In mid-20th-century Western democracies, there were typically two main politically opposed factions that were comprised of either:
- wealthy, educated people whose parents were wealthy and educated (Brahmins), or
- less affluent and less educated people whose parents were neither affluent nor educated.
In 1955 both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties. Conversely, both poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labour or social-democratic ones.
Two generation later, there was a complete transformation in the alignment of political parties in terms of wealth and education.
The political poles gradually became populist and took an “anti-elitist” turn — although they simultaneously began to represent different kinds of elites.
- wealthy but less educated people (merchants), versus
- less affluent but very educated people.
As radical as this transformation may have been, it happened gradually, steadily.
Today, wealthy people still lean to the right. In contrast, the relationship between education and ideology began to reverse as early as the 1960s. Every year, the 10% of voters with the most years of schooling gravitated towards left-wing parties, while the remaining 90% slid the other way. By 2000, this had gone on for so long that, as a group, the most educated voters became more left-wing than their less-educated peers. The gap has only grown since then.
This is a consistent and stable trend throughout the Western world.
This trend is strikingly consistent. It developed just as fast in the 20th century as in the 21st, and appears in almost every Western democracy studied. This includes both two-party systems and proportional ones, in which green parties now lure educated voters, and nativist parties attract the less educated. Such breadth and regularity make the rise of right-wing populists like Mr Trump—and of left-of-centre technocrats like Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau—look like a historical inevitability.
The article attributes the rise of the populist left to rising levels of educational attainment in the developed world.
Ordinary people with modest middle-class incomes (e.g., librarians) would now have college educations or even post-graduate credentials.
They would have an entirely different political orientation (e.g., environmentalism) from either wealthy educated conservatives or less educated middle-class people.
The article claims that the pushback against such “left-wing populism” would create a countervailing “right-wing populism” that would gradually displace conservatism.
[T]he simplest explanation is that it stems from growing educational attainment. In 1950 less than 10% of eligible voters in America and Europe had graduated from college. Any party relying on this group for support would have had scant hope of winning elections. In contrast, more than a third of Western adults today have degrees, which is enough to anchor a victorious coalition. And once candidates and parties began catering to educated voters—who often put living in a liberal society above lowering their tax bills—rival politicians could start winning elections by taking the opposite position.
In the case of the USA, however, there might have been a greater force that stimulated right-wing populism among Americans who were more affluent yet less educated.
There are hints of this in Rick Perlstein’s 2001 book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus”.
As far back as the 1960s there was a political uprising among provincial businessmen against the New Deal alliance of big government, big labor, and big business.
But first, in order to understand this, one must get a snapshot of a socioeconomically stratified society in which there were very affluent conservatives who were nonetheless outsiders.
In the article above, wealthy, educated people are referred to as “Brahmins”.
Brahmins are the ultimate insiders.
That is a reference to the highest caste in India, which is priestly in nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin
Brahmin are a varna (class) in Hinduism. They specialised as priests (purohit, pandit, or pujari), teachers (acharya or guru), ayurvedic physicians and protectors of sacred learning across generations.
The traditional occupation of Brahmins was that of priesthood at the Hindu temples or at socio-religious ceremonies and rite of passage rituals such as solemnising a wedding with hymns and prayers.[2][4] Theoretically, the Brahmins were the most respected of the four social classes.[5] Their livelihood is prescribed to be one of strict austerity and voluntary poverty.
It is also a reference to “Boston Brahmins”, the New England WASP elite that found its locus at Harvard University.
The Boston Brahmins or Boston elite are members of Boston‘s traditional upper class.[1] They are often associated with Harvard University; Anglicanism; upper-class clubs such as the Somerset in Boston, the Knickerbocker in New York City, the Metropolitan in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific-Union Club in San Francisco; and traditional Anglo-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins.[2][3] They are considered White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
This is a little bit of a lost history.
Today, young Americans often don’t know what a “Boston Brahmin” or even what a “WASP” is.
To them, there are “white people” and everyone else.
Digging deeper into the layers of history:
- The USA is dominated by a “white” majority.
- Before that it was dominated by white Protestants.
