Elitistics, Continued

This essay is a continuation of a previous essay, Elitistics.

Elites are Monolithic

The most important feature of Elitistics, perhaps, is its assumption that Elites constitute a simplex and monolithic sociopolitical class. All are perceived to be more or less equally powerful and equally removed in terms of wealth, social environment and ideology from a supposed vast majority of ordinary (and therefore conservative) people.

This by itself would imply a kind of conspiracy theory by which a dastardly cabal of a very small, if not tiny, minority in the West has incredibly immense power to control immense factors in terms of politics, geopolitics, business, academe, public schools, the news media, pop culture, and most institutions throughout the West.

Not all Elitisticians (as we may call those who subscribe to an Elitistics) may be comfortable with such a fantasy-based notion and the conspiracy theory it tends to necessitate. One way to try to dilute this implication is to broaden the problem sociologically -- i.e., to posit the existence of innumerable Leftists among more or less ordinary people, whose existence in society to some degree facilitates the agenda of the dastardly Elites. These ordinary Leftists will be posited to be in varying degrees brainwashed by the Elites, through a conscious process of decades of concrete attempts -- apparently successful, at least with regard to all the ordinary Leftists -- to infiltrate the educational realm and the cultural institutions of various media in order precisely to brainwash the populace. We may call this a "soft Elitistics", since it permits at least some number of ordinary people to be part of the problem, which we may contrast with a "hard Elitistics" that limits the problem to a dastardly cabal comprised exclusively of Elites.

This modification implied in a soft Elitistics, however, is not without problems. One problem is the classic logical flaw of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too. In this context, the soft Elitisticians are trying to have their cake of exculpating ordinary people and placing all the blame for the West's blindness to (if not complicity in) Islam on the shoulders of a tiny minority of Elites from whom the soft Elitisticians, themselves ordinary people, feel profoundly alienated -- while trying to eat their cake of squirming out of the conspiracy theory this implies. This logical flaw tends to play out by the soft Elitisticians simultaneously assuming both sides of the contradiction -- that Elites have no sociological influence on ordinary people, and yet that there exist a number of ordinary people out there who are Leftists (i.e., who have been brainwashed by the "Gramscian" Elites) sufficient to be causative where the Elites by themselves do not, apparently, suffice.

Thus, to reflect the incoherence of the logical flaw, ordinary Leftists will be assumed to be numerous enough to take the pressure off the conspiracy-theory fantasy, but not so numerous that the faith in the ordinary people which the soft Elitisticians have will be threatened. This safety valve that would take the pressure off the conspiracy-theory fantasy, however, tends to set up a counter-pressure, since the the soft Elitisticians would not want too many ordinary people to be assumed to be brainwashed.

Other soft Elitisticians, however, are grimly content to follow the logical implications of a large swath of ordinary people having succumbed to the brainwashing of the "Gramscian" Elites -- and thus speak in grandiose terms of an imminent "civil war" -- which would be such precisely because of a mutually hostile array of two sides numerous enough to be so termed -- as a way to express their alienation not only from the tiny minority of dastardly Elites, but also from what must be millions of their fellow citizens, now turned into their potential mortal enemies.  But then they have a problem, Houston:  For if the Good Guys are themselves a tiny minority, and the vast majority including Elites and vast swaths of ordinary people are brainwashed Leftists, how could the Good Guys ever possibly stand a chance of winning such a civil war...?

Counter-Assertion:

In fact, just as there is no rigid hierarchy of classes anymore in the modern West -- much less a starkly medieval opposition of Royalty and Peasantry (i.e., Elites and Ordinary People) -- so too there is no hard and fast sociological division which an Elitistics assumes. While there does exist in the West a tiny subculture (or superculture, in terms of wealth and prestige) of elites who are so wealthy and so sociologically exclusive that they are indeed removed from the lives of the majority of ordinary people, they represent an extremely small part of the overall population -- and a very small proportion of so-called elites overall. Unless, that is, the doomsday conservative wants to assert a "99% vs. 1%" problem ironically mirror-imaging the deluded rhetoric of the Wall Street Occupiers.

I.e., in the modern West, the majority (if not the vast majority) of so-called elites are themselves so stratified sociologically that on closer inspection one sees that they merge into the population of ordinary people. I.e., most so-called elites are really ordinary people -- though one would reasonably qualify that by saying that they are lower-upper to upper middle-class ordinary people, in terms of income, career and sociocultural habits and values. An editor of a local paper in Duluth, Minnesota, for example, who has a nice home, perhaps also a time-share in Florida, can afford three cars (one for his daughter who's getting ready to go to college), has a boat to take out on the lakes, is able to take the family on one vacation a year, once even to Europe, etc.: is he a dastardly "Elite"? Of course not. He's just your average lower-upper middle-class American with a relatively nice job; but he most certainly is not a Tom Brokaw who jets all over the world, owns at least three homes and maintains an expensive apartment in Manhattan, goes fishing in Mongolia and gallivanting in Africa, getting million-dollar contracts to do puff pieces on world news, is invited to cocktail parties on Long Island with Charlie Rose and other celebrities, etc. There are far more "Elites" like the Duluth editor than there are Tom Brokaws. The former represent, in fact, the majority of what are identified so glibly as "Elites". And yet the Duluth editor with bland sincerity assumes the PC MC paradigm about Islam in his editorials and choices for his mainstream, albeit relatively small, newspaper, with more or less the same degree of self-righteously matter-of-fact sincerity as does a Tom Brokaw or a Tom Friedman.

