young people wearing black and red “26th of July” armbands. Not wanting a repeat of when Machado fled Cuba, they went around securing government buildings and the homes of the wealthy. Many of these same buildings had been looted and burned after the revolt of 1933. It was expected that Fidel Castro’s rise to power would be organized and orderly. Although the casinos were raided and gambling tables overturned and sometimes burned in the streets, there was no widespread looting with the exception of the hated parking meters that became symbolic of the corruption in Batista’s government. Castro called for a general “walk-out” and when the country ground to a halt, it gave them a movement time to establish a new government. The entire transition took about a week, while his tanks and army trucks rolled into Havana. The revolutionaries sought out Batista’s henchmen and government ministers and arrested them until their status could be established. A few of Batista’s loyalists attempted to shoot it out and were killed for their efforts. Others were tried and executed, but many were simply jailed, awaiting trial at a later time.

Malaysia, then, offers an example of what happens when socalled moderate Islamists are appeased by the liberal elite. They provide cover for their more extremist allies to transform society, so it eventually looks like a crude imitation of Saudi Arabia (a totalitarian country, incidentally, whose gross human rights abuses Islamists elsewhere of whatever stripe never dare to criticize). The parallel, as I have said, is most strikingly with Tunisia.

The “old priestly office” having been “abolished,” Mann and his allies aimed to revive it, in effect, by promoting the school at the expense of the press, the lyceum, and other agencies of popular education. By giving the school system exclusive control over education, Mann’s reforms encouraged a division of cultural labor that would weaken the people’s capacity to educate themselves.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions. (Aristotle)

Are you a perfect capitalist citizen? If you are, isn’t it time to WAKE UP?! Isn’t it time to say, “I REFUSE.” No more will you do the bidding of the capitalist elite. No more will you comply with their system of privilege that penalises you and makes you a second-class citizen. If you accept being on the bottom tier of a two-tier society then you truly are a loser.

Revolution for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to create a new form of mass politics—hence his insistence that all people are intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is possible only when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and have a role in the exercising of power. Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters.

Revolution for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to create a new form of mass politics—hence his insistence that all people are intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is possible only when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and have a role in the exercising of power. Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters. Revolt without an alternative political vision, Gramsci knew, was doomed. Workers are as easily mobilized around antidemocratic ideologies such as hyper-nationalism, fascism, and racism. If they lack consciousness, they can become a dark force in the body politic, as history has shown and as we see at Trump rallies and with the proliferation of hate crimes.

Here then was the basic argument of liberal and progressive politics in the decades leading up to Brexit, Trump, and the populist revolt: The global economy, as if a fact of nature, had somehow come upon us and was here to stay. The central political question was not how to reconfigure it but how to adapt to it, and how to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of the elite professions.

A churning, highly redundant information sphere has taken shape near at hand to ordinary persons yet beyond the reach of modern government. In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage.

In the wake of the revolt and even amid legislative discussions, no government official, legislator, planter, or merchant ever publicly expressed any doubts about the institution of slavery itself. Unlike Virginians after the Nat Turner uprising, the citizens of the Orleans Territory held no debates about emancipation or colonization. Slavery was simply an unquestionable fact of life, no more controversial than the use of currency. And so, as they described and reacted to the uprising, the white elite focused not on changing the base of their society—slavery—but on strengthening the mechanisms that ordered that society—martial law. And with the main military power in the area being the American government, Claiborne sought to channel a desire for improved security into calls for a more robust, and more American, state—a state secure from the Spanish and from the slaves. In the minds of Claiborne and the planters, the proper response to African American political activity was violent suppression backed by the full force of the U.S. government.

The industrial model of liberal democracy isn’t particularly democratic in structure. It’s a steep hierarchy that operates in broadcast mode only. The distance between top and bottom is very great. The chasm of distrust will be difficult to bridge. And as elite fear and loathing of the public has increased, so has the craving for distance and isolation.

We must revolt against the malicious and political game of ‘revolution’ as we know it today. According to this game, revolution is nothing but the transfer of pain from one group of people to other less fortunate and wretched groups. According to this political game, ‘revolution’ is merely imposing injustice on new groups of people. According to dirty politicians, ‘revolutions’ are just moving privilege from one elite to another.