- Before that it was dominated by New England WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
- Pinnacle of power was dominated by profoundly wealthy inbred New Yorkers of Dutch background, like the Roosevelt family. For example, Eleanor Roosevelt’s maiden name was Roosevelt, and she was related to Theodore Roosevelt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in Manhattan, New York City,[11][12] to socialites Anna Rebecca Hall and Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt.[13] From an early age she preferred to be called by her middle name, Eleanor. Through her father, she was a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. Through her mother, she was a niece of tennis champions Valentine Gill “Vallie” Hall III and Edward Ludlow Hall.
Roosevelt was born into a world of immense wealth and privilege, as her family was part of New York high society called the “swells”.
It might be useful to understand all this by looking back at the terminology of British sociology of the 1960s and 1970s (IIRC).
- The “System” is the economic, political and cultural framework we all live in, which is run by
- the “Establishment”, which is comprised of people who were born into connected families and who went to elite schools, but which itself is dominated by
- the “Elite”, which is a kind of aristocracy.
In the USA, there seems to be a gradual democratization, with groups like the Irish entering the mainstream and then later the Establishment, and finally the Elite (Joe Biden).
A documentary on the conflict between William Buckley and Gore Vidal explains that they were actually very similar to each other, and this might have been the source of their enmity.
To most of us, Buckley and Vidal may have seemed like members of the elite because of their demeanor, accents, education, and wealth, but this is an illusion.
While they were born into the establishment and went to all the right schools, they were outsiders who did not pull the strings.
(“Best of Enemies”, 2015, trailer)
The distinction might be made more evident in the James Bond spy novels.
The character Bond seems to be part of the British establishment, but not of the British elite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_(literary_character)#Background
During Bond’s visit to the College of Arms, he says “[m]y father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss.”[38] Later in the novel Bond restates his Scottish Presbyterian roots.
The novel reveals Bond’s father, Andrew Bond, was a Scot who came from the Highlands from near Glencoe and his mother, Monique Delacroix, was Swiss from the Canton de Vaud.[42] The young James Bond spends much of his early life abroad, becoming multilingual in German and French because of his father’s work as a Vickers armaments company representative.
After the death of his parents, Bond goes to live with his aunt, Miss Charmian Bond, in the village of Pett Bottom, where he completes his early education. Later, he briefly attends Eton College at “12 or thereabouts”, but is removed after two halves because of girl trouble with a maid.[40] After being sent down from Eton, Bond is sent to Fettes College in Scotland, his father’s school.
Ian Flemming based the character largely on his own brother Peter, a British adventurer, journalist, soldier and travel writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fleming_(writer)
Peter Fleming was one of four sons of the barrister and Member of Parliament (MP) Valentine Fleming, who was killed in action in 1917, having served as MP for Henley from 1910. Fleming was educated at Eton, where he edited the Eton College Chronicle. The Peter Fleming Owl (the English meaning of “Strix”, the name under which he later wrote for The Spectator) is still awarded every year to the best contributor to the Chronicle.[4] He went on from Eton to Christ Church, Oxford, and graduated with a first-class degree in English.
The James Bond character was based on other real men from various strata of British society.
Aside from Fleming’s brother, a number of others also provided some aspects of Bond’s make up, including Conrad O’Brien-ffrench, a skiing spy whom Fleming had met in Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with distinction in 30 AU during the war, and Bill “Biffy” Dunderdale, station head of MI6 in Paris, who wore cuff-links and handmade suits and was chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls-Royce. Sir Fitzroy Maclean was another figure mentioned as a possibility, based on his wartime work behind enemy lines in the Balkans, as was the MI6 double agent Dušan Popov.
One of them seem almost like a parody of the cosmopolitan aristocrat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_O%27Brien-ffrench
Conrad Fulke Thomond O’Brien-ffrench, 2nd Marquis de Castelthomond (19 November 1893[2] – 23 October 1986[3]) was a distinguished British Secret Intelligence Officer, Captain in the Tipperary Rangers of the Royal Irish Regiment and 16th The Queen’s Lancers in World War I, and Mountie for the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.[4] He was also an accomplished artist, linguist, mountaineer, skier, and author.
Conrad Fulke Thomond O’Brien-ffrench was born in London, England, the second son of Henry Albert De Vreque O’Brien-ffrench, 1st Marquis de Castelthomond, and his wife Winifred née Thursby, heiress and daughter of Major James Legh Thursby, of Ormerod House Lancashire.[5][6]
He and his elder brother Rollo (Rollo Adrien Vladimir Thursby Marie Altieri O’Brien-ffrench) spent their early childhood in Italy at Villa Torlonia (Frascati) in the Alban Hills, east of Rome, and then at Piazza dell’Indipendenza in Florence, where they received private tutoring in English, French and Italian.[7] Returning to England, Conrad joined Rollo at the Wick, a preparatory school at Hove in Sussex. After Rollo left the Wick, Conrad completed his preparatory schooling at St. Aubyns School in Rottingdean, and then attended Bradley Court Agricultural College in the Forest of Dean, where he developed his lifelong interest in horsemanship, fox hunting and other country pursuits, and became a junior member of the Ledbury Hunt. During these years his other siblings, Yvonne (Yvonne Castelthomond O’Brien-ffrench)[5] and Alexis (Alexis Evelyn Henry O’Brien-ffrench),[5] were born.
Another model for Bond seems like a wealthy man of the establishment, but not an aristocrat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Dunderdale
Commander Wilfred Albert “Biffy” Dunderdale MBE (24 December 1899 – 13 November 1990) was a British spy and intelligence officer.[1][2] It has been suggested that Dunderdale was used by Ian Fleming as a basis for the character of James Bond.
Wilfred Dunderdale was born in Odessa, son of Richard Albert Dunderdale, a shipping magnate.[1]
Dunderdale served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, despite his thick accent.[4]
He worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) between 1921 and 1959.[1] His work involved liaison with French intelligence (1926–40) and Polish intelligence (1940–45).
Bill “Biffy” Dunderdale, was station head of MI6 in Paris, wore cufflinks and handmade suits and was chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls-Royce. After his retirement from SIS in 1959 he was appointed British Consul-General in Chicago.[4]
Later moving to New York, he died there in November 1990.[4] According to notes compiled by Stephen Dorril for his 1989 book, A Who’s Who of the British State, Dunderdale was a member of Boodle’s.
Yet another of the models for James Bond seems to have been an ordinary man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Dalzel-Job
Patrick Dalzel-Job (1 June 1913 – 14 October 2003) was a British naval intelligence officer and commando in World War II. He was also an accomplished linguist, author, mariner, navigator, parachutist, diver, and skier.
Born in London, Dalzel-Job was the only son of Captain Ernest Dalzel-Job, who was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. After his father’s death Dalzel-Job and his mother lived in various locations, including Switzerland, and he learnt to ski and sail. They returned to the UK in 1931 where he built his own schooner, the Mary Fortune, which he and his mother spent the next two years sailing around the British coast.[1][2]
In 1937, they sailed to Norway and spent the next two years exploring the coast. During this time Dalzel-Job became fluent in Norwegian. He and his mother took on as crew a Norwegian schoolgirl named Bjørg Bangsund from the city of Tromsø.
He briefly taught math, English, and chemistry.
IIRC, the British already had a highly developed intelligence service from its empire, especially in response to the perceived rivalry from the Russians in Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
The career of a spy would be appealing for an educated, worldly aristocrat, as well as for an ordinary man of talent thirsty for adventure.
But in either case, British intelligence was not the kind of bureaucratized institution that would emerge during the Cold War.
Hence, the James Bond novels find their historical reference to characters from WW2 and not the Cold War.
In fact, in James Bond movies, the Soviet Union is a fringe player, and a respected and likeable (sometimes lovable) adversary.
The nemesis for Bond is a secret international criminal organization run by an evil genius, more similar to Nazi Germany than to global communism.
(Dr. Mabuse)
In contrast to WW2, during the Cold War, the exemplary fictitious British spy might be the highly intelligent and educated yet unglamorous George Smiley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Smiley
George SmileyOBE[1] is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is a career intelligence officer with “The Circus”, the British overseas intelligence agency.
Le Carré created Smiley as an intentional foil to James Bond, a character who he believed depicted an inaccurate and damaging version of espionage life.[2] Short, overweight, balding, and bespectacled, Smiley is polite and self-effacing and frequently allows others to mistreat him, including his serially unfaithful wife; these traits mask his inner cunning, excellent memory, mastery of tradecraft, and occasional ruthlessness.[3] His genius, coupled with other characters’ willingness to underestimate him, allows Smiley to consistently achieve his goals and ultimately become one of the most powerful spies in Britain.
