By Nate
Hochman
Wednesday,
December 14, 2022
One of
the oddest quirks of modern American life is that much of our cultural and
political elite — what might have been described, in an earlier era, as the “ruling class” — is heavily invested in
denying that it is an elite at all. A claim to a lack of power —
often via invoking membership in any number of “marginalized” identity classes
— has become its own form of prestige. The real sources of power, in this
conceptualization, are the rare minority of cultural elites who hold right-wing
political views — i.e., those who dissent from the dominant ideology of
the nation’s most powerful cultural institutions. Two recent examples of this
phenomenon:
Notable what gets framed as a “buzzy media startup.” If u start off rich,
have a rich spouse, rich friends, don’t follow any journalistic ethical rules,
and focus your content solely on serving the interests of extremely powerful
rich ppl, you can go far! https://t.co/S12P5rTduf
— Taylor Lorenz
(@TaylorLorenz) December
13, 2022
Taylor
Lorenz works for the Washington Post, one of the two most
powerful media outlets in the United States and arguably the Western world,
which is itself owned by the second-wealthiest man in the country. The Post’s
decisively left-wing slant, particularly on cultural issues, is a reflection of
the dogmas of its elite writers and readers. Much of the talk of the mainstream
media’s “blind spots” with regard to large swaths of America have to do with
the fact that elite journalists tend to hail from an elite bubble that is
extremely cloistered off from the lower rungs of society — not always “lower”
in terms of income, but certainly in terms of power. “The primary source of
their power is their control of American identity — the
narratives, symbols, cultural shibboleths and taboos, and social arrangements
that define our self-understanding and the structure of our shared political
life,” I wrote last
year. “A New
York Times writer may not be able to buy a multimillion-dollar house
in Palm Beach, but he is infinitely more able to imprint in the halls of
American power his vision of how the world should be. A well-placed federal
bureaucrat may not have immediate access to the capital to build a successful
construction company in Little Rock, Ark., or Lubbock, Texas, but he can shape
the conditions in which others do so.”
None of
these people are, as Hill contends, arguing that “the real problems are
pronouns and wokeness.” It’s almost a prerequisite for full membership in this
class to be committed to such cultural views. But even if we
do take it at face value that the defining component of power is wealth — the
idea that the wealthiest people in the world are all conspiring to back right-wing
culture-warring falls apart under five seconds of scrutiny. As I tweeted in
response to Hill:
The second-richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington
Post; the fourth-richest, Bill Gates, is one of the top funders of lefty
climate and anti-racist groups; the ninth-richest, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer,
just dropped $400 million on a black entrepreneurs fund
Hill was
surely referring to Musk in his initial tweet. But the point is that Musk is
an outlier — an exception that proves the rule. One need only
look to the coordinated resistance to his takeover of Twitter, from Democratic
politicians and left-wing activist groups to outlets such as the Post, to
witness how much of an unacceptable provocation it was for a figure who does
not share Hill’s and Lorenz’s ideological priors to gain control of a major
civic institution. Power concedes nothing without a demand — or, in this case,
without unending denials of its own existence.
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