La Trahison des Clercs

The French title translates as The Treason (or Betrayal) of the Intelligentsia. Wikipedia translated "Clercs" as "intellectuals," but I think you'll see why I prefer "intelligentsia"--for historical reasons and to avoid dignifying the persons under consideration as actual intellectuals.

La Trahison des Clercs was the title of a book by Julien Benda, written in 1927 in a specifically French cultural context. However, since the book does deal broadly with the pursuit of power by the intelligentsia of his day, it seems appropriate for our own day as well.

Earlier today an anonymous commenter drew attention to a tweet by Helen Andrews:

"Meanwhile @TheAtlantic, having failed to unseat the democratically elected president with Russiagate, impeachment, etc., is now preparing the ground for something harder." 

https://twitter.com/herandrews/status/1269258120234184706 

N.B. [Franklin] Foer [other of the re article at The Atlantic] was The Atlantic propagandist who laundered the Clinton campaign / Perkins Coie / FusionGPS lie about Trump computer servers secretly communicating with the Kremlin via Alfa Bank in Moscow. The Atlantic is also the rag that just published Mattis's anti-Trump op-ed.

Andrews adds:

It's hard to believe the Atlantic is suggesting an actual coup, but I'm not sure how else to interpret this.

It's true that Foer, at the beginning of his article, makes a perfunctory disclaimer--"Trump’s time in office will end with an election and not an ouster"--the whole tone of the article bears out Andrews' instincts.

Franklin Foer, of course, is your classic "intelligent" (pronounced with a hard "g")--a card carrying member of the intelligentsia, as our anonymous commenter points out. As Tucker Carlson puts it so nicely, Foer is one of

The most privileged [who] are using the most desperate to seize power from the rest of us.

That of course is the key to the betrayal of the nation by the intelligentsia. They are driven by a lust for power and hatred for those they perceive as possessing the power that they believe belongs to them by right. That's you and me. Really! We collectively, through our "privilege"--the privilege of the ballot--have transferred the power that rightly belongs to the intelligentsia and their secular Messiahs to Trump. Who is "literally Hitler." And so they hate us and fantasize about us getting our comeuppance.

Suicide Of The Liberals?

Earlier this week emailer George sent me a link to a new article by Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. As many of you will already know, Morson is fascinated by parallels between the current crisis of our constitutional order and the pre-Revolutionary period in Russian history. His latest article focuses on the almost mind boggling upsurge of revolutionary terror in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century--and the liberal embrace of this virtual orgy of violence. That liberal reaction--which Morson wants us to see in our current "mainstream" progressives and liberals--led directly to the Bolshevik Revolution, with violence on a scale unparalleled in previous history.

I'll provide some fairly extensive excerpts and you can judge for yourself as to the aptness of the comparisons between Russian liberals and those of our own day and in our own country. For all the historical, social, and political differences between then in Russia and now in America, I do find the parallels to be striking. Morson clearly wants us to consider those parallels and to find common elements that underlie revolutionary violence, and it's there that I question whether his explanation of the common elements is completely satisfactory.

What I'd like to do here is to point out elements of current events that remind one of central themes in the thought of Mircea Eliade. Eliade saw many parallels between the thinking and acting of "archaic man," the man of "traditional" societies of any age, and the ideologies of the modern Western world. Thus:

Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world's structure—myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: "myth, then, is always an account of a creation."

That may seem abstract, so let's draw out some more concrete implications. For "archaic" man, the ordered, structured world is brought forth by the gods from a primordial chaos. Creation or, better, origin myths expresses this worldview. However, for the man of any society, we are faced with the reality that our existence always threatens to slip back into chaos--more so at some times than at others. Thus, a key part of traditional religion has always been to seek to "regenerate" the ordered world through rituals. Those rituals typically occur at the New Year--or other significant times, such as the spring planting or harvest. The rituals often include elements that invoke an overturning of the entire order of the world or of human society, to make way for the new creation or regeneration of a perfect order. Such disorder can obviously lapse into outright violence.

So, for example, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), Eliade describes the ancient Babylonian New Year rituals:

The first act of the ceremony ... marks a regression into the mythical period before the Creation; all forms are supposed to be confounded ... every feature suggests universal confusion, the abolition of order and hierarchy, "orgy," chaos. We witness, one might say, a "deluge" that annihilates all humanity in order to prepare the way for a new and regenerated human species. (p. 57)

I suggest that what we are seeing in the chaotic riots and "peaceful" violence is an unconscious reenactment of these types of rituals--indeed, the ritual element in Leftist demonstrations should be very apparent. The prominence that sexual disorder has for the modern Left--the "trans" movement (I think 'movement' is the right word) epitomizes and evokes the 'abolition of order'--is a strong indication of what's going on: a ritual evocation of chaos that will, by magical reenactment, lead to a 'regenerated human species.'

UPDATED: Leninthink And Impeachment

The other day I did a brief post excerpted from Daniel Greenfield's fine article:

The Disturbing Reason Why the Dems Really Want to Impeach Trump

In the article Greenfield seeks to capture what we could call the animating spirit behind the Leftist drive for impeachment. He finds that spirit in the Left's Will to Power, to dominate, humiliate, and destroy all opposition to their power. Greenfield poses the question, what does the Left really want:

Post-gender bathrooms, banning cows, and paying reparations to drug dealers are just random policies. They’re not the endgame.

His answer (extensively edited) captures that spirit perfectly:

Impeachment is not just meant to be a trial of President Trump, but of the voters who chose him.  

But the real appeal of impeachment is more emotional than strategic.  

"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship," O'Brien tells the hapless Winston Smith in the novel 1984. "The object of power is power." 

Marxist regimes love show trials because they allow them to destroy and humiliate their enemies. 

