When Elites Lose the Plot

or, "remember that scene where the gates open in The Children of Men?"

In 1980, the historian David Szatmary wrote a distinctly Marxist account of Shays’s Rebellion, a story of historical stages and economically determined social action. “In the larger context of American social development,” he wrote, “the insurrection illustrated the tumultuous effects of the transition from traditional society to merchant capitalism.” Caught between historical phases, pre-modern dirt-farming serfs lashed out blindly against a society that was moving forward — like a car groaning as you shift from second to third: “By and large, the Rebellion represented the reaction of subsistence farmers against an intruding commercial society.” Drooling backward idiots, unable to tolerate change into a more sophisticated world, tore some shit up like animals. Grunt grunt.

Twenty years later, the historian Leonard Richards did this remarkable new thing to test Szatmary’s theory: he looked in the archives. The government of Massachusetts had pardoned thousands of rebels, but had done so on the condition that they swear, in writing, to loyalty oaths that pledged their future obedience. Richards pulled 4,000 names off the written loyalty oaths, built a database, and compared his massive list of rebels to as many other lists as he could find: local officeholders, property owners, taxpayers.

Richards discovered that the rebellion — Shays’s Rebellion rather than Szatmary’s Shays’ Rebellion, and can we get a ruling from a copy editor? — was the effort of prominent, well-to-do, politically active property owners like Job Shattuck of Groton, a distinguished veteran of two wars and “the largest landowner in town;” rather than being the dumb lashing-out of farmers trapped in the feudal stage, the rebellion was the product of a shrewd reading of state politics by serious men who understood the ways that a coastal elite was using political means to disadvantage them.

Now, here’s a whole premise about 2021 in this late-November interview:

The Recount @therecount

Hillary Clinton: “There is a plot against the country by people who truly want to turn the clock back … that’s truly what is behind Trump and his enablers and those who invaded and attacked our Capitol.”

“There is a plot against the country by people who truly want to turn the clock back. They believe that the progress we’ve made on all kinds of civil rights and human rights, the cultural changes that have taken place, are so deeply threatening that they want to stage a coup.”

This narrative posture strikes me as the oldest and most tedious story in the world — older than the oldest profession, but closely related. Elite Group looks at Non-Elite Challenger Group and concludes that, my goodness, the people who challenge our power are…not good people. “Upon close reflection, I am shocked to discover that the people who seek to limit my status do not have legitimate grievances, and do you like the way the jewels on my crown look in the morning light?” It reminds me of colonial elites complaining about that upstart John Adams and his idiot friends down at the tavern; it reminds me of the Empress Dowager crushing the 100 Days Reformers; it reminds me of Woodrow Wilson and his view of everyone else on the planet; it reminds me of Anthony Fauci saying that you can’t criticize him, because he is science itself, you peasant. It reminds me of all power and high status in all places at all times, declaring all resistance and criticism inherently illegitimate. It’s not an argument: it’s an insistence that no arguments are to be permitted against the prevailing arrangement.

At this moment, though, the claim is uniquely stupid. Clinton sees a social order characterized by extraordinary progress, by historically exceptional movement forward: we have advanced so much that it worries some of the blunter-edged atavists. Society has become too perfect, and it scares people.

Test it. Test the theory of exceptional progress in human equality and social achievement. Tens of millions of Americans take antidepressants; marriage and childbirth rates are falling rapidly, and growing numbers of American adults live alone for much of their lives; measures of physical wellbeing like grip strength and testosterone levels in young men are plummeting; a little over 40% of Americans are obese, and a little more than 70% are overweight to some degree; and Americans are having significantly less sex now than they were ten years ago:

The study's findings regarding sexual frequency declines among adolescents are particularly notable, according to Herbenick. The proportion of adolescents reporting neither solo masturbation nor partnered sexual behavior increased from 28% of young men and 49% of young women in 2009 to 43% of young men and 74% of young women in 2018.

We have, ladies and gentlemen, built a society in which teenagers aren’t masturbating. It’s like getting Italians to lose interest in cured meats.

Screen-centered, physically unwell, socially disconnected, friendless, partnerless, sexless, clinically depressed, increasingly without faith or family, and heavily medicated, some Americans are resentful because of “the progress we’ve made on all kinds of civil rights and human rights.”

Such insight. Amazing that she lost.