A lot of my politics have been erratic over the past year since I haven’t quite had a good handle on the question ‘What’s going on?’ Especially over the past few months. After thinking about it for around that length of time, I’ve finally come to some conclusions. It’s my habit to entertain all possibilities. From mundane ones to wild conspiracies. The explanation I’ve come to is more mundane, but I think I should approach this subject with more humility. I don’t know what’s going on, but at long last, I do have a plausible explanation.
The story starts with the Elite, or as some like to call them, Brahmins. Our Brahmins are our upper Middle Class, Elite Educated, Coprotist, Pro-LGBT, Welfare state enthusiast-class we all know and love, and our story begins somewhere around the Obama era. The Brahmin were in power. Not only did they have the centers of Media, and Academia, but at long last they held political power. The only real opposition to the Brahmins were the minority of Evangelical Christians who were on their way out anyway. The mood among the Brahmins was optimistic. They were in a state of ascendancy.
As the Brahmins were beginning to consolidate all power under them, their opposition began to talk increasingly about Liberty. Evangelicals, Dissidents, Atheists, etc, became Libertarians. Every group when it’s not in power starts campaigning for Liberty. The fact that Conservatism had simply become ‘Please tolerate me’ was proof of Brahmin ascendancy.
The first domino in the chain of events that led us to where we are today came not from the Right, but from the Left. The problem is like so. The Brahmin are and continue to be, heretical Calvinists, and so like the Boston Elite or Dutch Merchants, they tend to impose a soft hierarchy on the world. They believe in equality as a spiritual principle, but they like that equality to come slowly, managed by the people who know best. They didn’t quite understand religious conservatism or right-wing ideas as a phenomenon, but they acknowledged them as a fact. As long as they were on their way out and the postmillennial eschaton was on the way in, the Brahmin Class was happy.
But the children of Evangelicals were raised in a different environment. Evangelicalism is far less tolerant of vice than Calvinism is, and while they secularized, Secular Evangelicalism retained its intolerance of vice versus the Elite. Secularized Evangelicalism is not quite a new phenomenon, it had begun in the 50s when the streams of Fundamentalism and Liberal Progressivism began to merge, but in the 2010s it began to achieve new prominence. What should we call this tribe? Digging out an old term from the English Civil War, I say we call them the Levelers.
The emergence of the Levelers on the national scene is the source of all woes. No sooner had they joined the Brahmin tribe when they began calling it out from every angle. The hypocrisy of the Brahim’s alleged Socialist ethics, combined with their Capitalist practice. The Brahmin generally tolerated Centrists and allowed Conservatives to exist so long as they were barred from real institutions of power (Dhimmi status). The Levelers wanted a harsher regime. Centrists, in their world, would be treated as Dhimmis until they gave up and became Leftists. Right Wingers would be removed. A rural right-winger was one right-winger too many.
This in the end, disrupted the Brahmin’s delicate power game that they had spent decades perfecting. Plenty of Christians were willing to accept second-class citizenship as their price for faith, they were not willing to accept their children being taken away and re-educated to be made more tolerant. Centrists were baffled, since they had (mistakenly) viewed themselves as the locus of power, suddenly finding themselves on the out of culture. The white working class, which had been fuming under the casual elitism of the Brahmins became oppositional. Rural people, who were already hostile to the Brahmins, became furious.
And through this confluence of events, Trump was elected. The Rural tribe became his backbone. Their support for him was fanatical. The Christians, Centrists and Working Class folks who voted for him, wasn’t. These classes felt deeply morally conflicted about voting for Trump. As much as the Brahmin class has forgotten it, all three had an affection towards the Brahmins and Brahmin rule. The message was mixed. The message from the Rurals was ‘We no longer care what you think’. The message from Christians, Centrists, and Working-Class people was ‘Get Rid of the Levelers’.
Nor was ‘Get rid of the Levelers’ confined to America. The Brahmins had been nigh universally popular in Europe, but the Levelers were not. Britain has often nursed a hatred of dissenters and Evangelical sentiment for a long time, and so the Levelers rubbed much of the British public the wrong way. Continental Europe had a history of Calvinism, but not of Evangelicalism, and so the Secular version inevitably felt foreign. Populist parties sprung up and endure to this day.
Now to the Levelers, this just confirmed how wicked and corrupt the world was. “Of course we are hated and despised, we’re righteous”. It didn’t shake their worldview. But the Brahmins were terrified. Trump, Brexit, and European Populists showed them that certain segments of the population could simply rebel. That and the fact the Levelers had taken control of the wheels of power, which meant that the Brahmin were not free to play their normal game of moderation. So for the moment, the Brahmin directed the energy of the Left towards a common enemy, Trump, while they undermined every attempt the Levelers could give at political power.
The Brahmin were panicked, their political popularity had tanked. By the end of the Trump Presidency the Brahmin refusal to deal with the Levelers, had alienated broad segments of the population and had turned Christians from reluctant Trumpers into enthusiastic ones. The Centrists and the Working Class exhausted under Trump decided to give Biden one last chance. And only the threat of Trump has prevented a complete Leveler revolt in the form of Bernie.
When Covid came along, a crisis, the Brahmin sensed an opportunity to reassert their power. Democracy had gone from the friend of the Brahmin to the enemy. Votes get you Bernie and Trump. So, much like the Sulla and the Senate shutting down the Tribunes, the Brahmin have decided to use Covid as their measure to reassert control, both over the Right and the Left.
The Rural Right, which has long been the most hostile to the Brahmins was the first to react, with the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. It had been oppositionary in the Obama. Hostile after the rise of the Levelers. And now (even if the events of the Capitol are highly exaggerated) it was actively disestablishmentarian. The Brahmins didn’t care. It unleashed the FBI on them.
At this point, all factions involved are doing what has to be done in order to preserve their faction. The Levelers are trying to eliminate the Brahmins by means of conversion and hyper-democratic demagoguery. The Brahmins are trying to prevent a full-scale revolt form by seizing control of the government and destroying democracy. The Right will use either populism or destruction of Democracy since right now it realizes it’s in a battle for survival.
And this is how we got to where we are today.