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?" O'Brien asks.
"By making him suffer," Winston replies. 

The Mueller investigation enraptured lefties with its spectacle of police state tactics, night raids, prolonged interrogations, eavesdropping, and then finally trials that bankrupted their opponents. 

Nothing else, not even winning in 2020, excites the Left as much as the prospect of more show trials. 

Impeaching Trump isn’t about him. It’s a Rorschach test that reveals the ugly inkblot of the leftist soul. Its real purpose is for an ugly totalitarian movement to live out its fantasy of casting aside the vestiges of democracy, divesting itself of the illusions of representative government and holding a show trial. 

Their vision of utopia isn’t equality or progress, it’s trial after trial, an endless series of proceedings against Trump and you and me. The nightmares of the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, Communist China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia weren’t accidental misfires: they’re the essential truth of what the Left is.

Terror is in the political DNA of every radical movement. And the arc of the Left is always radical. 

“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever,” 1984’s O’Brien rhapsodizes. 

Impeachment is a feverish effort by the Left to live out this evil fantasy. It’s one of a million show trials that the radicals who are taking over the Democrats envision, not just for Trump, but for America.

But now I urge you to consider that in the context of Leninthink. This is an article that was sent to me by an emailer. The author, Gary Saul Morson, is a professor at Northwestern University, a self confessed "pink diaper baby" and recovering Marxist-Leninist. Morson finds in Lenin the roots of the modern Left's Will to Power--whether they've ever read Lenin (doubtful) or not. I ask you to compare Greenfield's description of the spirit that animates the Left and consider--Is there truly any difference between the Left in America and Leninthink. Consider the events of the past decade, the domination of public life by division and hatred, all ginned up by the Left in order to gain ... Justice? No, Power. Just like man and woman, words for the Left mean only what they want them to mean. And that changes depending on the needs of Power.

It's a long article, but I found it an absorbing read. Here's the concluding paragraph:

When I detect Leninist ways of thinking today, people respond: surely you don’t think all those social justice warriors are Leninists! Of course not. The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on. That was the key insight of his tract What Is to Be Done? When Leninism is significant, there will always be a spectrum going from those who really understand, to those who just practice the appropriate responses, to those who are entirely innocent. The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?

And with that context in mind there's Angelo Codevilla's sobering article: Igniting Civil War. Never?

UPDATE: The article I'm about to link is quite lengthy and somewhat diffuse. The author is obviously suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, however his concerns are very much on point with Greenfield:

AMERICA’S NEW SEX BUREAUCRACY
Meme Wars: How campus Title IX courts’ guilty-until-proven-innocent subversion of due process is a harbinger of a dangerous wider shift in liberalism 

By Wesley Yang
September 24, 2019

Here are two concluding paragraphs:

How the Harvard Law School faculty came to be seen as out on a perilous limb for defending “the most basic principles we teach” is a much larger part of the submerged history of our time than is generally understood. It is a story with which the rise of Donald Trump is fatally intertwined, but it is in fact a story that takes precedence—both temporal and logical—over the anarchic and pathological rise of the demagogue occupying the White House. 

The story, I will argue in this and subsequent columns, is about the rise and bid for hegemony of a new ideology. This ideology is a successor to liberalism. It brandishes terms that superficially resemble normative liberalism—terms like diversity and inclusion—but in fact seeks to supplant it. This new regime, in which administrative power has been fashioned into a blunt instrument of deterrence, marks off a crucial distinction—between the liberal rule of law, and the punitive system of surveillance rooted in identity politics known as “social justice.”

He wants us to believe that the rise of this "new" ideology is not to be blamed on liberalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The new ideology is simply following out the principles that are inherent in liberalism.

Trump And Impeachments Past--The Difference

Daniel McCarthy has a fascinating article at Spectator | USA today that examines the significance of the current Trump impeachment mania of the Dems by comparing it to past impeachments of the modern era. His conclusion is that, as recently as the Clinton impeachment, there was still what he terms a ruling class consensus regarding the fundamental legitimacy of "the system," or as I would say, the constitutional order. We can certainly see that in the attacks from the Left on basic constitutional principles such as the electoral process as it has been know up till now. McCarthy maintains that the consensus has thus vanished and, with it, the legitimacy of the ruling class. The ruling class is going through the forms of legitimate constitutionalism, but in reality they are exposing their own constitutional bankruptcy. What we are seeing now is, thus, tantamount to unthinking "regime suicide."

Impeachment is regime suicideThe ruling class still believes in a consensus that doesn’t exist. Their legitimacy is vanishing

What I present below is the last third or so of the much longer article--read it all. And then compare it with the views of Daniel Greenfield, Patrick Deneen, and Gary Saul Morson that we've examined recently.

To the extent that there was still a skeletal national consensus, it favored Clinton. Impeachment was a circus, but it wasn’t a national trauma. It cast no shadow over the next presidential election two years later. It was a dud that reaffirmed the stability of the American regime. 

With Trump, everything is different. The 2016 election was a referendum on the regime itself. Trump resurrected the populist attacks on the country’s political and economic establishment that Buchanan and Perot had battle-tested in the 1990s. 

Trump was no mere conventional Republican who happened to beat Hillary Clinton. He was a completely unconventional Republican who first beat the party’s own ideological standard-bearers during the primaries, in the course of which he often said things that no Republican had said for a generation or more. Trump’s message in the primaries and general election boiled down to: they screwed you. ‘They’ being the Bushes, the Clintons, the establishment in both parties, the warmongers, the trade-deal architects, the communist Chinese, free-riding allies, and more. 

Trump is no ideologue or political theorist, but he launched a comprehensive attack on the domestic and international liberal order. He campaigned against the system as it has existed since the Cold War ended.​