To hear Andrew Sullivan tell it in New York Magazine, Trump isn’t really a Republican – he’s a Reactionary. Sullivan presents a long, fascinating article defining the recurring phenomenon and interviews with some of its leading proponents. I’m still mostly absorbing the material, but I did have to note one thing – the intellectuals of the movement do seem to ring some false notes.
For example, this paragraph summarizes Professor Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna College, and editor of the Claremont Review of Books:
It was an act of desperation, he explained. In classic reactionary fashion, he believes that we are living through a crisis of American democracy. The Claremont consensus (to put a name on this strain of thought) holds that beneath the veneer of constitutional democracy, we are actually governed by a soft despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits, and academics who ignore the majority of the American people. This elite has encouraged a divisive social transformation of the country, has led us into disastrous wars, and has created a deepening economic crisis for the middle class. Anyone — anyone — who could challenge this elite’s power was therefore a godsend.
This requires me to believe that the Iraq War was a common decision taken by a professional elite for hidden reasons – and not the decision by the Bush / Cheney administration, taken in contravention of intelligence resources, agencies later proven right, that Saddam Hussein had indeed rid himself of weapons of mass destruction such as poison gases. If I must discard as a reason motives of revenge, personal loathing, and avarice, then I shall also discard Professor Kesler’s apparent conspiracy theory, as it appears to have a logical weakness, and instead consider more probable the bidding of the military-industrial complex as we were warned about by President Eisenhower.
Another example is that of computer programmer Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug on Unqualified Reservations, who Andrew reports making some dubious sweeping statements. First, he defines the “Cathedral” as an elite amalgam of universities and mainstream press. Then:
And the Cathedral has plainly failed. “If we imagine the 20th century without technical progress, we see an almost pure century of disaster,” Yarvin writes, despairing from his comfy 21st-century perch. His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
A mix of rousing rhetoric and highly unstable system prescriptions, it skips rapidly over the hard work of an honest appraisal of the foundations, and on to the easy work of applying logic. He wants to just assert that it’s been a century of disaster – never mind the recognition and response to the political problems we’ve encountered (i.e., the United Nations), the development of humanitarian organizations, recognition of ecological desolation and how to begin returning the environment to a better condition (nevermind how hard that question can be to answer). In a sense, I’ve read similar crap from other computer-oriented folks since the ’80s – and have real troubles taking it seriously. Programmers, by the nature of the trade, have to make simplifying assumptions, and sometimes they are wrong, wrong, wrong. (Been there, done that.) Noting the flow of how he wrote that, it raises the red flags for me – someone who thinks they have wonderful insights – but has only skimmed to fortify his own predilection, not dug in deeply to question his own desired conclusions.
Or perhaps Andrew is right in the first instance, and Curtis is just putting forth an immense intellectual trick.
It’s worth taking a look at his article, especially if your bewilderment quotient is currently high – a peek behind the curtain that other people are holding.
