The new clerisy class

Not entirely sure what to make of this conversation on Bari Weiss’ podcast with Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and a widely quoted political analyst of the ‘internet revolution’ credited with anticipating the rise of Trump. (He’s also been on one of my favourite podcasts, The Fifth Column.) There’s a lot to agree here; there is something qualitatively different happening with the switch from the era of information monopoly to the era of information tsunami. Whether the ever elusive public, the democratic agora, is what’s being voiced via the internet and the social media is another matter. An almost opposite analysis could be found in the writing of Peter Pomerantsev, for ex, which looks at the ways that ethno-nationalist chauvinism, authoritarianism, conspiracy theories and the post-truth-ism in political life have first taken hold in Russia and Eastern Europe with the post-communist liberalization, then returned home to west to roost.

A lot of questions from Weiss centre on what is happening to the media behemoths like the NYT, where she used to work, and indeed a good number of writers are leaving such institutions for the Substack and podcast pastures, and many in the US are able to make a living off the media grid. Where Gurri’s analysis loses me is in the placing of the Trump election within the global populist revolt, and Trump himself in the counterculture. We tend to forget that during the 2016 election campaign, Trump was 24/7 in the mainstream media, reported on in fairly polite, at worst mildly stunned terms (he was to be, accurately, described as a liar on cable news chyrons only near the end of his presidency). “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for the CBS”, is how Les Moonves judged the Trump phenomenon. Trump was on network news, he was on cable news, he was in the NYT, and he was, I would argue less significantly, audience-wise in 2016, on Twitter. Through his presidency including the very end he maintained the unwavering support of that center of countercultural anarchy, the Republican party. He was elected not in small part thanks to the data nerds of the GOP who knew to identify those three or four crucial states for his election and act.

Us Torontonians have had our fair share of experience with wealthy men running for office on a populist tidal wave and understand that irrational identifications, fantasies, images, aspirations, emotions like anger or fear, and one-issue verbal memes like the gravy train are likelier to decide an election than sober choices and analysis. How to explain the electoral successes of the late Rob Ford and the current Ontario premier Doug Ford, both wealthy and fairly establishmentarian but unburdened by education and embodying (or performing?) the hoser culture to a T. There’s a good episode of the Fifth Column in which a Mexican-American journalist explains that the key to Trump’s 2020 electoral gains among the working class and non-professional middle class ethnic minorities (the so-called “BIPOC”) was that in many ways they saw themselves in him. “Trump’s a Mexican,” culturally, says Gustavo Arellano in the show, and I can see how he could also be seen as East European, Jamaican, Cuban etc.

What left and right populism, if those distinctions still hold, do have in common is the mistrust of experts and professional classes. So I find a more persuasive model of analysis of the age of internet revolt the neo-feudal one, probably best popularized by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, and the commentary around it. I think the concept of the new Clerisy is especially useful. If the tech industry overlords are the today’s aristocracy, it’s the academia, the media and the NGOs that form the new Clerisy, a class that earns a living by telling the rest of the society what to value. And there’s been some significant changes in the clerisy class in the last few years! But if you ask a Marxist, like Angela Nagel (or Slavoj Zizek), clerisy has been like this at least since 1970s, since the New Left emerged and the stuffy liberal institutions and capitalism which they prop up adopted it for their purposes. Nagel writes in her (where else) Substack newsletter:

The fundamental moral principles in today’s clerisy, which we treat as a new phenomenon, were already settled in all the secular clerical institutions by the early 1970s - feminism, youth culture, globalization, identity politics, multiculturalism, sexual freedom, the technocratic application of science as the solution to social ills and so on. The clerisy’s role ever since has been to teach the public that these were superior values to the systems of all other existing and past forms of society. 

