From a review of We Have Never Been Woke, written by Musa al-Gharbi, reviewed by Adam Szetela, this paragraph is, I think, a fine summary of where the “elite” screw up:
Instead, Americans are upset during Awokenings because these are periods when they feel most abandoned by elites. These elites not only are out of touch with the communities they purport to represent. They passionately push ideas that are, in the eyes of many people from these communities, harmful. By way of example, while my colleagues in the Ivy League continue to produce papers about “defunding the police,” the overwhelming majority of Black Americans are clear, according to one Gallup survey from 2020: It found that more than 80 percent either want the same police presence or more police presence. While my colleagues encourage people to adopt “Latinx,” just “23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves,” according to the Pew Research Center. Of those who have heard of it, 75 percent say it “should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population,” Pew found.
And Etc.
Nor do the elites attempt to engage in the necessary discussions with the non-elite – that is, these new ideas are imposed on the masses, much to their resentment. This is a violation of a central tenet of liberal democracy.
In this era of fourth-rate Republicans actually being competitive with a Democratic Party that should be kicking their pants, analyses such as the above should be the centerpiece of the national dinner table. Is it?
I have yet to hear meaningful discussions between elite and non-elite.
In a bit of synchronicity, Professor Richardson lightly discusses Dorothy Thompson, a 1930s-era journalist who was in Germany and watched the Nazis come to power.
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
Of course, it’s not difficult seeing this on the right. But, I believe, it’s also present on the left: the imposition of moral precepts of undiscussed, and undiscussable, origin, such as has occurred in the management of the transgender issue, is surprisingly alike across the political spectrum. It makes me wonder if the urge to dominate in the human species, which is not unique across life, results in a political spectrum in which what we call Nazism is actually a repeating member.
And if this is how nature will be reducing our numbers.
