“Elites vs. Populists”

In the old days, Russia would send communist agitators to rile up the working class. Nowadays, they don’t have to. The West’s ruling class is happy to do the agitating.

Traditionally, communist agitators (they preferred the term “organizers”) would try to build class consciousness among the workers. They’d stress the notion of the working class as a separate entity, distinct from the well-off managers, capitalists and aristocrats that occupied the higher rungs of the social ladder.

A team of researchers at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy recently came to some counterintuitive findings.

Using a massive dataset from 27 countries and 81,857 survey respondents, the team suggested the COVID-19 pandemic may have halted the rise of populism and populist leaders across the world. Political polarization over the period appears to have declined — a populist leader’s mishandling of the pandemic led to an average 10 percentage point drop in approval rating.

From Cambridge you say? Historic haven for turncoat Homo commies and upper-class twits.

The only real recent public service of elites has been to persuade us why they were never elites at all.

An elite is always variously defined.

The ideal elites, as ancient philosophers argued, were a “natural elite” due to their exemplary character, aptitude, and work ethic. Understandably, a towering few ascended from all walks of life to positions of power, influence, and occasional wealth.

But such a natural meritocracy, for obvious reasons, rarely leads to an equality of result.

Their fantasy world can no longer control us

We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management is not solely the brainchild of the state. Rather, calls to increase censorship come not from the state but from below, with the educated, urban middle classes often organising on their own to help bring this about.