Sibylla Bostoniensis

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1865048.html


Content advisory: Fascism and genocide, both historical and what is happening in the US right now. It won't make you happy, and it's not actionable information, but it will make you better equipped to act.




0.

It has recently come to my attention what the MAGA right means when they decry "the elites": they mean us.

It took me a long time to sort this out because, boy, I sure don't feel like an elite. You probably don't, either. When I hear someone talking about "the elites" it sure sounds like they're talking about someone with way more status, wealth, and power than I enjoy. Or than most of you enjoy, either.

But it was a nagging thing in the back of my head that when the MAGA right uses the term to ascribe fault for what's wrong, as far as they're concerned, with this country, they didn't seem to be talking about an obvious identifiable set of people with a tremendous amount of status, wealth, or power, even though the "elites" they speak of with such venom seemed by implication to be of such great privilege. For instance, they don't seem to think their orange messiah, Trump, is one of "the elite", despite the fact that they love him for his great status, wealth, and power. They seem to celebrate titans of industry like Musk. They certainly don't have any rhetoric excoriating billionaires nor, excepting some fringe militants, dictators; they demonstrate no suspicions of those who accumulate status, wealth, and power. To the contrary, they seem to think those glorious and like glory.

So it was an unresolved problem, a loose end, in my understanding of the fascist movement in the US, just who they mean by "the elites". There seemed to be two possibilities. Either "the elites" so detested by the MAGA right were a wholly imaginary people, like the the Illuminati or the Pizzaria-basement pedophile ring – which, to be clear, given Qanon and other flights of fancy they are often taken with, seemed like a very real possibility and wholly on brand for them – or the term referred to some actual subset of society, as of yet unidentified.

The obvious candidate was, of course, the Jews. As I wrote previously:

Indeed "elites" is another term in politics that's often used by the right as a dog-whistle for Jews, especially when modified by terms like "intellectual", "international", and, in the US, "coastal".

And, you know, I think originally when right wing demagogues started railing about "the elites", I think they did mean The Jews. And I do think some of the factions within the right have meant, and possibly still mean, an imaginary shadowy cabal with no actual mapping to real people.

But they way it gets used today, I don't think it does anymore. For one thing, they way they talk about "the elites", it sure doesn't sound like they're talking about a conspiracy. They don't sound like TERFs saying "just follow the money, and then you'll know who are transing the kids to make money selling surgeries and hormones." What they accuse "the elites" of is not pursuing wealth, or trying to secretly take over the world, or secretly anything. It doesn't map to the standard antisemitic tropes.

Instead, when they invoke "the elites", it sounds like they're talking about a class. A social class. They sound when they talk about "the elites" not unlike how leftists sound when talking about "the bourgeoisie".

I got a note on my post about antisemitism arguing that I had it all wrong, and had grabbed the knife by the sharp end: sure, my commenter argued, there's antisemitism in the assumption that evil money-grubbing merchants are Jewish, but the real prejudice is against merchants, and as such is really about class.

It's certainly the case that antisemitism has a huge classism component. You can't have a stereotype that all of a people are rich and own businesses without it being about class. It's been said that antisemitism is the Marxism of fools. I disagree that the phenomenon I was discussing is nothing more than antagonism to a merchants and thus reducible classism. But maybe that was what put classism on my radar when listening to the right express their grievance with "the elites."

When the MAGA right rails against "the elites" they're talking about the people who tell us that climate change is real and anthropogenic. They're talking about the people who tell us to stay home to flatten the curve and wear a mask and get shots that they tell us are safe. They're talking about the people who decide on the country's fiscal and diplomatic policies. They're talking about the people who explain how and why bigotry is bad and they should no longer do it, and how it has been a part of our nations culture and a stain on its honor. They're talking about the people who tell them the heroes to whom they have raised statues are false heroes and tear those statues down. They mean the people who get to run departments of the government. They're talking about the people who complicate understandings and frustrate simplicity with clever questions and they're talking about the people who hand dangerous books to their children.

Which is to say, they mean experts. It is surely not news to you that the MAGA right disdains and reviles expertise. Lots of people have made that observation. Well one way they express that antipathy of experts is by snearingly calling them "elites", by which they mean the people with authoritative expertise.

They do not mean what you mean when you use the word "elites", or think you would mean if you ever did use the word, which you probably do not – its very disuse made it ripe for appropriation for this purpose. When you do use the word "elite", you use it in the singular, and you generally use it to mean "very excellent", or "most able", or "most selective". Maybe of late, in an attempt to court the other side by appropriating their language right on back, as is the fad among some leftists, you have adopted the affectation of referring to the people you think the MAGA right should be angry at as "the elites": the ultra-wealthy.

That's not what they mean, and it's not what they're going to start meaning. And they don't mean merchants or business people, either. They're not talking about the people who own the means of production.

