By Sumantra Maitra
Friday, August 16, 2019
“If Milton’s Lucifer seems attractive to us, it is
because, in our time, Public Opinion is God. Non serviam,” Williamson
writes in The Smallest Minority, a collection of separate but connected
essays. These essays deal with a few specific themes, and shed light on
Williamson’s very brief and controversial tenure at The Atlantic, and
the overall cowardice the senior editorial board of the publication displayed
by firing him in response to an online mob. That consists of a whole chapter at
the end, and is the best writing of the whole book.
But that’s not its thesis. “If you are expecting a
rousing paean to democracy here, perhaps with a little liberal nod in the
direction of free speech and general toleration and other liberal-democratic
pieties that you may imagine to be central to my theme here, then you are going
to be disappointed. I come not to praise democracy but to bury it,” Williamson
writes.
The book really deals with the debate about today’s
cultural moment, where Williamson tries to answer, or at least explore, the
causes of social discontent, and traces it to Ochlocracy or, in simple terms,
mob rule.
Unlike the common definition of mobocracy, ochlocracy is
institutionalized majoritarianism by a bunch of people who are no more
effective or intelligent than apes, but with additional victimhood. “The
problem for mass democracy is that the demos does not think. It cannot. It
lacks the requisite apparatus. Groups do not think in any meaningful sense.
People think—one at a time,” Williamson writes.
Naturally, ochlocracy leads to “periodic and desultory
mob rule effected through the exploitation and domination of both public and
private centers of power,” or in other words, tyranny of the majority. “The
modern primitive is no less primitive for having a smartphone.”
People Are Dumb
Williamson identifies an interconnected mechanism fueling
the problems with discourse. On one hand, the majority of the people have free
speech, which is codified and good. But the problem is, the majority of the
people, are also, frankly, dumb. Most people have nothing interesting to add
to the conversation, and essentially do not communicate to exchange ideas, but
to signal to their own tribes, and to feel important.
“Social media has made a perverse contribution to public
life: By giving everyone an equal opportunity to speak, it has revealed how
little of interest most people have to say—and how little the content of what
they say actually matters when set against in-group tribal affiliation,”
Williamson writes.
This unchecked egalitarianism is against Nature, which is
hierarchical. By contrast, social media is quasi-Marxist in the sense that it
destroys all hierarchy and leads to anarchy and chaos. Or, in Williamson’s
words, “embrace of the tribe is only lukewarm, sterile, and superficial: a
four-second online hook-up, not a genuine intimate relationship. Small wonder
they are depressed.”
But they are not by themselves a problem. It is further
complicated due to the need for public intellectuals to feel “satisfied,” and
for the corporates to have obedience. “The original sin of the American
intellectual is his desire to be popular,” Williamson writes.
Leftist control of the corporate sector has further
exacerbated the obedience to majoritarianism. Again, Williamson does not mince
words: “Obedience is what the corporate Kultur demands. Like all totalitarian
regimes, corporations are managed by people who believe they are doing good,
and that if a few eggs have to be cracked to make the proverbial omelet, then
so be it.”
His objections to leftist control of corporations
reflects similar arguments from Tucker Carlson, who recently argued that the
biggest threat to faith, flag, and family isn’t the tyrannical nation-state or
national government, but the private sector, which will wreck everything
conservatives hold dear for borderless capital and unchecked labor mobility.
“Progressives would not trust corporations with that kind of power if they did
not believe that they could control them and thus wield that power themselves
by proxy,” Williamson says in the book, in tacit agreement with Carlson.
This development, according to Williamson, has led to the
return of the original worry facing every society since Hellenistic Greece: an
unchecked mass, a growing majoritarian instinct on both ends of the political
spectrum, and cowardly and complicit gatekeepers of society. Initially, the
fear of unchecked mobocracy was the norm, “fear of such anarcho-tyranny has
been a cornerstone of Anglo-American liberalism and republican government
throughout the world.”
Williamson adds, “Efforts to contain it represent an
intelligent evolution of political thought: The English developed the principle
of parliamentary sovereignty, which holds that there were some things that even
the king may not do; the American Founders, in turn, built into their
constitutional architecture the principle that there are many things that
parliament may not do, either.” But the checks and balances are lost: “A
combination of deep stupidity and casual authoritarianism already had begun to
disfigure our public discourse.”
We are, empirically, living in the best of times, and yet
“the masses are not happy. They are miserable. They are masses; misery is what
they do.” And the intellectual class, the free and independent thinking
individuals, the barrier against majoritarian tyranny, is failing. This is
where Williamson demands a return to the independent individual, willing to
stand athwart history and yell “Non Serviam.”
A Choice of Dystopias
That’s all well and good. But, for someone who came to
bury democracy, Williamson did not go far enough. He is correct in identifying
the problems in the greater Anglosphere, including Australia, India, and the
United Kingdom, but the biggest contradiction at the heart of his arguments
need to be addressed.
Social media and online outrage are indeed behind the
polarization. Hans Morgenthau, the godfather of post-Cold War American foreign
policy, once wrote the same thing, that a rational foreign policy for a great
power is incompatible with emotional public opinion.
From Palmerston to Disraeli, Teddy Roosevelt to Nixon,
Morgenthau to Kennan, there has always been a healthy skepticism of mob rule
and a gloomy pessimism about mass democracy. Social media has given an Oscar
Wilde-ian mask to otherwise normal people, giving a place for their vilest
human instincts to erupt, a coarsening of discourse and society.
Just look at any online comment boards, or Twitter. In an
earlier era, people would have to read, then write, a coherent letter to the
editor, which was vetted by the gatekeepers of society. These days no one
reads, but everyone comments, most of which are abusive or idiotic, and often
both.
But to suggest that masses are by definition
majority-moronic, and to expect a return of free individuals and independent thinking,
is, for lack of a better word, utopian. As Mary Eberstadt recently said, the
recent fad of “intersectionality” is not a flaw, but the logical end-game of
libertarian individualism, where everyone is unique, and every opinion and
silly bit of narcissism needs to be respected. What if progressivism is not a
corruption of liberalism, but the child of it?
I checked Williamson’s book for any citation of Jason
Brennan. There wasn’t any, but there should have been. The logical end game to
battle ochlocracy isn’t further individual liberty-empowering imbeciles, but
epistocracy, a rule of “the enlightened.” That argument has already been made
thoroughly by Brennan. The problem is, “rule of the enlightened” often leads to
a very different form of tyranny. Ask the French, and the Soviets.
What then, if not “an enlightened, rationalist central
committee” or “individualism, leading to tribalism, leading to majoritarian
tyranny”? The choice shouldn’t be between two dystopias. Classical conservatism
provides the answer.
Perhaps empowering time-tested units, such as faith, flag
and family; building a common national purpose regardless of class, creed, or
race; a return to Benjamin Disraeli or Teddy Roosevelt-type one-nation
Tory-ism. That would, dare I say, need some nation-building projects at home,
an overhaul of the left-liberal edifice, a “reactionary instinct.” And I am
not sure Williamson would approve of it.
Nevertheless, the book is a much-needed polemic for our
times, all the needless profanity notwithstanding. It also has some juicy
tidbits about how duplicitous some major media figures are in the United States
(like Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times, in chapter eight).
As for Jeffrey Goldberg, and his “delusions of testicular
adequacy,” in Williamson’s words, all I can say is, what a sad loss for The
Atlantic to let go of such a writer, due to “some seething young woman with
an unfortunate All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut loitering glumly in
the coffee room.”
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