Luke Ford

Rony Guldmann responds to my email:

Hey Luke, I have been pondering your question about Biden’s cognitive decline, even though that issue appears to have been at least temporarily superseded by the events of this weekend.

As to what’s going on with Biden, I think you need to look at Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression‘s discussion of the New Class and its contradictions, which are perhaps manifested in the shielding of Biden. I note Alvin Gouldner’s observation that:

The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.”

So, Biden clearly presents a problem on this front. But, of course, a lot of people have strong career interests in a second Biden term, as unlikely as that now appears, and will not sacrifice these for the greater good. This is because, as I write:

However, Gouldner also stressed that the New Class is no gathering of benign technocrats selflessly promoting the public good. For it is a morally ambiguous “flawed universal class” that is “elitist and self-seeking and uses its special knowledge to advance its own interests and power,” and so “embod[ies] the collective interest but partially and transiently.”

When you contrast Biden’s cognitive decline (and denial about it) with Trump’s triumphal, fist-raising defiance of death this weekend in Pennsylvania, you have the perfect symbolic embodiment of conservatives’ belief that a decadent liberalism is sapping the vitality of the country, with Trump carrying the flame of that endangered vitality.

I’ve been rereading Rony Guldmann’s book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression and found these references to the New Class:

Alvin Gouldner observes that higher education is the institution through which the “New Class is at first readied for contest against the old class.” Colleges and universities are “the finishing schools of the New Class’s resistance to the old class.”219Taking this notion to its logical conclusion, conservative claimants of cultural oppression believe that the elite universities from which the liberal elites hail are more akin to social fraternities than to Platonic academies.

Admission to elite colleges is commonly seen as a marker of intellectual merit. But more important, writes [Angelo] Codevilla, is the candidate’s contribution to a “social profile that fits the school’s image of itself,” a commitment to “fit in,” to be “in with the right people,” and give “the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.” Academic merit is a social construction of the ruling liberal elites, an institutional filter designed to weed out conservatives and set the stage for widespread liberal domination. First inculcated in the university, the elites’ “tastes and habits” are later enforced with the threat of social ostracism. It is, writes Anderson, simply assumed in Rawls’s Cambridge or Manhattan’s Upper West Side or the CBS newsroom that one has “the correct liberal opinions,” and those who do not will simply stop receiving dinner invitations. In withholding these invitations, liberals are just doing what they were trained to do in the college classroom, where the ostracism of conservatives was first introduced to them as “progressive” behavior.

The elite university believes it has replaced an old WASP-regime of social virtue revolving around gentility and “character” with a new regime of intellectual virtue revolving around raw mental firepower. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression charge that the new intellectual virtues are social virtues in disguise, just as automatic and unreflective as those of the WASP ancien régime. It is the elite universities, laments Gelernter, that produced Obama, the “symbol of the new American elite, the new establishment, where left-liberal politics is no longer a conviction, no longer a way of thinking: it is built-in mind-furniture you take for granted without needing to think.” Consequently, the nation is “filling inexorably with Airheads, nominally educated yet ignorant; trained and groomed like prize puppies to be good liberals.”222To defend liberalism as a mere conviction is to refuse the role of the liberal prize puppy, to refuse liberalism as a social identity. But perversely, it is liberalism qua social identity, qua automatic social reflex, that has been culturally credentialed as the embodiment of a privileged intellectual acuity. Just as the classic finishing schools strove to inculcate a certain physical posture, so the elite universities now inculcate a certain mental and spiritual posture through which to announce oneself curious, broad-minded, given to scientific detachment and dispassionate analysis, etc.—that is, as a member of the anointed in good standing. With this training having tethered students’ self-esteem to liberalism, they become prize puppy liberals who cannot see that their intellectualism is really an exercise in social signaling…

But just as the Left relativizes the value of economic liberty to the interests of capitalists, so conservatives relativize the value of expressive autonomy to the New Class culture of wordsmiths, artists, and entertainers. Bork observes that the student radicals of the 1960s were later attracted to careers through which they could influence opinions and attitudes,73their ultimate passion. But not everyone shares this passion. And the radical expressive individualism liberalism celebrates will only resonate for those who share this powerful need for symbolic manipulation—and the social privilege that permits it. It is only the molders of opinion and sensibility whose career paths require an unqualified right to continually transgress the boundaries of decency and good taste. Liberals will sugarcoat this aggression in anodyne abstractions like self-expression or autonomy. But conservatives believe these abstractions are ideological instruments of elite domination, initiated in the 1960s and continuing to this day. The 1960s were, as Kimball says, a revolution “of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged.”74Itwas a revolution, not of individualists against collectivists, but of one collective against another, of the people of fashion against the common people, whose cause has now been taken up by conservatives…