What they mean is wonks. What they mean is people who went to Harvard and MIT, CalTech and Yale, Swarthmore and CMU, Wellesley and Berkeley, Princeton and Antioch – you know, to "elite colleges". What they mean is people who have PhDs, and people who have desk jobs doing intellectual labor that were highly competitive to get or well-remunerating or both.

The MAGA right's use of the term "elites" is only the latest in a long, long line down through history of epithets, more and less derogatory, for a certain set of people, which we might term people with privileged educations – though that is both not a definitional marker, and also, as you will see below, a highly relative one.

When they say "elites" they mean the people who are authorities, both in the sense that they are authorities on topics of mastery, and also in the sense that what they say goes.

Because what all these sorts of people have in common is that they are arbiters of truth. The scientist tells us the truth of nature. The philosopher tells us the truth of philosophy. The historian tells us the truth of history. The journalist tells us the truth of current events. The artist tells us the truth of the human condition. The teacher tells us the truth of the topics they teach, and the librarian hands out books full of truths in all topics imaginable.

And they do not like the truths that these parties tell them very much, and they have come to bitterly resent that those parties get to tell them what the truth is.

That resentment has a name: anti-intellectualism.

But I suspect you understand that term wrongly.




1.

If you are like most English speakers, your primary sense of what "anti-intellectualism" means is being against thinking and reason, and preferring unreason or emotion. One dictionary's second definition of "anti-intellectual" is "a person who believes that intellect and reason are less important than actions and emotions in solving practical problems and understanding reality." [source]

That dictionary's first definition is kind of curious. It is:

a person opposed to or hostile toward intellectuals and the modern academic, artistic, social, religious, and other theories associated with them.

It's curious because we don't usually say a person is opposed to a type of person, but to a position or idea. For instance, a "pro-lifer" is opposed to abortion, an environmentalist is opposed to environmental degradation, a pacifist is opposed to war. As such, they may be hostile to abortionists, or real estate developers, or military generals, respectively, but their hostility is not ostensibly organized around a people, but a practice or philosophy, and only secondarily, following from that, pointed at people who do or believe that thing.

And that's how most people, I think, conceptualize "anti-intellectualism": primarily hostility towards intellectualizing or to thinking an intellectual approach to understanding is good and valid, and only secondarily a subsequent hostility towards people to whom intellectualizing or valuing intellectualizing is ascribed. Anti-intellectualism is thus understood to be a kind of philosophical position, that of ironically hating philosophical positions.

We don't say someone who is sexist is "opposed" to women. We might say they are opposed to equality for women – which they may or may not be. It's possible to be for equality for women and still be sexist, after all. And sexist antipathy need not have any philosophical basis at all; straight up misogyny of the "women: I just don't like them" sort is entirely sufficient to qualify. Similarly we don't say that someone who is an Islamophobe is "opposed" to Muslims. We might say they are opposed to Islam, which they may or may not be. It's entirely possible to conceive of a hate for Muslims entirely in ignorance of anything about Islam whatsoever; possibly that's even common among Islamophobes. Some Islamophobes will be happy to tell you they don't have any problem with Islam, just so long as it's practiced far away from them, ideally on another planet, and if that can't be arranged, on the opposite side of this one. "Why," they whine, "do they have to come here?" Their problem is not with the practice of Islam per se, but with the people who do so, i.e. Muslims.

We don't use the expression "opposed to" to describe someone who is a bigot, because you can, as we use the word today, be opposed to an idea, but not a person. We don't use the expression "opposed to" to describe being prejudiced against a people.

But like that dictionary definition also says an "anti-intellectual" can also just be somebody who is "hostile" to intellectuals, themselves. Or to put it more precisely: someone who has antipathy for intellectuals as a type of person.

The typical understanding of what "anti-intellectualism" means is more akin to being anti-abortion or anti-war than being bigoted against women or Muslims, as objecting to a practice than a people. Understood such, anti-intellectualism does not register at all as being in the same category as, say, racism, or antisemitism, or homophobia, or xenophobia – which is to say as an identity that is an axis of oppression.

You might even recoil at the comparison, thinking, "Nobody rounds up all the 'intellectuals' and shoots them, or puts them in concentration camps, or makes them second-class citizens and discriminates against them, or forces them to work on plantations."

The Great Terror of 1937, also known as the Great Purge, was a brutal political campaign led by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a threat. Although estimates vary, most experts believe at least 750,000 people were executed during the Great Terror, which started around 1936 and ended in 1938. More than a million survivors were sent to forced labor camps, known as Gulags. [...]

Stalin’s acts of terror and torture broke the Soviet people’s spirit and effectively eliminated certain groups of citizens, such as intellectuals, scientists and artists.

(From History.com, "The Great Terror", as appeared 2025 Jan 29)

Khmer Rouge ideology stated that the only acceptable lifestyle was that of poor agricultural workers. Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and qualified professionals in all fields were thought to be a threat to the new regime.

(From the UK's Holocaust Memorial Trust, as appeared 2025 Jan 22.)

