The Elites are Revolting
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox.
It will be brought to you by BMW. The German luxury
automaker is a key advertiser at GQ. And GQ is the
headquarters of the Resistance. That's a vlog by
Keith Olbermann who returned from his exile at an
ESPN Elba to denounce Trump.
"I am Keith Olbermann," Keith Olbermann barks to the
peasants and workers of GQ who are taking a break
from reading an article on '$100 Cologne that Smells
Like Nothing', "This is the Resistance."
When the underground isn't at GQ (The Most Radical
Dress Socks to Wear Right Now), it's at Vanity Fair
where Graydon Carter denounces Trump (Donald Trump:
A Pillar of Ignorance and Certitude) right above a
photo of himself taken by Annie Leibovitz smiling
smugly from his skyscraper office.
Maybe the resistance is Reed Hastings, the
billionaire CEO of Netflix, who used his wealth
catering to the tastes of urban elites, to lobby to
raise the taxes of the middle class. Hastings whined
that President Trump's moves to protect Americans
were "so un-American it pains us all.”
Who are this 'us'? It might be Warren Buffett,
Google's Eric Schmidt and Facebook's Sheryl
Sandberg, with whom Hastings had joined to support
Hillary Clinton. Or it might be the CEOs of Lyft,
Airbnb and Twitter, to name a few, who have jointed
the anti-Trump resistance of wealthy elites.
It's no coincidence that the most vocal outcry
against President Trump's measures have come from
urban elites and the corporations that cater to
them. It's easy to spot the class divides in the
scoffing at Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company behind
Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, getting a cabinet position
instead of Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg who had been
tipped for Treasury Secretary by Hillary.
Carl's Jr and its 4 Dollar Real Deal are a world
away from Facebook's Gehry designed Menlo Park
headquarters. Or as a WWE tournament is from Conde
Nast's Manhattan skyscraper.
It's hard to imagine a clearer contrast between
coastal elites and the heartland, and between the
new economy and the old. On the one side are the
glittering cities where workforces of minorities and
immigrants do the dirty work behind the slick logos
and buzzwords of the new economy. On the other are
Rust Belt communities and Southern towns who
actually used to make things.
Facebook's top tier geniuses enjoy the services of
an executive chef, treadmill workstations and a bike
repair shop walled off from East Palo Alto's Latino
population and the crime and gang violence. And who
works in Facebook's 11 restaurants or actually
repairs the bikes in the back room? Or looks through
the millions of pictures posted on timelines to
screen out spam, pornography and racism?
Behind the illusion of a shiny new future are
Mexicans getting paid a few dollars an hour to
decide if that Italian Renaissance painting you just
shared violates Facebook's content guidelines.
If you live in the world of Facebook, Lyft, Netflix
and Airbnb, crowding into airports shouting, "No
Borders, No Nations, Stop The Deportations" makes
sense. You don't live in a country. You live in one
of a number of interchangeable megacities or their
bedroom communities. Patriotism is a foreign
concept. You have no more attachment to America than
you do to Friendster or MySpace. The nation state is
an outdated system of social organization that is
being replaced by more efficient systems of global
governance. The only reason anyone would cling to
nations or borders is racism.
The demographic most opposed to President Trump is
not a racial minority, but a cultural elite.
This isn't a revolution. The revolutions happened in
June in the UK and in November in the US. Brexit and
Trump were revolutions. The protests against them
are a reaction.
Somewhere along the way the political projects of
the left ceased to be revolutionary. The left won.
It took control of nations and set about dismantling
them. Its social and economic agendas became law. It
ruled through a vast interconnected system of the
bureaucracy, media, academia, non-profits and
corporations. In Europe, democracy nearly vanished.
In America, there were still elections, but they
didn't matter very much. A Republican president
could tinker a little, but he couldn't change
things. The left would throw its ritualistic
tantrums if he limited abortion funding or invaded
Iraq. But around the isolated controversies,
everything else would go on moving further to the
left.
The left had come to envision its victory as
inevitable. Its leaders enjoyed the divine right of
kings bestowed on them by historical materialism.
And so they couldn't see the revolution coming.
The inevitable elites and their power were
overthrown. The little people they had been stepping
on stormed the castle. All their pseudoscience had
failed to predict it. Suddenly the future no longer
belonged to the City or to Palo Alto. And its
denizens poured out into the streets to protest.
The protests are taking place in the name of
oppressed minorities, but like any dot com logo,
that's branding. They are actually an angry reaction
by an overthrown elite to a people's revolution.
This isn't really about Muslims. The angry
protesters know as little about Islam as they do
about rural Iowa. But borders and airports are an
important metaphor. President Trump said, "A nation
without borders is not a nation." And that's exactly
what the left wanted. No borders and no nations.
If you make tangible goods or have a mortgage, you
are more likely to want borders and a nation. If on
the other hand you deal largely in intangibles, in
information, in strings of numbers, in data on
global servers and financial transactions around the
world, in movies and music, in ideas, then borders
are an unreal abstraction. If you get your rides
from Uber, your house from Airbnb, your
entertainment from Netflix and your dates from
Tinder, if you don't actually own anything, and have
no plans for a family or anything more permanent
than a virtual existence, who needs a nation?
Patriotism is an ideal grounded in real things. Our
elites exist in an unreal world filled with unreal
things. Their world is based on rapid communications
that organizes the world in new ways. They have
grown so dazzled by the potential of that
organization that they ignore what is underneath.
That metaphor became reality with Brexit and Trump.
The country rebelled against the city. People who
were in the business of making and doing real things
rose up against a virtual economy.
The elites are unable to understand the
nationalistic and territorial impulses of either
their own citizens or Islamic terrorists. Their
strange social-plutocratic fusion of Marxism and
technocracy sees it as a problem of sharing the
wealth. All the popular uprisings can be put down
with a bigger welfare state. Redistribute more of
the profits from Facebook to Muslims and Trump
voters. Problem solved.
But the problem can't be solved by enlarging the
welfare class. It's a gaping cultural chasm.
People need meaning. It is meaning that gives them a
sense of worth. The angry leftist reactionaries find
meaning in their post-everything world. The
shattering of this world has driven them into the
streets. And yet they can't grasp that it was the
shattering of their world that drove so many working
people to vote for Brexit or Trump. They refuse to
comprehend that nations have meaning to more people
than their post-national world order of
interchangeable multicultural megacities does or
that most people want something tangible to hold on
to even if it requires labor and sacrifice.
It was a war between Davos, Conde Nast, GQ, Soros,
MSNBC, Hollywood, Facebook and America. And America
won.
The "resistance" is a collection of elites, from
actors at award shows to fashion magazines to tech
billionaires, decrying a popular revolt against
their rule. They are not the resistance. They are
dictators in exile. They had their chance to impose
their vision on the people. And they lost.
The revolution will not be brought to you by BMW, by
a Davos conference, by $100 cologne that smells like
nothing or by Facebook lobbying. It will be brought
to you by the comeback of America.