The character is held in high esteem in Britain, where he has become a pop-culture icon on par with Bond.[4][6] The Guardian has called him “the sort of spy [Britain] believes it ought to have: a bit shabby, academic, basically loyal, and sceptical of the enthusiasms of his political masters.”
George Smiley is a middle-class man who went to Oxford, and went on to spy in Germany during WW2.
Smiley was born to middle-class parents in the South of England in the early part of the 20th century (his birth date is retconned from 1906 to 1915 in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and spent at least part of his childhood in Germany near the Black Forest.[17] He attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction (in the 1982 BBC television adaptation of Smiley’s People, he refers to himself as a fellow of Lincoln College, le Carré’s alma mater in real life), studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature. One July, while considering post-graduate study in that field, he was recruited into the Circus by his tutor, Jebedee.
His aristocratic wife is a metaphor for the British elite which he serves.
His weary but certain loyalty to her — and to the elite — is not reciprocated.
In 1943, he was recalled to England to work at Circus headquarters, and in 1945 successfully proposed marriage to Lady Ann Sercomb, a beautiful, aristocratic, and libidinous young lady working as a secretary there. Ann would soon prove herself chronically unfaithful, engaging in numerous affairs and occasionally leaving Smiley entirely, though she always returned to him after the initial excitement of the separation ended.
Moving down further on the food chain of fictional British spies, there is Harry Palmer, played by the defiantly working-class Michael Caine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Palmer
Harry Palmer is a British Army sergeant forcibly drafted into the security services to work away a prison sentence for black marketeering. He worked first for Army Intelligence, then the Foreign Office.
Harry Palmer does have some aristocratic tastes, despite Michael Caine’s accent.
Harry Palmer has much in common with [author Len] Deighton, including passions for military history, cooking, and classical music.
The main point here is that the class (caste) background of fictitious British spies moves downward with the rise of meritocracy and increasing rates of education attainment.
However, several other assertions are also made here:
- These three characters — Bond, Smiley, Palmer — each exhibit the ideals of virtuosity and versatility in their own way.
- These ideals penetrated deep into American and British culture in the 1960s, and originated from the James Bond films.
- This represented one of several cultural revolutions in the immediate postwar era.
- These cultural revolutions were, in some respects, counter-revolutions against Christian otherworldliness and hearkened back to earlier modern periods (e.g., the Renaissance) which likewise looked back in history for inspiration.
In the 21st century — or even in the 1980s — there was a sense that the Bond franchise was outdated.
However, it is difficult to emphasize what what a sensation those films were in the mid-1960s.
The Bond films signified a cultural revolution in popular entertainment that preceded the turmoil and transformation of the later 1960s.
The ideals of virtuosity and versatility were at the heart of this metamorphosis in popular culture.
Virtuosity became the ideal of classic rock and later of rap music, although it was explicitly rejected as undemocratic in punk.
Virtuosity seems related to the Renaissance ideal of virtù as skillfulness as opposed to the Christian virtues, an idea that seeped into modern culture from Machiavelli.
The niceness and kindness that is required to be a good neighbor in Christianity is different from the ruthlessness, judiciousness, and skill required to be a good citizen or patriot.
That is, kindness and generosity are sometimes necessary for survival and success (e.g., the magnanimity of a king).
But the opposite of gentleness is, at times, also required.
Virtù is all about knowing when and how to act accordingly.
Good judgement and flexibility are vital because fortune is fickle and the world is fundamentally unpredictable.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#PoweVirtFort
Related to the need for flexibility is the ideal of versatility manifest in the idea of the “Renaissance man”.
Hence, James Bond moves smoothly between English sadistic brutality and Continental witty suaveness (removing a scuba suit after a fight to reveal a tuxedo underneath).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath#Renaissance_man
Which of today’s world leader could be, like James Bond, a man or woman of virtù?
That is, which of the most visible global political leaders are able to be gracious and classy at one moment, and ferocious as a lion in the next?
Looking at the current G7 summit, it seems like it is the older politicians who are capable of being as sly as a fox and as savage as a lion.
Joe Biden in particular has the Irish politician’s easy charm and quick temper.
On “The Crown”, the late Price Phillip seems like he could be a real king who could be a charming diplomat but also lead armies into battle.
David Bowie also had the character of a king.
(MTV interviews David Bowie, David Bowie interrogates MTV)
The men who worked on the first Bond films became obsessed with every aspect of those movies (e.g., the modernist architecture, the right way to smoke and drink, etc.).