Today we know both partners in this political minuet were correct. Digital media can be exploited by self-assembled networks to muster their forces and propagandize for their causes, against the resistance of those who command the levers of power. But this understates the distance between the old and the new. A churning, highly redundant information sphere has taken shape near at hand to ordinary persons yet beyond the reach of modern government. In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book. And it was arrived at, in part, by pursuing threads of analysis about the nature and consequences of new media first spun by Clay Shirky.

In fact, it’s difficult to measure the impact of deceit on an election. By the same token, if you are going to argue that the impact was large for the 2016 presidential race, you need to muster convincing evidence. Merely to say, “But he lied—and he won,” though accurate enough as a description, says nothing about causation. The elite vision of a post-truth era ultimately rests on a fallacy. It assumes that there was once a time when voters acted on some sort of rational calculus based on “objective facts,” and were immune to “appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Consider Matthew d’Ancona’s condemnation of the tactics used by Brexit advocates: “This was Post-Truth politics at its purest—the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex.”108 But that has always been the way. All the cunning dictators, like Hitler and Mussolini, persuaded by appealing to raw emotions—but so did the great democrats from Pericles to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how human persuasion works.

Thankfully, I am not interested here in the nature of truth: that is a mystery for the ages. My concern is with those shared interpretations of reality that provide the reasons and explanations necessary to political life. I’m going to argue that a crisis of authority can’t help but trigger a crisis of uncertainty. An overabundance of digital information in the hands of the public has buried alive many of the grand narratives that were once our shared source of meaning. With the fatal decline of the elites, the truth, like so much else, has begun to unbundle. I

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication—the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority. A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.

The idea that democracy is incompatible with excellence, that high standards are inherently elitist - or, as we would say today: sexist, racist, and so on - has always been the best argument against it. Unfortunately many democrats secretly - or not so secretly - share this belief, and are therefore unable to answer it. Instead, they fall back on the claim that democratic men and women make up in tolerance what they lack in character. The latest variation on this familiar theme - its reductio ad absurdum - is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. This is so clearly a recipe for universal competence; or at least a disastrous split between the competent classes and the incompetent, that it is rapidly losing whatever credibility it may have had when our society, because of its abundance of land and natural resources, combined with its chronic shortage of labour, offered a more generous margin for incompetence.

The rise of the advertising and public relations industries side by side helps to explain why the press abdicated its most important function - enlarging the public forum - at the same time that it became more responsible. A responsible press as opposed to a partisan or opinionated one attracted the kind of readers advertisers were eager to reach: well-heeled readers, most of whom probably thought of themselves as independent voters. These readers wanted to be assured that they were reading all the news that was fit to print, not an editor's idiosyncratic and no doubt biased view of things. Responsibility came to be equated with the avoidance of controversy, because advertisers will willing to pay for it. Some advertisers were also willing to pay for sensationalism; though on the whole, they preferred a respectable readership to sheer numbers. What they clearly did not prefer was opinion [...] because opinion reporting didn't guarantee the right audience.

The right and the left share another important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely subversive. Kimbal takes the radical claims of the academic left at face value. He does not object to the tenured radicals because they are more interested in tenure than in radicalism. He objects to them because, in his view, they use the security of their academic positions to attack the foundations of social order. [...] Now, instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. No doubt, they would like to think so; but their activities do not seriously threaten corporate control of the universities. And, it is corporate control - not academic radicalism - that has corrupted our higher education. It is corporate control that has diverted social resources from the humanities into military and technological research; fostered an obsession with quantification that has destroyed the social sciences, replaced the English language with bureaucratic jargon, and created a top-heavy administrative apparatus, whose educational vision begins and ends with the bottom line.

Political elites in democratic countries have become thoroughly demoralized. Whether this was deserved or not is a separate question, to be examined in the next two chapters. But the crisis of confidence among established politicians has precluded the possibility of bold action, of democratic reform.