The main goal of the White Terror [during the Spanish Civil War - S.] was to terrify the civil population who opposed the coup,^{[6]: 248 [7]: 201 [11]: 34}  eliminate the supporters of the Republic and the militants of the leftist parties,^{[11]: 29 [4]: 84 [45]: 375}  and because of this, some historians have considered the White Terror a genocide.^{[48]: 24–28 [49]: 501}

[...]

In areas controlled by the Nationalists, targeted were [...] teachers[36]: ⁹⁵, hundreds of whom were killed by the Nationalists in the first weeks of the war^[8]: 460 [and] intellectuals - for example, in Granada, between 26 July 1936 and 1 March 1939, the poet Federico García Lorca, the editor of the left-wing newspaper El Defensor de Granada, the professor of paediatrics in the Granada University, the rector of the university, the professor of political law, the professor of pharmacy, the professor of history, the engineer of the road to the top of the Sierra Morena and the best-known doctor in the city were killed by the Nationalists,^{[18]: 110–111 [6]: 253}  and in the city of Cordoba, "nearly the entire republican elite, from deputies to booksellers, were executed in August, September and December...",^[6]: 255 

(From Wikipedia, "White Terror (Spain)", as appeared 2025 Jan 29)

Directed by Chairman Mao, the May Sixteenth (1966) Notification of the Central Party Committee “sounded the bugle” to advance the Cultural Revolution [...] Its rhetoric declared a war on all “academic authorities,” accusing them of opposing socialism, and representing ideas and culture of the bourgeois and exploiting classes. In the arsenal of weapons supporting Mao’s Cultural Revolution, citizens loyal to Mao used big-character posters, public debates, criticism, and denunciation.

[...]

In August and September 1966, “red terror” seized China. The Red Guards attacked the “enemies of the people”—Party government cadres classified as “capitalist roaders,” teachers, artists, writers, intellectuals, former capitalists, landlords, the so-called rightists who were labeled for their open criticisms of the Party in 1957, and others labeled as hooligans and criminals. The Red Guards went searching their houses and confiscating their property. Violence, bloodshed, killing, and suicide occurred.² The Maoist Cultural Revolution authorities sanctioned or even directed the Red Guards’ violence. [...] The first educator was beaten to death at the hands of female Red Guards of the elite Girls Middle School attached to Beijing Teachers University on August 5, 1966. These female Red Guards tortured Bian Zhongyun, the vice principal, and other administrators for three hours. Bian died soon after. Although notified of this incident that same day, the Beijing and Central authorities did nothing. Instead, they praised the rapidly spreading Red Guard movement.³

On August 18, 1966, Mao gave his now famous “audience” to the thousands of Red Guards on Tiananmen Square. On the rostrum of the Tiananmen, Song Binbin, the head of the Red Guards from Bian Zhongyun’s school, presented a Red Guard armband to the Chairman. Mao asked her name, and when told that her name meant gentle and cultured, he remarked: “you want to be militant (Yaowu).” So Song changed her name to “Yaowu". The next day, the Red Guards of Beijing middle schools embarked on their destruction of the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), changing street names and shop signs to conform to this new revolution. They smashed religious statues, destroyed temples and traditional architecture, and burned books.[...]

Class-consciousness was strong among the Red Guard generation. The Mao government divided people into three broad categories. On the one side were the “red fives”—communist cadres, soldiers, martyrs, workers, and poor and lower middle class peasants. On the other were the “blacks”—former landlords, rich peasants, the Nationalists, bad elements (criminals), and rightists. In between was the gray category of clerks, professionals, and intellectuals. The system placed the “reds” at the top of the political and social hierarchy, discriminated against the “blacks,” and urged the children of the bad classes to “draw a line” between themselves and their parents, and to reform themselves into true revolutionaries.⁹ [...]

[...] To many, the appeal of Mao Zedong came from his image as a rebel against Chinese tradition and authority. Mao criticized China’s educational system, attacking its elitist tendency.[...]

(From the Association for Asian Study: "From Red Guards to Thinking Individuals: China’s Youth in the Cultural Revolution", as appears 2025 Jan 27.)

So it turns out that, yes, as a matter of fact, history does attest to "intellectuals" – meaning something much broader than you probably think it might – being rounded up and slaughtered en masse, sent off to gulags and re-education camps to do hard labor, and designated the enemy of the state and the people and treated accordingly.

There's been lots and lots of discussion across all media about how the rise of Trumpism mirrors the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. And, seriously: about god damn time. I am so relieved that the great mass of people is finally cottoning on. But here's the thing: the Nazi party isn't the only edifying example of fascism history provides us. There are a whole bunch of other despotic regimes that we don't usually think about, that are unfortunately pertinent to our present moment.

You might not have ever thought of "anti-intellectualism" being a prejudice against a people that leads to them being violently oppressed. And that's a problem for three reasons. First of all, it is. Second, it's one of the core organizing principles of what is happening in the US right now. Third, if you're reading this you're one of the type of people it happens to.