Yet the first two Bond movies were not mega-hits, because the public did not understand the strange new (old) ideal that had set afire the imagination of the filmmakers.
The third Bond film (Goldfinger, 1964), however, was a cultural phenomenon because the radicalness of Bond had finally sunk in.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2366308/
There were two other hysterias in American popular entertainment during the early post-war era:
- Elvis in the 1950s and
- the Beatles in the mid-1960s.
Elvis and the Beatles were both maligned by conservative Christians.
Elvis has been explained as an American pop culture version of Lord Byron, the symbol of the narcissistic and idealistic 19th-century romantic poet with godlike creative powers (C. Paglia).
The following is the usual take on the romantic era, which emphasizes the emotional, rebellious individual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature.[7][8] It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment,[10] the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution.[11] Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of “heroic” individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art.
The flip side of rejecting rationality and mechanistic science, however, was an embrace of holism and a return to tradition, mystery, ritual, and spectacle.
Romanticism could therefore have a conservative Catholic appeal.
In Elvis’s heyday that took the form of the popular pianist Liberace.
The older working-class religious conservatives who hated Elvis could love Liberace.
Like the Book of the Month Club, Liberace imbued their lives with the gravity of heritage, an aura of respectability, and a touch of romantic stardust.
That might be related to a pattern in which raw, authentic, dangerous, and risque figures in popular culture have a tame, generic, conservative counterpart in mass culture.
- In the 1980s, the actor Bruce Willis was the K-Mart version of Mickey Rourke, and
- in the 2000s, “Desperate Housewives” was the safe, suburban fantasy version of “Sex in the City”.
Curiously, the Beatles were both tame and dangerous, conservative and destabilizing.
If Elvis was a sexy, dangerous romantic rebel, the Beatles, with their formal suits and ties, reassured audiences that “it’s gonna be alright”.
Amidst postwar fears of communism and the atomic bomb, the Beatles seemed to tap into the 18th-century Enlightenment optimism about the potential for rational modern world.
The Beatles would appeal to Steven Pinker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.[2] The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the pursuit of happiness, sovereignty of reason, and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
At the core of their conservative appeal was the Beatles’ cuteness.
This reflects a cultural strategy of amelioration.
It’s a way of making life bearable in a modern society that has become vast, impersonal, and regimented.
Mechanical and electronic items that are otherwise alienating are cosmetically altered to be personable and cute.
In a society like Japan, the weaving of cuteness into the daily fabric of life is generally a conservative strategy of adjusting oneself psychologically to a life of regimentation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawaii
This might be where the Beatles went awry for conservatives.
The Beatles were cute, but their cuteness involved more than the domesticated cuteness of, say, Donnie and Marie Osmond.
The Beatles added a new twist to their conservative reassurance that the modern world we live in is okay.
This was the idea that the modern world could be FUN!!!
It was the Beatles’ witty, creative, playful spontaneity that rubbed the stoic older generation the wrong way.
The Beatles, after all, borrowed their name (and their hairstyle) from the Nazi car supposedly designed in part by Adolf Hitler which became a hit with southern California surfers.
The appropriation of the VW Beetle as a cute car is an act of amelioration, which could be conservative.
But VW Beetle was not merely some cute car adopted by nice people in the Midwest.
The Beetle was modified to be aggressively fun in sunny California.
The Beetle, and the Beatles, connected cuteness with fun and spontaneity and creativity.
That can be disruptive — or, at least, it can be sold to the public as being disruptive.
IIRC, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and made his big comeback, Apple’s website featured the band the Beatles, the VW Beetle, and Star Wars movies.
There is something superficially similar to passive-aggressiveness in the appeal of Beatles.
That is, the Beatle’s outwardly presented themselves as harmless, but in their playfulness they embodied a kind of rebellion.
The Beatles’ music was able to fly right under the radar and avoid persecution while still registering discontent with a stultifying status quo.
Hence, the Beatles were one of the most popular bands in communist and post-communist Czechoslovakia.
However, cuteness and fun do not always have a disruptive side.
For example, in a society like South Korea, the kind of slick cuteness one finds in K-pop is linked to highly choreographed, coordinated performances and stereotypical role playing.
This is why for most societies, K-pop has an irresistible combination of energy, fun, and spontaneity, safely tempered with cuteness and orderliness.
