QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Who Killed the Center-Left? “The politicians supportive of illegal immigration,” Matthew Continetti writes in the Washington Free Beacon:
If there is a common denominator to these electoral shakeups, it is the politics of migration. The overthrown establishments all benefited from the economics of illegal immigration and used migrants as chits in a humanitarian sweepstakes in which the leader who signals the most virtue wins. Migration became a symbol for the “flat world” of globalization where not just people but also cultures, goods, and investments flowed freely, borders had little meaning, and sovereignty was pooled upwards to transnational bureaucracy as identity was reduced to racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual characteristics. The fantastic wealth produced by the global marketplace enriched the center-left to such a degree that its adherents became walled off from the material, social, and cultural concerns of the working people they professed to represent. And so middle-class workers who believe a country’s leadership ought to be accountable to a country’s citizens went elsewhere—devastating the ranks of the center left and creating a vacuum for the neo-socialists of the twenty-first century.
Read the whole thing. Continetti’s paragraph quoted above also dovetails with an observation Jonah Goldberg made in his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy:
Intellectuals surely have a financial motive in arguing for a system in which intellectuals would run things, but they also have a psychological one. That desire is often the more important one. Marx wanted to be the high priest of a new world order, but he didn’t necessarily want to be rich. We are wired to want to have higher status than others. We are also wired to resent those who we believe have undeservedly higher status than we do. Intellectuals and artistic elites have heaped scorn on other elites— the wealthy, the military, the bourgeois, the Church— for centuries.
[Joseph] Schumpeter’s analysis was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, laid out in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment, in Nietzsche’s highly literary telling, is the process by which priests use their skills to redefine the culture’s idea of what is virtuous in order to undermine the power of knights, i.e., the ruling nobility. The knights are non-intellectual men of action who hold more power than the priests, and the priests hate them for it. Thus, according to Nietzsche, Christianity elevated the meek and denigrated the powerful (just as Marx lionized labor and demonized entrepreneurs). It’s much more complicated than that—Nietzsche always is—but Schumpeter took this framework and applied it to capitalism over time.
There is one very common—if not quite universal—universal—thing that unites these different kinds of “priests”: They tend to come from the ranks of the bourgeois and the very wealthy themselves. There’s something about growing up prosperous that causes people not only to take prosperity for granted but to resent the prosperous. “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are socialist children of capitalist parents.”
See also: Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria.