Or, Rather, When Elites Invent the Plot

Following up on yesterday’s post about Hillary Clinton’s apparent certainty that some Americans disagree with her only because they hate progress and want the world to be bad, the obvious question is whether or not this rhetorical choice actually constitutes “losing the plot” — whether people like Clinton are confused and lost — versus the possibility that they know they’re telling a fake story and doing it with the intent to manipulate. My proposed answer is that it’s both: They’re plotting and scheming, trying to shape the possible discourse and frame the available social choices, and they’re lost in a bubble world of their own invention.

As a refugee from academia, I watched the “you have to stop talking because you make me feel unsafe” maneuver as it grew into its culture-defining place.

Crybullying — the assertion of power based on a claim of traumatized powerlessness — is quite familiar to me, and Hillary Clinton is not a subtle practitioner of this dark art. If you can stomach it, watch all of Clinton’s interview with Rachel Maddow, which I linked to yesterday if you feel the need to go back and click on the horrible thing. Predictably, it contains more projection than a movie theater. She warns that authoritarianism is spreading all over the world, and anti-democratic forces are gathering in the United States, and so we have to protect against this disturbing growth of strongman-centered autocracy by….

….limiting the degree to which people can speak freely and read whatever they want, because people who read and speak freely can be manipulated by fear into supporting authoritarians. “Guardrails,” she says: government has to install “guardrails” into our discourse to protect our democracy. Fuck you, lady.

The expansion of campus crybullying tactics into national politics and culture is a cancer. Here’s Greg Sargent of the Washington Post warning this week against the rise of far-right power in America: “Our homegrown threat to democracy comes primarily from a dangerously radicalized right wing and from the cynical, antidemocratic accommodation of it by only one of our major political parties, the GOP.” We need to suppress this dangerous GOP thing, this anti-democratic menace, to protect a free and open politics. If only we had a single-party state — then we could really protect democratic pluralism. We can re-open society when everyone submits to the vaccine; we can re-open the discourse when everyone submits to the ruling class orthodoxy, so we’re no longer threatened by unfree ideas.

Again, the solution to the claimed problem is the problem itself: These people are fascists who attacked our democracy on January 6, so we have to protect our democratic norms and our freedom with the indefinite pre-trial detention of January 6 defendants. We need FBI raids of conservative political organizations to protect against the politicization of governmental authority. FISA warrants on political campaigns will protect our democracy against far-right autocrats.

So, yes: This is a conscious maneuver, a plot, to delegitimize a range of cultural and political alternatives by simply declaring them presumptively illegitimate; it’s an attempt to stop losing an argument by stopping the argument. Disagreeing with me is being a Nazi, and it shouldn’t be allowed, because we have to protect our democracy. Fuck you, la— oh, wait, I already said that.

But, again, no maneuver has ever been more obvious. The Hillary Clintons and Greg Sargents, highly programmed and predictable social types posing as people, are not at all unlike the geniuses who ordered the closure of the port of Boston to punish colonial resistance to central authority. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll just send a column of troops to Concord to disarm the militia, they said smugly.

They’re gaslighting, they’re scheming, it’s more or less a kind of distributed ruling class plot, and they’re idiots.