K-pop seems like an endless iteration of Janet Jackson, but deep down its kind of like a neutered version of the Beatles.
Elvis, the Beatles, and James Bond were sensations because they represented a change in the ideals by which young Americans guided their lives.
They became part of the new postwar “ego ideal”.
The ego ideal is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become.
That is, it is an image of the perfect self towards which the ego should aspire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_ideal
It’s not that every man has a secret “alter ego” — an alternate self which he wants to be, and this happens to be personified by James Bond.
It’s that James Bond, as well as Elvis and the Beatles, were daring new secular ideals in popular entertainment that dethroned previous ideals.
Hence the mania surrounding their advent.
Bond, Elvis and the Beatles resonate with the older ideals of the Renaissance, Romanticism, and the Enlightenment, respectively.
Those ideals challenged Christian ideals even while being influenced and inspired by Christianity.
As the popular versions of modern worldly secular ideals, James Bond, Elvis and the Beetles represent one small step for man, and one giant leap toward the Nietzschean Übermensch.
The Übermensch or “over-human” is an ideal that rejects the otherworldliness of Christianity and the creation of a new earthly value system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch
Nietzsche introduces the concept of the Übermensch in contrast to his understanding of the other-worldliness of Christianity: Zarathustra proclaims the will of the Übermensch to give meaning to life on earth, and admonishes his audience to ignore those who promise other-worldly fulfillment to draw them away from the earth.[5][6] The turn away from the earth is prompted, he says, by a dissatisfaction with life that causes the sufferer to imagine another world which will fulfill his revenge. The Übermensch grasps the earthly world with relish and gratitude.
Zarathustra declares that the Christian escape from this world also required the invention of an immortal soul separate from the earthly body. This led to the abnegation and mortification of the body, or asceticism. Zarathustra further links the Übermensch to the body and to interpreting the soul as simply an aspect of the body.
Zarathustra ties the Übermensch to the death of God.
While the concept of God was the ultimate expression of other-worldly values and their underlying instincts, belief in God nevertheless did give meaning to life for a time.
“God is dead” means that the idea of God can no longer provide values.
Nietzsche refers to this crucial paradigm shift as a reevaluation of values.
According to Nietzsche, the moral doctrine of Christianity had become outdated.
With the sole source of values exhausted, the danger of nihilism looms.
Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values to banish nihilism.
If the Übermensch acts to create new values within the moral vacuum of nihilism, there is nothing that this creative act would not justify.
Alternatively, in the absence of this creation, there are no grounds upon which to criticize or justify any action, including the particular values created and the means by which they are promulgated.
In order to avoid a relapse into anti-worldly ideals, the creation of these new values cannot be motivated by the same instincts that gave birth to those ascetic tables of values.
Instead, they must be motivated by a love of this world and of life.
Whereas Nietzsche diagnosed the Christian value system as a reaction against life and hence destructive in a sense, the new values for will be life-affirming and creative.
That is the cultural significance of James Bond movies in terms of nihilism.
But now let us turn back to the socioeconomic context of those Bond films.
There is a long slide down the socioeconomic ladder going from James Bond to Harry Palmer, and it might reflect the growth in meritocracy in the UK from WW2 onward.
However, there is one genre of film diametrically opposed to the glamorous spy movie that is nevertheless rooted in the WW2 era that inspired the James Bond character.
The exact opposite of a James Bond movie would be an American WW2 movie.
The American WW2 movie is all about balancing teamwork and diversity in order to survive.
One can see this in the 1970 movie “Kelly’s Heroes”, about American G.I.s trying to pull off a bank heist in Europe while fighting the German army.
The dilemma for movie studios in 1970 was an American public divided between an older patriotic generation and self-indulgent Baby Boomers.
The solution here was to fuse a classic WW2 movie with a heist movie, and throw in some in some out-of-place hippie soldiers (Donald Sutherland as “Oddball”).
(“Kelly’s Heroes”, 1970, trailer)
The point is that by 1970, two different popular cinematic genres had already played themselves out:
- the upper-class, educated, individualistic spy movie, and
- the WW2 movie about a working-class team of diverse soldiers.
The WW2 movie lives on in certain blockbuster movies, in which a ragtag, intrepid band of workers venture off into the unknown on some quest.
That’s also the story that the Democratic Party from FDR to Joe Biden has told itself about itself.
