Obituary for a Cluster of Status Groups

a premature obituary, but let's hope

I expect most readers will have seen Margaret Brennan’s comments, this weekend, explaining that free speech caused the Holocaust and was used as a weapon to conduct it. I can’t even, and I assume you don’t need me to, but yes, that’s insane.¹

And I assume that most readers will have seen the 60 Minutes segment, aired the same day, that proudly profiled the brave German officials who are battling hate speech. Again, raw madness:

It's 6:01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers searched a suspect's home, then seized his laptop and cellphone. Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime. The crime? Posting a racist cartoon online. At the exact same time, across Germany, more than 50 similar raids played out.

Imagine having the courage to fight…cartoons. Imagine being a journalist who finds it impressive.

See also the spectacle of three grown-ass adults nodding vigorously, in unison, when a journalist asks them if it’s a crime to insult someone. I’m just embarrassed for them. Ditto the absolutely shameful and repulsive spectacle of German politicians melting down into a tearful rage because the Vice-President of the United States dared to suggest to them that an open culture is better than a culture of state repression.

But I lack the capacity to care, or to make an argument about it, because I’ve been making the argument for years, and Christopher Lasch saw all of this several decades ago:

Being for free speech is like committing genocide: ingrown and formulaic discourse, conditioned reflexes, the absence of a reliable map of reality. Yeah, that. Margaret Brennan wasn’t making an argument; she was expressing the horror of people from her class and place at the appearance of a distasteful noise. Free speech? Goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were from a trailer park. That’s being a Nazi!

The Second Industrial Revolution led to the “incorporation of America,” a period of consolidation and standardization led by increasingly large corporate systems. “Island communities” became connected and relatively homogenized; cities grew, so an increasingly separate urban culture emerged, standing in opposition, center and periphery. A distinct managerial class developed, and then specialization continued, leading to the creation of the “helping professions.” The self-credentialing “new elite” defined itself against, by exclusion: not like the lowbrow trash in middle America. The horror of the new elite at the prospect that an arriviste will dismantle the civil service, the true authority, the expert class, is the end of the road for a Gilded Age social process. Angelo Codevilla:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

America’s ruling class speaks the language of bureaucrats, and has bureaucratic tastes. Tell me you can’t see that point clearly this week.

To use the lowest-hanging fruit, The Atlantic. I know, and I’m sorry, but this is usually the easiest way to illustrate a point: go to the dumbest and laziest advocate of a deranged position, who lays the biggest eggs. Actual headline:

Here’s how Nichols characterizes DOGE: “The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.”

The federal bureaucracy is apolitical: disinterested, neutral, evenhanded, empirically grounded. So here’s some evidence of the political neutrality of the federal bureaucracy:

See, federal bureaucrats never take sides. They live well outside of mere politics. Imagine being so shameless that you would pretend, in public, to believe that.

A status and an oppositional identity with long historical roots is being woven into a ludicrous narrative that makes the identity into something it has never been, and will never be. No one believes the argument — not even the people who are making it. But the historically situated creation of a thing implies the possibility of the historically situated destruction of the same thing. Nothing is forever. Please, God.

1. Like the einsatzgruppen shouted at Babi Yar, We’ll never stop defending your right to disagree!