Broken Steering Wheel

the stupid bus won't go where the driver points it

Returning to the story about the far-right knuckledraggers who “took over” Shasta County, where does this framing come from? If you look calmly at what happened, it amounts to ordinary behavior: People recognized bad policy choices in their county government, organized for political change, and participated in local elections to set a new course. But in the news, a majority of citizens voting for people who promise to implement their policy preferences is a terrifying assault on democracy, akin to the arrival of hooded nightriders: They took over their county!

There’s a lot of that going around — if Trump wins in 2024, America won’t have a democracy anymore! — and the premise implodes into dust if you poke at it: It’s an assault on democracy for the wrong people to win an election. This elections thing is anti-democratic!

But this argument isn’t a surprise; it comes from somewhere, and we can easily find the secret message if we send away for the decoder.

In 1922, the journalist (and occasional government advisor) Walter Lippmann published what would become his most famous book, Public Opinion. To summarize, Lippmann thought that public opinion was a pile of shit, the inane collective babbling of what he would soon call the “bewildered herd.” Here’s how the historian Christopher Lasch summarizes Lippmann’s argument, and this should all be very familiar in the Age of the Public Health Expert™:

The scope of public debate had to be severely restricted, because it’s the primary defect of democratic governance. “Ideally public debate would not take place at all,” and we would all just believe in science.

Lippmann’s bullshit appeared in a very particular context, and only makes sense in the age of corporatization and the growth of the giant, hierarchical organization — with its differentiated management class, and the emergence of a technocratic elite. The Progressive Era had an intellectual baby, and now he’s an adult who still lives with us.

A hundred years after Public Opinion, this set of presumptions has baked into the groupmind of allegedly elite culture so completely that the people who wield them don’t even notice what they’re doing. The experts are a unitary class of disinterested truth-seekers; the masses are ignorant and useless. You have to be an idiot to not notice all of the problems with those categorical assumptions — some of the experts wrote and signed the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, prompting rage from some of the other experts — but you also have to be an idiot to write for the Guardian, so no worries.

So here we are, at a moment when the expert Deborah Birx shrugs and says that oh yeah, I always knew the vaccines wouldn’t prevent infection:

Scott Morefield @SKMorefield

Dr. Deborah Birx: "I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines ..." Claims vaccines "protect against severe disease and hospitalization" before saying that 50% of those who died via Omicron were older & vaccinated.

And we still have journalists typing up stories about the ignorant masses in their weird little communities where they don’t listen to the experts. What can you even say about the whole sick performance, at this late point?