Mark Lilla: "The American People Are Inbred Retards Because I Say They Are"

Good God. The problem with the "intellectual" left as a class in this country is they are a rather dimwitted bunch. The latest installment of their attempt to "theorize" occurs in Mark Lilla latest "essay," The Tea Party Jacobins. A full fledged fisking is beyond my current time constraints, and far beyond the merit of Lilla's feeble broadside, but it will be instructive to look at the symptoms of intellectual decay it displays.

Let's start with its patrician air:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets....

My own view is that we need to take [this supposed new populism] even more seriously... we need to see it as a manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century. Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

At least this has the virtue of wearing Lilla's feelings of revulsion towards the American people on his sleeve.

But, maybe Lilla is going to make a nuanced argument here. Maybe, he will argue for something like a pragmatic renaissance that will guide politics based upon some connection with reality.

No such luck. Lilla is a utopian thinker. You know, like Stalin.

The new American populism is not, by and large, directed against immigrants. Its political target is an abstract noun, “the government,” which has been a source of disenchantment since the late Sixties. In Why Trust Matters, Marc Hetherington uncovers the astonishing fact that in 1965 nearly half of Americans believed that the War on Poverty would “help wipe out poverty”—a vote of confidence in our political institutions unimaginable today. The failure of the Great Society programs to meet the high expectations invested in them was a major source of disappointment and loss of confidence.

Got that? The "War on Poverty" failed only because high expectations were not met, and not because the goal itself was unattainable. You see, the Lillas of the world have ideological fervor which informs them that if the "War on Poverty" failed it was because we failed to will it into being and nothing else. Utopia is ours to be had as long as we subsume the individual into the collective, mostly by deferring to the elites (like Lilla) and by disregarding "special interests" (which would include the interests of ordinary, i.e. "stupid," individuals.)

Now, what do you call someone who blindly holds onto such an ideological vision as Lilla's? Well, it has a long historical pedigree. It arose first out of the political philosophy of Rousseau, who taught that the General Will was always directed towards the common good. Thus any individual who differed from the General Will was guilty of promoting nothing but their inferior particular will. As the General Will was equated with the "truth" this meant that those who didn't support them were guilty of promoting falsehood. These fools were the one who had to be "forced to be free" by the virtuous. The virtuous were those who "knew" the truth about the General Will, and were largely made up of a self-appointed intellectual elite. At all cost the "truth" as promulgated by the "virtuous" had to be preserved, even if this called for the elimination of the recalcitrant. This eventually murderous elite were the real Jacobins, born out of a perversion of liberalism that offered a utopian promised land which could be ours if only we were virtuous enough to allow out elite overlords to build it for us. That it would be built upon the corpses of the unbelievers was an unpleasant detail which was best not dwelt upon.

That Lilla, a living embodiment of Jacobinism if ever there were one, sees the complaint of average Americans that they wish to exercise the liberal promise of defining their own ends based upon their own vision of the Good, as an example of "Jacobinism" just shows how shallow our virtuous elite really has become. It also shows how immoral they have become. It is impossible to square Lilla's vision of the American people with the UN Declaration of Human Rights. For Lilla, the common people are simply too stupid to be imbued with anything like rights.

ADDING:

Here is how Protein Wisdom sums up Lilla's piece:

You know why the TEA Party is dangerous? … because it gives you bitter-clinging, Zionist, Xtianist, redneck, low-IQ, low-education, two-digit, Walmart-shopping, steak-on-the-backyard-BBQ, homeskooling, Boy-Scout-supporting, US-flag-wearing cousinfuckers the IDEA you can actually be responsible for your own life.

So they basically read it the same way I do.