2.

There are any a number of hang-ups you might be having at this point. Let me address some of the ones I anticipate.

In our culture there's a deep cultural inhibition about identifying oneself as "an intellectual" or identifying too closely with one's intellect. It's sounds much too close to calling oneself intelligent. This results in a strong inclination to disavow – even within the privacy of one's own mind – being the object of anti-intellectualism. "I'm not an intellectual, they must be talking about somebody else. And I'm sure none of my friends are intellectuals. They're all lovely people."

The idea that "intellectual" could be an identity – and thus a target for oppression – may get stuck in your craw because you think, "Who calls themselves an 'intellectual'?" You might be wondering how could there be prejudice against an identity nobody, or nobody much, claims as their own? Pretty damn easily, it turns out. We have this idea in Western Left culture that identity is something one asserts or claims for oneself, as a form of self-expression. But in reality all identity is in tension between the ways we know ourselves and the ways others know us: there's the identities we own for ourselves and there are the identities ascribed us by others. And generally the people who are busy being prejudiced against an identity aren't too worried as to whether or not you agree with the identity they're assigning you in their minds.

Sometimes anti-intellectualism is imagined to be hatred of smart people; "intellectual" is conflated with "having a high intellect". To split a hair, anti-intellectualism isn't a hatred of smartness or smart people, per se, it's just a hatred of the sort of person smart people turn out to be in our society, more on which below. By saying that you are the object of anti-intellectualism, I don't mean "they hate you because you're smart". I mean something a lot more like "they hate you because you have a college degree and/or work with computers and/or hang out with and share cultural values with the people who do."

When anti-intellectualism turns violent, it's not (just) the people you think of as "intellectuals" who get targeted, say Continental philosophers who wear black turtlenecks, chain smoke, and hold salons. It's typically also aimed at school teachers and physicians and scientists and government bureaucrats.

I am not saying that intellectuals (or if you prefer "intellectuals", as designated by anti-intellectuals) are an oppressed people in our society. If oppression is prejudice + power, well, intellectuals have not been disempowered in our society. Quite to the contrary: intellectuals have had enormous power in the US and all the nations of the West since at least the end of WWII. It has not been possible to oppress us.

That is precisely what the MAGA right wants to change. Ardently.

I am also not saying that the persecution of "intellectuals" has historically been equivalent in atrocity to the persecution of any particular minority – in part because I don't know the extent of that persecution. Violent anti-intellectualism as an aspect of genocide is often not foregrounded or accounted, and least in accounts of what used to be known as the First World. Despite the traces of it being visible everywhere in the history of 20th century genocides, it is largely unremarked upon. I gather that neither the left nor the right is keen to talk about this, albeit for differing reasons.

The left is very much more comfortable (and the right is fine with this) thinking about genocide as a product of "tribalism" (which is not a paradigm I think has much value), where people of different ethnicities are imagined to just naturally sometimes develop hatred for other ethnicities and sometimes act on it. I think this is the same phenomenon, under the hood, as American's preference to think of American history – whether from a traditional, right-wing jingoistic point of view or a critical, left-wing social-justice point of view – as the history of successive waves of interacting ethnicities, a la the "melting pot"/"oppressed minorities" paradigms.

You might reasonably be wondering, "As opposed to what?"

Well, for one thing, as opposed to class, of course.





3.

If you take nothing else away from this post, let it be this: anti-intellectualism is classism against the educated white-collar middle class.

That is what "intellectual" means to anti-intellectuals: it refers to people of a certain socio-economic class. It is a class characterized by being college-educated professionals who earn their livings by doing intellectual labor. People whose job, or at least aspiration, it is to be experts in something cerebral: education, medicine, science, research, journalism, law, technology, the arts, etc.

In other words, what you, being someone who is reading this, probably considers a "normal person".

Were you aware that less than half the adult US population over 25 has a college degree? According to Pew Research, as of 2021, 37.9% of Americans over 25 have at least a bachelor's degree or higher, and an additional 10.5% have an associates degree. The modal adult in the US does not have a college degree.

You may also find it interesting, in light of recent American history, that the percentage of the US population with a college degree has about doubled since 1990. Which is to say, one human generation ago, adults with college degrees were a quite small minority (about one in four), and now it's closing in on half (ibid). This is not an immaterial fact to our present historical moment.

Constant readers will recall I've explained three distinct class systems in play in the US: economic class (wealth), social class (culture), and interest, or Marxist, class (financial interests). (Constant readers may now be realizing just why it is I have been so avid to write about class.) Anti-intellectualism is classism against a class position anti-intellectuals designate "intellectuals" that is primarily a social (not economic or interest) class: people who are culturally of this white-collar, college-educated, professional-expert class.