The facts are uncontroversial. Trump spent far less money on advertising than Clinton or his Republican opponents, yet he received a vastly greater volume of media coverage.20 The news business seemed strangely obsessed with this strange man, and lavished on him what may have been unprecedented levels of attention. The question is why. The answer will be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded to an astonishing degree. The data on media attention speaks to a world-class talent for self-promotion.21 Again, there can be no question that this allowed Trump to separate himself from his competitors in the Republican primaries. He appeared to be a very important person. Everyone on TV was talking about him.22 Who could say the same about Ted Cruz? Media people pumped the helium that elevated Donald Trump’s balloon, and they did so from naked self-interest. He represented high ratings and improved subscription numbers. Until the turn of the new millennium, the news media had controlled the information agenda. They could decide, on the basis of some elite standard, how much attention you deserved. In a fractured information environment, swept by massive waves of signal and noise, amid newspaper bankruptcies and many more TV news channels, every news provider approaches a story from the perspective of existential desperation. Trump understood the hunger, and knew how to feed the beast.

The bizarre schizoid style of the Trump administration becomes intelligible as an attempt to escape this dilemma. Elected as an agent of negation, President Trump must now promote positive policies and programs. Any direction he takes will alienate some of his supporters, who are bound together largely on the strength of their repudiations. A predilection for the mainstream will alienate most of them. Against this background, the loud and vulgar sound of the president’s voice becomes the signal for a mustering of the political war-bands. The subject at issue is often elite behavior unrelated to policy: “fake news” in the media, for example, or an NFL star kneeling during the National Anthem. Those who oppose Trump can’t resist the lure of outrage. Their responses tend to be no less loud or vulgar, and are sometimes more violent, than the offending message.80 Groups on the other side of the spectrum, now stoked to full-throated rant mode, rally reflexively to the president’s defense. I have described this process elsewhere.81 It’s a zero-sum struggle for attention that rewards the most immoderate voices—and, without question, Donald Trump is a master of the game. His unbridled language mobilizes his anti-elite followers, even as his policies appeal to more “conventional” Republicans and conservatives. Politically, it’s a high-wire act without a net. Trump was never a popular candidate. He’s not a popular president. To retain his base, he must provoke his opposition into a frenzy of loathing. Ordinary Americans, inevitably, have come to regard the president as the sum of all his rants. For our confused and demoralized elites, who have no clue about the game being played, Donald Trump looks something like the Beast of the Apocalypse, a sign of chaotic end-times. Writes the normally reflective Ian Buruma: “the act of undermining democratic institutions by abusing them in front of braying mobs is not modern at all. It is what aspiring dictators have always done.

The immediate target of revolt is an elite class that has failed persistently, on its own terms. The elites once were wrapped in the mantle of authority and delivered grandiose national projects, but now the public knows them too well, and they can only mutter and stammer, demoralized. They loathe the public for their humiliation. Politicians have lost faith in the idea of service, or the common interest, or the promotion of some universal cause or ideology: they exist, in office, merely to survive, or more accurately to be seen surviving, to suck up the attention of mass and social media. It has come to pass that presidents are chosen from the casts of reality TV shows. Political actors more and more resemble the real actors in Hollywood, whose company they keep and whose perverse predilections they seem to share.

POLITICAL DEBATE BEGAN to decline around the turn of the century, curiously enough at a time when the press was becoming more “responsible,” more professional, more conscious of its civic obligations. In the early nineteenth century the press was fiercely partisan. Until the middle of the century papers were often financed by political parties. Even when they became more independent of parties, they did not embrace the ideal of objectivity or neutrality.

It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann’s pejorative sense—half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions,” gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.

politics” has to be kept out of education. It isn’t “politics” that has “corrupted our higher education” (as Kimball announces in his subtitle) but the assumption that politics is another name for warfare. If politics is nothing more than “ideological posturing,” as Kimball puts it, obviously it can have nothing to do with “reason,” “impartial judgment,” or “truth.” Here again the academic left turns out to be in fundamental agreement with the right. Both hold the same debased view of politics as the rule of the strongest, a shouting match that drowns out the voice of reason.

