T.S. Eliot:
I wonder if we can expand on this a little:
I can see no reason for believing that either Dante or Shakespeare did any thinking on his own. The people who think that Shakespeare thought are always people who are not engaged in writing poetry, but who are engaged in thinking, and we all like to think that great men were like ourselves.
Related:
People different from me cannot be great
It's become routine to blame snobbery for the Trump Derangement Syndrome that has gripped vast swathes of the professional and grifter wings of the conservative movement and the GOP. This explanation seems reasonable when we remember that pride and snobbery are not the same thing.
Understanding Trump: War on Mount Olympus
Lionel Trilling:
Trump destroyed the pretense that these famous conservatives and well-compensated operatives had any real function. Political professionals announced that he could not win and that his campaign was a joke. Conservative “thought leaders” declared that the man and his ideas were anathema to true conservatism.
Snobbery is not the same thiing as pride of class. Pride of class may not please us but we must at least grant that it reflects a social function. A man who exhibited class pride -- in the day when it was possible to do so -- may have been puffed upp about what he was, but this ultimately was depended on what he did. Thus, aristocratic pride was based ultimately on the ability to fight and administer.
Snobbery is pride in status without pride in function. And it is an uneasy pride of status. It always asks, 'Do I belong -- do I really belong? And does he belong? And if I am observed talking to him, will it make me seem to belong or not belong?' It is the peculiar vice not of aristocratic societies which have their own appropriate vices, but of bourgeois democratic societies.
Turned out that the rank and file conservatives did not care what the thought leaders thought. The only people laughing on election night were Trump supporters.
Inept experts and leaders with no followers – no surprise then that they lash out at the man and the voters who increased their unease in the status they took such pride in.
It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead – and to find no one there.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Are there any better examples of Taleb's “inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking 'clerks' and journalists-insiders“ than the Never Trumpers who show up on “Morning Joe”??
Never Trumpers spend a great deal of time lauding themselves as defenders of “democracy”. Those few who really believe this are just LARPing as they reveal their ignorance of history.
As historian John Lewis Gaddis notes, in ancienty Athens, democracy “functioned by divorcing virtue from status. If a man wished to participate – a virtue – then 'the obscurity of his condition' – status – wouldn't prevent his doing so.”
The Never Trumpers want the very antithesis of this. The system they are defending has failed America repeatedly. From Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis to the opioid epidemic to China to the COVID pandem – their system has produced death, impoverishment, misery and despair.
Related:
Mediated democracy and the temptations of Leninism
Steak, ketchup, and Trump Derangement Disorder
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