So, if the Duluth editor is really just an ordinary person more or less, why does he believe the PC MC paradigm, and why does he participate in the general obfuscation of the dangerous facts about Islam? How do the Elitisticians explain this? They can't, according to their own paradigm; unless they opt for the more grimly alienated version that sees an imminent civil war in the West where Ordinary People will be fighting against Ordinary People -- the former against the Elites, the latter brainwashed to defend the Elites and thus themselves arrayed as the Enemy -- this scenario to be quickly followed perhaps by a half Mad Max, half evangelical Christian apocalypse.

The latter fantasy I've noticed being bruited at various times by various guest authors (if not by the owners themselves) at the Gates of Vienna blog and also at Lawrence Auster's blog.  For example, the relatively famous blogger "Fjordman" seems more or less to subscribe to it. back in 2009, Auster put up a piece about Fjordman's epiphany about the West:

I think we need to be realistic and realize that the current political-ideological order is completely broken and beyond repair. Instead of wasting time and energy on attempting to fix what cannot be fixed we need to prepare as best as we can for the coming crash and hopefully regroup to create something new and stronger afterward. There will be a pan-Western and perhaps international economic and social collapse in the not-too-distant future. I fear that this is too late to avoid by now. The people who support the ruling paradigm are too powerful and the paradigm contains so many flaws that it cannot be fixed. It needs to crash. We should focus on surviving this crash and on developing a new paradigm to replace the failed one.

Auster's editorial remark is uncritical:

Fjordman is speaking to the current crisis in which we seem to feel the West passing some transition point. What he says is provocative and important and I hope he will develop this theme further.

(Ironically, as I have noted before, this is more or less the same dismal view his Moriarty Breivik subscribes to; although Breivik in his "Manifesto" seems to granularize the enemy a little more subtly -- though, of course, not subtly enough to spare them the likely necessity he envisioned of having to have them killed, in various degrees of collateral damage in pursuit of the overarching enemy -- the "Marxist Multicultural" elites.  But this is the subject of another essay, perhaps someday.)

So too, Auster more recently lent uncritical pride of place to a similar view by featuring as a separate article a reader's grandiosely depressing forebodings of the Western future:

I am a simple school bus driver. Here is a conversation I heard. Last year we had an Iranian girl who loudly proclaimed, when the school was in its Patriotic Songs Celebration ("This Land Is Your Land," etc.): "I am not an American, I am a Muslim."

This was done on the bus so all could hear.

This is what they feel, deep down. They don't think like us, they lie without compunction, they want us dead or out of the way, because they are not fools like the Propositional Nationalists.

They know what a country really is; it is its land and resources. As long as we are here, we're in their way.

I am stunned at the stupidity of our leaders. Either they go to war in a place like Kosovo and learn nothing about it and why it became the way it did, or they are biding their time until full scale civil war breaks out in the USA, so martial law can be enforced and their power grows exponentially.

Personally, I think the latter will be the case.

However innumerable Leftists may be in the conception of Elitologists, their numbers never rise to the level of being sufficiently popular to explain the mainstream cultural dominance of PC MC -- for that explanation is the function of the cabal of the dastardly Elites and their para-democratic power, of course. As far as Leftists qua Leftists go, the Elitologists are correct: Leftists are in fact a minority throughout the West, and thus do not represent a demographic sufficiently numerous to be able to control the sociopolitical climate. 

Thus, in addition to "Elites are monolithic", we see two other assumptions by which to explain why the mainstream continues to protect Muslims and turn a blind eye to the inimical content of Islam:

Elites are a Tiny Minority 

Elites are not only monolithic: they are also conceded to be a small if not tiny minority -- a necessary feature by which to protect the conception among the Elitologists that the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the West are not liberals but are, rather, "one of us".

Elites are Amazingly Powerful

The tiny number of Elites, then, coupled with the dominance of PC MC, leads to the logical conclusion that this tiny number of Elites wields a remarkable, if not amazing, degree of power over Western societies. Apparently, they are able to control the mass media, academe, popular culture, and public schools, as well as local, national and international governments throughout the West.

So even an otherwise level-headed Diana West would think to ask a rhetorical question which makes sense only in these terms:

Well, it's a free-ish country, after all, right? But that doesn't account for why elites in the media and public life have abdicated their freedom, forever failing to call things what they are.

Conclusion:

At this juncture, only two explanations seem logical to explain the mainstream dominance of PC MC throughout the entire West: either a majority of non-Leftists have become PC MC, or a dastardly cabal is controlling and manipulating society to be PC MC, and our democratic freedoms, throughout the West, are a cruel illusion manufactured by this same cabal.

Unless I see sufficient evidence to indicate otherwise, I will assume the former to be the more reasonable explanation: and that effectively pulls the plug on the whole paradigm of Elitistics, and we are left with a more realistic -- but alas, more complicated -- problem.