The concept that I think brings it all together is the one that may be the ancestor of the word "intellectual". Our modern sense of it may have come to us from the French, "intellectuel" [*1], which was their late 19th century translation of a term that had been coined in Polish and spread through Eastern Europe, and then beyond: intelligentsia. Wikipedia:

The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society;^[1] as such, the intelligentsia consists of scholars, academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers.^[2][3]

Etymologically, the 19th-century Polish intellectual Bronisław Trentowski coined the term inteligencja (intellectuals) to identify and describe the university-educated and professionally active social stratum [...] men and women whose intellectualism would provide moral and political leadership to Poland in opposing the cultural hegemony of the Russian Empire.^[4]

Before the Russian Revolution, the term intelligentsiya (Russian: интеллигенция) identified and described the status class of university-educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, and intellectual enlightenment) allowed them to assume the moral initiative and the practical leadership required in Russian national, regional, and local politics.^[5]

[...]

In a society, the intelligentsia is a status class of intellectuals whose social functions, politics, and national interests are (ostensibly) distinct from the functions of government, commerce, and the military.^[6] [...]

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Polish word and the sociologic concept of the inteligencja became a European usage to describe the social class of men and women who are the intellectuals of the countries of central and of eastern Europe; in Poland, the critical thinkers educated at university, in Russia, the nihilists who opposed traditional values in the name of reason and progress. In the late 20th century, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that the intelligentsia has two types of workers: (i) intellectual workers who create knowledge (practical and theoretic) and (ii) intellectual workers who create cultural capital. Sociologically, the Polish inteligencja translates to the intellectuels in France and the Gebildete in Germany.^[6]

You might have noticed zipping past the expression "status class", which is not exactly the same thing as what I have termed cultural class, but it has a lot of overlap. That will have to be a topic for another day.

This concept of intelligentsia weakly attempts to position it in the Marxist system of class, in that it attempts to frame it in terms of what kinds of work these class members do, but it's a round peg being shoved at a square hole: what intellectual workers, whether they are creating knowledge or cultural capital, have in common is not their relationship to the means of production. What the physician who has his own clinic with a staff of seven has in common with the librarian who works for the local university and the novelist who is paid by her publisher as an independent contractor is neither economic nor economic interests per Marx, but cultural. It is a cultural class, and one that cross-cuts economic and interest classes.

And, crucially, because it is a cultural class, and not defined by how much money an individual has or how they make their living, a person can be in it because it is their culture either by upbringing or acculturation, regardless of whether they, themselves, are knowledge or cultural workers. So it may include not just the doctor, but the doctor's kid. Not just Harvard-trained philosopher, but the Harvard drop out. Not just the legal scholar writing about critical race theory, but the very pierced genderqueer teen scolding someone about "intersectionality" on Twitter. Not just the columnist writing a thought piece about the logical incoherence of eating meat, but the white dude with dreadlocks, birkenstocks, and bookbag, whom the hostess addresses saying, "You'll want the vegetarian menu, yes?" Not just the Senate-confirmed head of a part of the Federal government, but the chick in the firetower on a National Parks Service pittance all summer.

Because it is a cultural class, characterized by style and worldview, it can wind up being defined, in practice, by vibes. And often has been. Especially by anti-intellectuals.





4.

The edges of the category "intellectual", per the anti-intellectuals, are fuzzy and often flexible. Some times and places, it's been pretty constrained to a narrower, stricter set, such that merely being an office worker wouldn't qualify. In other times and places, the set of people designated intellectuals has been drawn much broader, such that it included, well, whomever it was convenient or appealing for it to contain.

Take for example during Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was originally persecuted by the "Red Guards". The Red Guards were predominantly middle schoolers. You know: tweens. Also high school students. They kicked things off by beating to death their teachers. Eventually Mao needed to rein in his maurading bands of murderous teenyboppers, so he held an audience with the Red Guards at Tiananmen Square where he informed them their next responsibility to the Revolution was, basically, to do penance for being educated (I repeat: middle-school students), and ordering them to go off to the countryside to re-education camps to study from the peasants how to be peasants. This was called "rustication". Thus the very persecutors of anti-intellectualism became, themselves, designated as intellectuals and shipped off to gulags to do hard labor, when Mao decided he had no further use for them and they were too dangerous a tool to leave lying around. "Between 1968 and 1978, an estimated 17 million urban youth were relocated to remote villages and border regions to work." (ibid)

Who constitutes an "intellectual" when anti-intellectualism starts gathering steam in a society can also be formulated in relationship to the other two class systems – and sometimes has been in ways equally... convenient.

In the genocidal examples I gave above, three of the four were nominally left-wing political movements: Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge. As such, they used leftist rhetoric. Not only were white-collar knowledge workers designated "intellectuals", "intellectuals" in turn were designated "bourgeoisie".

As you will recall, in Marxism, "bourgeoisie" is the class of employers. The class of people who own businesses – "own the means of production" – and make their income not by their own labor but by the labor of others, of employees. They exist in contrast with the "proletariat", the class of people who make their livings by taking employment, and being paid (by the bourgeoisie) for their labor.