Nagel argues that the clerisy has served ‘capitalism’, the post-war liberal consensus and the Pax Americana well so far but that it’s gotten so theological and dogmatic over the last few years, so ripe with luxury beliefs and so detached from the material conditions of life of the great majority of humanity, that it’s now hindering ‘the science’, something that VC won’t like, and making the basic HR management in non-clerisy sectors a challenge. Which brought to mind this intriguing episode of the Sam Harris podcast where Harris describes to Jesse Singal a meeting that he attended with some of the most powerful people in the tech, during which he asked why they can’t simply explain to the junior and middle staff that they should stop campaigning against their own workplaces for verbal or symbolic delikts, as we’ve recently seen in publishing for ex, and get on with the job or quit. To which the people running those companies said We can’t, it’s too late. In other words, the clerisy capture is too far gone. 

This is the class that brought us the ‘gender identity’ legislation, the sex is a spectrum not a binary, the Equity-Diversity-Inclusion training, transhumanism, the Ibrahim Kendi and the Robin DiAngelo and the UK’s Stonewall protection rackets, the virtue signalling marketing, the memory-holing of actors and retroactive editing of TV shows, and in Canada, crucially, the lawyers, academics, activists and bureaucrats invested in the growth of the aboriginal apartness-and-trauma industry, and the public broadcast service that effectively advocates for removal of books from municipal libraries. But I would disagree with Nagel that it was always thus. I’ve spent a lot of  time in the silken trenches of the graduate-degree left and can attest that the identiterians were not hegemonic until a few years ago, and that the class analysis people and the old school social democrats gave good brawl. It’s only recently that identity, speech curtailing, safetyism and anti-universalism prevailed. An illustration in point: It was Leo Panitch, the éminence grise of the Canadian Marxist left, who supervised Francis Widdowson’s work in the 1990s, but in 2021 her historical materialist analysis of Canada’s benevolent apartheid is now on the margins of the academe, Widdowson herself one of the most protested-against and ostracized academics in Canada. The Canadian historical-materialist and class analysis left in the era of the hegemony of the decolonizing and racializing left is rarely heard from.

“As for the NGOs, they cost society billions but have no legitimate reason to exist outside of what the modern welfare state could provide for a fraction of the cost and without the moral strings attached,” says Nagel. I can’t substantially disagree with this, especially if we talk about high income liberal democracies. In other, international contexts, the NGOs can still be useful, as gadflies to authoritarian regimes, and advocates of liberal education. The foreign-funded NGOs played an important role in the Western Balkans during and after the 1990s wars and probably the best known (most notorious?) funder of metropolitan elite clerisy, the Open Society Foundation, helped create the programs that I too benefited from, and most happily – Women’s Studies Centre in Belgrade, for example, and the Krakow summer school on democracy and diversity under the auspices of the New School for Social Research. In Montenegro and Serbia under Milosevic and international economic sanctions, the foreign-funded programs were an all-important sanity tap for many of us. What is the situation like now, I am not sure. Last time I was in Montenegro, I’ve noticed a set of well-established NGOs, with a lot of smart and competent people, who’ve been doing and saying same things for years, without substantially changing anything much. Is it all about just… keeping the well paid jobs in the NGO sector? It’s become I think a trench war of sorts, and I expect it’s the same in Serbia and in the neighbouring countries too, even Romania which is in the EU: the local strongmen and dominant parties rule while the NGOs bark at illiberalism and clientelism. Everybody goes about their business.

And the LGBTQI+ acronym has settled in the Balkans too, and is often even said in English, as EL Gee Bee Tee etc, rather than as a word from the vernacular. Are you sure you want to talk about your lives this way, I ask my gay friends there? Why anglicize? Can we find a suitable localism for, say, queer? Noo, they don’t mind, English pardon Globish comes with added cachet and internationalism, and meanwhile a recent poll in Montenegro revealed that more than eighty percent of the citizens would not want to live next to or work with any of the letters of the “LGBTQ+”. Do the polled even know what each individual letter means, I wondered? But the clerisy be clerisying. If there is no problem, there is nothing for them left to do. Homophobia 1, clerisy 0, so a bright future of many more workshops, training sessions, press releases, and staff retreats awaits.