Social criticism that addressed the real issue in higher education today—the university’s assimilation into the corporate order and the emergence of a knowledge class whose “subversive” activities do not seriously threaten any vested interest—would be a welcome addition to contemporary discourse. For obvious reasons, however, this kind of discourse is unlikely to get much encouragement either from the academic left or from its critics on the right.

There is a crucial difference between the acceptance of limitations and the impulse to reduce everything exalted to its lowest common denominator. “Acceptance” becomes shameless, cynical surrender when it can no longer distinguish between nobility and pomposity, refinement of taste and social snobbery, modesty and prudery. Cynicism confuses delusions of grandeur, which call for moral and therapeutic correction, with grandeur itself.

Trust in life carries the risk of disappointment, so we inoculate ourselves with irreverence.*

Current therapeutic and pedagogical practice, all “empathy” and “understanding,” hopes to manufacture self-respect without risk. Not even witch doctors could perform a medical miracle on that order.

Wide-ranging public controversy, as we have seen, was just what Mann wanted to avoid. Nothing of educational value, in his view, could issue from the clash of opinions, the noise and heat of political and religious debate. Education could take place only in institutions deliberately contrived for that purpose, in which children were exposed exclusively to knowledge professional educators considered appropriate. Some such assumption, I think, has been the guiding principle of American education ever since.

Culture is a set of moral demands —“deeply graven interdicts, etched in superior and trustworthy characters.” This is why it makes sense to describe the United States today as a “cultureless society.” It is a society in which nothing is sacred and therefore, nothing is forbidden.

The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual’s growth from childhood to maturity—the point of reference that Jung shared with Freud and Weber, indeed with most of those who speculate about such issues—made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition, as an expression of the natural tendency to resist emotional and intellectual growth, to cling instead to the security of childhood. “Only the man who has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past … can achieve a full consciousness of the present.

Oldenburg argues that it was a new and “basically flawed” ideal of marital intimacy, not the women’s movement, that undermined single-sex sociability. Like the shopping mall, marital “togetherness” was an essentially suburban invention, which led people to seek all their emotional satisfactions in private, leaving the public square to the single-minded pursuit of profitable exchange. Although Oldenburg minimizes women’s longstanding opposition to all-male sociability, I think he is right in linking this opposition to an ideal of intimacy that loaded marriage (as many other observers have noted) with more emotional weight than it could bear.

Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that trust, in a democracy, can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balanced by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole—its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members—than in the responsibility of individuals. When the authors of The Good Society say that “democracy means paying attention,” they seek to recall us to a sense of the common good and to combat the selfish individualism that blinds us to the needs of others. But it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today.

If the whole world now seems to be going through a dark night of the soul, it is because the normal rebellion against dependence appears to be sanctioned by our scientific control over nature, the same progress of science that has allegedly destroyed religious superstition.

Those wonderful machines that science has enabled us to construct have not eliminated drudgery, as Oscar Wilde and other false prophets so confidently predicted, but they have made it possible to imagine ourselves as masters of our fate. In an age that fancies itself as disillusioned, this is the one illusion—the illusion of mastery—that remains as tenacious as ever. But now that we are beginning to grasp the limits of our control over the natural world, it is an illusion—to invoke Freud once again—the future of which is very much in doubt, an illusion more problematical, certainly, than the future of religion.

Nostalgia is superficially loving in its re-creation of the past, but it evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history’s hold on the present. Those who mourn the death of the past and those who acclaim it both take for granted that our age has outgrown its childhood. Both find it difficult to believe that history still haunts our enlightened, disillusioned adolescence or maturity or senility (whatever stage of the life cycle we have allegedly reached). Both are governed, in their attitude toward the past, by the prevailing disbelief in ghosts.

Unenlightened ages past might be forgiven for believing things no educated person could believe in the twentieth century or for taking literally mythologies better understood in a figurative or metaphorical sense; one might even forgive the modern proletarian, excluded from an education by virtue of his unremitting toil, but the bourgeois philistine lived in an enlightened age, with easy access to enlightened culture, yet deliberately chose not to see the light, lest it destroy the illusions essential to his peace of mind. The intellectual alone, in any case, looked straight into the light without blinking.