You will notice that, in the 20th century, overwhelmingly intellectuals are not in fact bourgeoisie per Marxism. Professors work for colleges, journalists work for newspapers, teachers work for schools, librarians work for libraries. The two populations of "intellectual" who might commonly be business owners in the 20th century are physicians and lawyers, many of whom through the 20th century were in private practice. Novelists might well be self-employed, but rarely employed others. Most artists might be self-employed in their art, but also be employees in their day jobs. The "intellectual" class owns little to no means of production, except their own minds, and mostly earn their livelihoods through their own labor, not profiting from the labor of others.

But in the morality play that is Marxism, the "proletariat" were the good guys – the virtuous oppressed – and the "bourgeoisie" were the bad guys – the wicked oppressors. Consequently, when Marxist political authorities wanted to turn on a group of workers – who, being workers, were definitionally virtuous, and owed class solidarity per Marx – those workers had to be stripped of their identity as "proletariat", and designated "bourgeoisie".

Let's stop here for a moment and take this in. Given that getting called one of the "bourgeoisie" could be a prelude to being guillotined, you may see why there have been a hell of a lot of Americans who have been utterly terrified of Communism and Marxism as an ideology. I say this as someone who leans pretty hard to the left, politically: they had cause. In the name of Marxism, a whole lot of genocidal movements around the globe used the rhetoric of Marxism to justify class genocide. Not just of people you might think, in the darker corners of your secret heart, could use a little genociding – the ultra rich, landlords, bosses – but people like school teachers and poets and journalists and scientists and doctors.

The Khmer Rouge’s interpretation of Maoist communism drove them to create a classless society, simply by eliminating all social classes except for the ‘old people’ – poor peasants who worked the land. [ibid]

I invite you to reflect on how so many people who identify as leftists on social media seem prepared to turn on comrades and denounce them as the enemy, and offer up arguments as to why they're not really members of whatever oppressed identities they have. And then imagine them with guns and a sense of a license to kill for the greater good.

Returning to my point at hand, this ideological slight-of-hand bad-faith pseudo Marxism has been repeatedly used to take the "intellectuals" of society, who were very much workers, who did not own the means of production, and mark them out for oppression and extermination as "bourgeoisie".

It fact, it happened so much that it shifted the popular meaning of "bourgeoisie" away from the original sense as Marx defined it – capitalists – to mean "anyone who is not a laborer who labors with their hands", to start with. In other words, the term "bourgeoisie" in popular parlance stopped meaning a class in Marx's class system (an interest class), and started referring to a class in the social class system (a cultural class) – or rather a set of social classes. The "proletariat" started meaning what we would call "blue-collar workers", and "bourgeoisie" started meaning "anyone who wasn't one of us blue-collar workers (except the lumpenproletariat which we pretend doesn't exist)". It included the original bourgeoisie, the bosses and owners, but it also included the non-blue-collar middle class, which is to say the white-collar middle class.

And then it stopped including the original bourgeoisie. This was the point at which the term "bourgeois" starts referring to middle-class-ness:

bourgeois

adjective

1) belonging to the middle class

2) (disapproving) interested mainly in possessions and social status, and supporting traditional values

You can also see this today in the modern slang term, "bougie", which comes right from "bourgeois". What "bougie" gets applied to is not the heights of wealth or power - nobody would refer to Trump as "bougie" – but the trappings of the professional culture.

So in the 20th century, the term "bourgeoisie" became a communist's insult, and gradually, eventually stopped meaning "the people on top" and started meaning "people in the middle."

Relatedly, I gather that this shift is what also gave rise to another subtle bit of American class rhetoric. You may have noticed that we have the terms "middle class" and "working class" and sometimes they are synomyns and sometimes they are not. Indeed, sometimes they are more like antonyms.

The term "working class" comes right from Marxism. It's what is meant, per Marx, by the proletariat: people whose livelihood is from their own work, not the work of others. The proletariat is the class that works, as opposed to the other classes, which don't work.

I don't know the origin of "middle class". These days at least, it's typically used to refer to an economic class: the big swath between "rich" and "poor". But sometimes it's used to refer to a social class, as when I refer to "middleclassness", and sometimes it's used in contrast with the working class. It seems to me this is most often done when the speaker wants to conflate blue-collar social class with economic disadvantage, whether because they are sympathetic to the plight of the blue-collar social class and want to plead for sympathy on their behalf, or whether they want to stress the economic inadequacy of the blue-collar social class and cast capitalist shade on them. It's a way to imply, "Well, they're not poor, but they certainly aren't doing well by middle-class American economic standards." The distinction can also be used to set up a moral comparison between the social classes of salt-of-the-earth honest working class people who "don't have much" but are cheerfully content and the materialistic, status-conscious, social-climbing, money-grubbing middle class people – i.e. exactly what "bourgeois" came to mean as an insult in the latter, denigrating pseudo-Marxist sense.

