Thread by @Tinkzorg

This is an interesting point, but the reasons for why this is how things stand are also kind of complex, if you ask me. It's worth exploring this complaint (red elites are feckless, while blue elites have real killer instinct) in greater detail.

https://twitter.com/BronzeStoner/status/1454209876989669381

So first off, you see this frustration a lot. And it's quite hard to deny that there's a huge imbalance between liberal and conservative elites in terms of how radical and combative they are. The former attack with strength and determination, the latter retreat or weakly defend.

People tend to explain this in terms of moral, ideological and subjective factors. Liberals are revolutionaries, they read Lenin, they're fiends and devils (but devilishly competent and fiendishly driven), and so on. People on the right are weak and old, clinging onto sinecures.

The elephant in the room, however, is that aside from these subjective factors to consider there's also an objective one: America is a stratified society (all human societies are), and the elites of both sides are drawn from the same layers of society.

As such, there's a very sound reason for why liberals attack and conservatives weakly defend or retreat. I wrote about this reason more longform here (or parts of it):

tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/sen…

The short version though is just that liberals attack because they belong to a class of people that are seriously downwardly mobile today. Wokeness is, in essence, not just an ideology but a very open patronage scheme. And these schemes are increasingly necessary!

One of the reasons I care about American politics - maybe the primary reason - is that Sweden serves as a perfect sort of control group to the US, politically. In Sweden, the state runs a HUGE patronage scheme that eats up several percents of the economy.

As such, it has been fascinating to see how the huge wave of wokeness that spread over the west lately, especially after the death of George Floyd, passed Sweden almost completely by. Here, municipalities hire these overproduced elites, the state just subsidizes them.

My own municipality has almost 100 people tasked with running the municipality's social media accounts (!!!). These communicators dolittle work - they had to hire an outside consultancy firm to investigate what these employees even *did* all day - but the work isn't the point.

The point is that the state employing these people means they won't become radicalized. This method was famously used to pacify the very angry sans-culottes (urban workers) of Paris during the French Revolution.

By paying these revolutionaries to show up at meetings, you could limit the amount of meetings they held, and also limit how likely they were to bite the hand that now fed them. The social democrats in Sweden have become masters of this method for historical reasons.

Contrast this to the United States. In the US, these overproduced people can only really rely on piecemeal handouts, either from billionaires in the NGO sector, or from state projects here and there. There's no huge formalized federal patronage scheme set up yet.

This is what one shouldn't miss about things like CRT, or the massive expansion of HR work. The work isn't the point, the point is that these people demand someone subsidize their lives as late capitalist petty nobility, or they will (quite literally, as sometimes happen) riot.

Now, back to the topic of "red team elites". Who are they? Well, they're all college educated, and they are all workers in the knowledge economy. Sometimes you find a guy like Pedro Gonzales - someone who's worked at actual physical jobs - but they are the exception to the rule.

The very same fears and threats bearing down on the liberal elites are in fact bearing down on the conservative elites. And I think there's a willful blindness to what this actually means. Take David French, who is conservatism's Ice Cube: "the nigga y'all love to hate."

French went to Harvard, and he has three kids. Are those kids going to work at some gas station in Nebraska? Hardly! Even if they loved the work, what would the neighbors say? Preserving your own class position and passing it on to your kids is like the #1 parent imperative.

And here's the unvarnished truth about wokeness and CRT: your kids have two options. They can either buy into it and hope to elbow their way to the rapidly dwindling number of musical chairs, or they can go "I'm gonna wear a bowtie and read Spengler" and work at a gas station.

Again, the pressures liberals respond to - by trying to force through a process of looting america's public coffers to create a Swedish-style patronage machine for the knowledge workers of the world - are felt equally strongly by conservative elites. Even more strongly, in fact.

Conservative legacy institutions and sinecures are next on the chopping block in a negative-sum economy; for a lot of these people, they can't hand over their lucrative chairs and fellowships to their kids, so they hold on to them until they die, after which the party will stop.

So rather than just look at David French and say "oh well he's just a freaking cuck lol! what a moron!", it's just more honest - but I suppose, also more "blackpilling" for some - to admit that French is operating under incentives that a lot of "based" people would share.

Elite schools in America are the epicenter of woke culture today, and this is not really "ideological". These schools would teach kids to sacrifice the homeless to Quetzalcoatl if it improved the students' chances at getting into Harvard or Yale - the parents would demand it!

So yes, red team elites are just structurally fighting one hand behind their back. One the one hand, they don't like liberals, but on the other, they don't want to join the working class. They don't want their kids working at those gas stations!

So the "strategy" here tends to become one of fending off particular attacks by liberals that aim to just deprive their own kids of a chance at a chair, while passively conceding stuff that isn't a direct threat. Which is how they become "woke" on trans issues, for example.

You can't solve this by replacing these people with more "based" people. Looking after your kids is both biologically and socially hardwired into people, preserving your class (especially in a country like America, where it's no fun to be poor) is thus the prime directive.

The good news here is that conservative knowledge workers are not really in the driver's seat in American politics today. And thank the Lord for that, I say. Right now, it's ordinary working- and middle class people doing the real work of political struggle out in the states.

So the political scene in the US is that talking heads still do the talking, but it's increasingly obvious that most of the population either don't know they exist or don't care about them. The generals are showing themselves to be basically without much of an army.

As such, I think there's going to be a big slow winnowing and decimation of "conservatism inc". Again, what use is a leadership that no one with any power or ability to shape politics actually recognizes as such?

In the place of these legacy institutions you will likely see - in fits and starts - a new form of leadership caste pop up, one that is much more deeply committed to advancing the interests of, say, dockworkers or truckers. Not for unselfish reasons, but for reasons of power.