Gouldner argued that the New Class of professional knowledge workers is a progressive force in some ways. It has no truck with traditional hierarchies, including all the privileges of the old class of bourgeois capitalists. The New Class furthermore promotes a linguistic culture, the “culture of careful and critical discourse”(CCD), that de-authorizes “all speech grounded in traditional societal authority.”165However,Gouldner also stressed that the New Classis not a group of benign technocrats selflessly promoting the public good.166Rather,it is a morally ambiguous “flawed universal class”167that is “elitist and self-seeking and uses its special knowledge to advance its own interests and power,”168and so “embod[ies] the collective interest but partially and transiently.”169While the New Class is hostile to traditional bourgeois interests and values, it is itself a cultural bourgeoisie whose commitment to freedom is qualified by its interest in maintaining its cultural capital. It may be egalitarian when attacking the privileges of the old class, bourgeois conservatives. But it also seeks to maintain its own guild advantages,170to which end it attempts to “control the supply and limit the production of its culture, to oppose any group that restricts its control over its culture, and to remove legal or moral restrictions on the uses for which its culture may be purchased.”171As the defender of free thought and expression, the New Class opposes formal censorship. But as a cultural bourgeoisie, it has its own interests to protect, and practices unofficial censorship by limiting discussion to members of its own elite,172dismissing those who have not been properly credentialed as irrelevant. Even as it subverts old inequalities, the New Class “silently inaugurates a new hierarchy of the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful.”

What liberals interpret as conservatives’ primordial anti-intellectualism is better understood as a specific reaction to the New Class culture, to the cognitive privileges which that culture affords its liberal membership. The New Class’s cultural capital is ostensibly founded on the culture of careful and critical discourse, which is laudable if taken at face value. But as a culture, CCD must take on a life of its own in order to fulfill its cultural function as a hero-system, to which end its libertarian features will be compromised as necessary. Its membership seeks to be recognized, not merely as having been insightful on some particular occasion, but as “the reflexive and insightful.” They wish to see themselves as the kinds of people who make insightful observations. And this requires that the concrete meaning and function of their intellectual ideals be circumscribed accordingly, so that what qualifies as “serious” speech is defined by their identitarian needs—the “mainstream” as the Duke deconstructionist put it. Professionalism, writes Gouldner, is “among the public ideologies of the New Class, and is the genteel subversion of the old class by the new.”

…The irrationality that conservatives detect in liberals is meaningful, not for its actual scope and repercussions, but as evidence for the operation of a hero-system, a system of meaning-preservation whose very existence gives the lie to what Codevilla calls the “Ruling Class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality.” Conservative claims of cultural oppression are a civilizational rebellion against the culture of careful and critical discourse qua embodiment of the meta-equal protection problem. As such, they address themselves, not to deleterious consequences, but to differential dignity. Gouldner observes:

“CCD (careful and critical discourse) treats the relationship between those who speak it, and others about whom they speak, as a relationship between judges and judged. It implies that the established social hierarchy is only a semblance and the deeper, more important distinction is between those who speak and understand truly and those who do not. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is to be emancipated at once from lowness in the conventional social hierarchy, and is thus a subversion of that hierarchy. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is a political act.”

Translated into our framework, this is a hierarchy between those who stand above the “peculiarly human emotions” and those who do not, between those capable of naturalistic disengagement and those whose sensibilities remain anthropocentricor “pre-modern.” This is the distinctively liberal “bigoted clause,” the distinctively liberal “Moral Order” in relation to which conservatism represents a form of contagion. The New Class may not feel disgust toward homosexuality or go out of their way to shame unwed mothers. But they nevertheless feel themselves emancipated from a certain kind of “lowness,” as Gouldner puts it, which they now identify with conservatism. Hence their conservaphobia, which is simply the corollary of the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity. Conservaphobia is always couched in a utilitarian façade, as a response to the perniciousness of conservative ideas. But conservatives correctly sense that it is a source of intrinsic identitarian satisfactions, and this is why they claim cultural oppression.

The elitism of the liberal elite is an elitism, not of wealth, status, or even education, but of moral luck, the fact that they have been undeservedly blessed with the capacity to sublimate, intellectualize, and etherealize their illiberalism, and thus be illiberal with comparative impunity. Their illiberalism may be less pernicious by some measures. But this is nothing for which they deserve any credit, because this is a difference of social background and personal constitution, not individual courage or intrinsic virtue. Just like everyone else, they have been, as Heidegger says, thrown into a particular field of social meanings. And their good luck on this front is, from the cosmic viewpoint to which they themselves aspire, just as arbitrary as the inherited fortunes of third-generation plutocrats. Hence conservatives’ perverse sense that liberal equality taken to its logical conclusion would somehow redound to their cause. Their claims of cultural oppression transpose the categories which liberal discourse applies to the world onto that very discourse, because it is here that the sublimated conservatism of liberals can be discovered. These claims’ profound, ceaselessly innovative perversity, their ineluctably convoluted character, is the direct outcome of this effort to transpose the ideals of liberalism onto this meta-level. This is the philosophical meaning of what liberals mistake for mere rancor.

The difference between the leftism of the Left and the leftism of the Right is that the latter presupposes a much higher level of philosophical abstraction and reflexivity. Hence the rhetorical disadvantage to which conservatives perennially feel subject. This inequality enables liberals to seize upon the irrationality of conservatives as structural features of the conservative mind while chalking up their own irrationality to generic human imperfection—individual idiosyncrasy, practical exigency, rhetorical license, and so on. The result is that the irrationalities of liberals are quickly forgotten and never assembled together as a totality that would reveal liberalism as a hero-system. Doing so is the still unconscious project of conservative claims of cultural oppression—to systematize the irrationalities of liberals so as to expose the hero-system of which they are symptoms. This would reveal the hidden meaning of conservatives “curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs about the world.”