This shift in the meaning of "bourgeoisie" is an expression of anti-intellectualism and a means by which it was perpetrated. It marks out the intelligentsia class – the social class characterized by being college-educated white-collar worker who makes their living by knowledge or cultural work – as the enemy of the proletariat, which in turn is redefined as strictly blue-collar workers and implicitly as culturally blue-collar workers. In a sense, this concept of "bourgeoisie" (and "bourgeois") has been propagating as a slur for white-collar workers, and an expression of prejudice against them.

The use of the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" and "bougie" this way has also served to expand the extent of who is considered such. It's not just the prominent culture-shaping thought leaders – the famous public intellectuals, the kinds of people you probably would think of as "intelligentsia", at least prior to reading this – who were meant by "bourgeoisie". The term expanded the target from that narrower sense of intelligentsia outward to the whole white-collar middle class.

This is how we go from, "Ugh, university professors with tenure, cushy lifestyles, and a newspaper column are so financially invested in the status quo they might as well be capitalists themselves" to the Maoist equivalent of the Hitler Youth beating middle school teachers to death in the streets, to, well, Trump.

The actual bourgeoisie, in the original Marxist sense, are no doubt delighted by every part of this evolution: delighted that the term "bourgeoisie" no longer refers to them, delighted that the term, still carrying all its Marxist moralizing hostility, is aimed at the class that is pretty consistently a thorn in its side, delighted that the peons are fighting amongst themselves rather than making a common cause in opposing them. I assume they're tickled pink that the white-collar middle class is being hoist by the petard of their own left-leaning politics.

But these are all Marxist terms and slang that left-leaning people use. Using such terms is a cultural marker of exactly the social class they referred to. The people on the right in the English-speaking world wouldn't be caught dead using the word "bourgeoisie" without sneer quotes. No, they had to find their own terminology to do the same work.

And, lo, "the elites" is it. It is the MAGA right's rebranding of the same old anti-intellectualism. "The elites" is just the latest anti-intellectual epithet for this same social class that anti-intellectualism is always about.






5.

I am not saying the gestapo are going to show up in the middle of the night to round you and your loved ones up to load onto the cattle cars. (I'm also not not saying that.) My point in explaining this is not to tell you you are imminent danger from the state or your neighbor.

I am explaining all of this to hopefully wisen you up to what is unfolding. I am trying to show you the shape and trajectory of it. If you have been bewildered – and it certainly seems that frankly expressed bewilderment is epidemic among American liberals and leftists – this is what you have been missing.

The puzzle you've been trying to put together: this is the picture on the box lid. All of the pieces that seemed so random and arbitrary – climate change denial and antivaxism and voting for politicians who make outrageous idiotic claims about wildfires being caused by Jewish space lasers and aircraft crashes caused by DEI and conspiracy theories about all sorts of silly things – fit together seamlessly in this frame: it's about attacking the epistemological authority of the expert class, the prerogative of "the elites", the white-collar college-educated class, to assert the nature of reality.

While much of their xenophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and other bigotry is earnest, the political el Niño current that is turning them into a monster storm is that social justice is a cultural value extremely associated with the college-educated white-collar class. This is why they have a narrative of "the elites" forcing "political correctness" (1990s), "affirmative action" (2000s), "wokeness" and "critical race theory" (2010s), and "DEI" (2020s) on them. They would insist they aren't racist at all, it's that "the elites" keep imposing unfair rules and policies and social norms on them in the name of antiracism that are entirely unnecessary and unfair to them. Of course they're lying, but look that the form their lie takes: it is a narrative that positions them as the poor, innocent victims of the oppression perpetrated by "the elites", and that anyone who oppresses them thus is clearly one of "the elites". Furthermore, what they are decrying as oppressive of them – such as being attentive to how one speaks and having formal policies and rules to redress wrongs – are very much cultural practices of the social class they hate, and very much not cultural practices they care for.

They didn't all suddenly decide they cared about what bathroom trans people use because of any deep-seated opinion on the matter. A substantial motivation for many on the right turning on trans people was simply because opposing transphobia was a "liberal" cause, and promulgating transphobia was a way to "own the libs". And in the respect the "liberals" extended trans people, they saw the very epistemological authority they so deeply coveted and bitterly resented not having: if those people get to assert they are any gender they like, why don't we get to assert that vaccines cause autism? If those people can assert that being agender is a thing, why can't we assert that global warming is a hoax? They see in the support of trans youth a truth written large about "the elites": the doctors and the teachers and the professors and the librarians (and the therapists!) are all in it together to extend this epistemological privilege to their kids. [*2]

Gender norms being class norms, and the "undermining" of traditional ideas about gender also look to the blue-collar class a heck of a lot like the white-collar class imposing their own norms about gender on the blue-collar class. The idea that a woman's career might be so worth preserving as to have an abortion for is one that is almost wholly predicated on the notion she would have the kind of career a college-educated white-collar worker aspires to, the kind of career that regularly and ordinarily requires protracted schooling, extensive sacrifices, and the postponement of childbearing. Which is not to say that women (and girls) who are blue-collar and not college educated might not have their own blue-collar career aspirations that would be compromised or wholly thwarted by an untimely pregnancy. But in blue-collar culture, much more "traditional" gender norms often prevail which hold that women's economic ambitions are properly subordinate to her domestic responsibilities, and if she should have to give up her dream of getting a cosmetology license or becoming a plumber, that is not so a great sacrifice as to justify refusing or deferring motherhood.

Thus the MAGA right embracing the deeply unpopular pro-life movement fits into their class hatred. Not only does it strike a blow for enforcing their class' traditionalist gender norms against the whole population, it gores a "liberal" ox: their uppity women's precious, precious careers. Take that, you America-hating elites.

I could go on, but I have more post to write, and really, once you start looking it's everywhere.





6.

This class of which I speak, the "intellectuals" that the bigotry form of anti-intellectualism is aimed at, the modern intelligentsia, the college-educated white-collar knowledge and cultural worker social class, is pretty much wholly oblivious to the fact that they are a class, much less that the titanic conflict in which they find themselves, this eruption of fascism, is a class conflict.

There is certainly some awareness that the conflict is a conflict of cultures, or at least a conflict over a culture, hence the term "culture war". But that the two sides in conflict – the two cultures – are class cultures is apparently not something our side has noticed, despite the fact the evidence for it is ubiquitous on casual inspection.

The evidence for this obliviousness has been in how people on the left have talked about the threat that Trump's reelection has posed to them personally: either that they are afraid because of what they anticipate the threats are to them as a person of color, or a gender or sexual orientation minority, or an immigrant, or a woman, or poor, or other identity they expect to be oppressed under the new regime, or that they expect they themselves will be safe because of their privilege because they are a straight, white, cisgender man with a good paying job. In neither case have I yet encountered someone saying, "I'm scared because they're going to target people of my social class" or "I'm thinking of leaving the country because I'm a scientist/poet/web developer/librarian/professor" or "I'm afraid for career and my safety because they hate people with PhDs" or anything remotely like that.

We are in this incredibly weird situation where people who belong to the hated group have no idea they belong to the hated group.

The intelligentsia class in the US has a worldview for understanding injustice and things like fascism, and that worldview sees through a lens of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identity categories – what the MAGA right derides as "identity politics". Class does not fit into that worldview. Class, as a topic, makes a lot of people in that class very, very uncomfortable as a topic.

In fact, class, as a topic, makes people in the left-leaning intelligentsia class as squirrelly and evasive as race, as a topic, makes people in the right-leaning blue-collar class.

When I first wrote "Class (American)",

It has long been commented (e.g. Fussell, Class) that discussing class is basically taboo in American culture: but, specifically, the class which it is taboo to discuss is social class. This presents a problem for Americans because social class is a real phenomenon, an important phenomenon around which huge amounts of American policy, politics, and culture organizes. It's the elephant in the American living room.

This is where that gets us: Americans are so unaware of social class – or so in denial about social class – they don't even notice that's the organizing principle of the strife that is tearing their country apart.

I think there's a number of reasons for that discomfort. I think that one of them is that a lot of leftists that, just like some people on the right, like their understandings of the world to be organized into Good Guys and Bad Guys. Every conflict must have one of each. One of the things that this "identity politics" worldview gives them is a moralistic category system, where some identities are the Good Guys and some are the Bad Guys, and that way they always know who is righteous and who is wicked.

Unfortunately, this falls down pretty badly when both sides in a conflict are Bad Guys.

---

I ran out of month before I ran out of post to write, so perhaps this will Be Continued....

---

Footnotes:

*1 The Wikipedia page on "Intellectual" contends that the origin of the word "intellectual" in English is French, and the French got it as a side effect of the Dreyfus Affair:

In France, the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), an identity crisis of antisemitic nationalism for the French Third Republic (1870–1940), marked the full emergence of the "intellectual in public life", especially Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau and Anatole France directly addressing the matter of French antisemitism to the public; thenceforward, "intellectual" became common, yet initially derogatory, usage; its French noun usage is attributed to Georges Clemenceau in 1898. Nevertheless, by 1930 the term "intellectual" passed from its earlier pejorative associations and restricted usages to a widely accepted term and it was because of the Dreyfus Affair that the term also acquired generally accepted use in English.^[7]: 21

They have a single source for this – Collini, Stefan (2006). Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – and I can confirm none of this.

*2 A consequence of this, then, is there's no political advantage to be gained by throwing trans people under the bus. The MAGA right doesn't hate the intelligentsia class because the intelligentsia class supports trans people. The MAGA right hates trans people because the intelligentsia class supports them. So in addition to being a betrayal of our humanist values of justice, liberty, and autonomy that define us as a culture, it's also stupid.

---

---

This post brought to you by the 207 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!