But the Democratic Party has seen the rise of a new story alongside the old war story.
This time it’s a new kind spy thriller instead of the old war movie.
This would be 2002’s “The Bourne Identity”.
It’s Matt Damon doing his usual schtick as a talented outsider with an identity crisis, only this time as a multi-talented, multilingual assassin with amnesia.
But that’s also the story of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who graduated with honors in economics and international relation from a prestigious university but wound up working in a restaurant.
The Bourne trilogy was influential, and forced changes in the Bond franchise, with the hiring of a gloomy Daniel Craig who looked like an older, tired Matt Damon.
That’s a vexed innovation, because portraying the self-assured James Bond as a troubled victim make no sense.
The war movie likewise has transformed itself in response to the Bourne films.
This is something suitable for what Republicans have gradually morphed into.
This time it’s a new kind of war movie instead of the old kind of spy thriller.
Notably, Matt Damon’s spy as an elite-trained outsider on the run has a twin who proudly serves his country in uniform.
This is the sniper movie, which typically features a war-hero-stabbed-in-the-back-by-the-elite conspiracy theory.
The classic of the genre might be 2007’s “Shooter” starring Donny Wahlberg, who played Matt Damon’s doppelgänger in 2006’s “The Departed”.
The sniper movie finds its direct lineage in 1982’s “First Blood”, the first in the Rambo franchise.
“Shooter” in particular has a kind of syncretic, Tulsi Gabbard-ish appeal for both left-wing romantics and right-wing populists.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/02/men-gone-wild
The action has an oddly undifferentiated, wearying feel to it. Yet this standard industrial product does something strange. On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it’s angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The filmmakers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the Pat Buchanan conservatives who hate big government and multinational corporations and want American warriors to stay home. The clash of political currents suggests the degree of confusion roiling Hollywood at the moment. How do moviemakers find military heroes in the midst of an unpopular overseas war?
In that first Rambo movie, the protagonist is a working-class hero harassed by the local authorities.
What is unusual is that the persecution is being carried out by other working-class enforcers — cops — on their own initiative.
In fact, in order to persuade Rambo to cease and desist, Rambo’s commanding officer from Vietnam is brought in (Richard Crenna).
Unlike the conspiracy theory of a movie like “Shooter”, there is no obvious anti-elitist ethos in “First Blood”.
In this way, “First Blood” wears the window dressing of a typical Vietnam war movies, and postwar literature in general:
A soldier returns home from a war a stranger to a nation intent on forgetting the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier%27s_Home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Years_of_Our_Lives
“First Blood” also aligns with Sylvester Stallone’s other signature movie “Rocky” in a strange way.
Although it adorns itself with the themes of postwar literature and movies, “First Blood” is obviously a commercial action movie.
In contrast, as a low-budget first effort, “Rocky” shrewdly presents itself as both an authentic boxing movie and a love story that eschews the slickness of a big movie.
But in a darkly cunning way, “Rocky” subtly plays to a mass market.
The secret is that “Rocky” appeals to working-class white resentment by portraying Blacks as wealthy snobs.
Likewise, “First Blood” and “Shooter” play to class resentment, although more openly than “Rocky” did.
However, this resentment is not the dark secret of either the Rambo or sniper movies the way it was in “Rocky”.
The real secret of these stab-in-the-back-by-the-elite movies is that this resentment mostly does NOT appeal to the working class, which is ambivalent.
In the real world, the primary audience for right-wing populist conspiracy theories is the less educated prosperous businessmen.
In particular, the classic right-wing populist is the prosperous rural businessman who did not graduate from college, and who was the odd man out in the New Deal coalition.
This brings us back to Rick Perlstein’s “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus”.
From the Amazon description:
Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR. Perlstein’s narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.
Perlstein’s book labels Goldwater’s movement as “conservative”.
However, that movement might be better described as a manifestation of right-wing populism that was shunned by conservatives.
Perlstein does emphasize how this movement was a fringe phenomenon.
Remarkably, the movement eventually took over the Republican Party, long after Goldwater lost the 1964 election in a devastating landslide.
It’s incomparable to any development in the Democratic Party.
It is hard, now, to grasp just how profoundly the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted between 1964 and today. Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations — and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of the 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, [politicians] would have to proclaim softer versions of these positions just to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination.
Perlstein asks the reader to empathize and put themselves in the place of the typical far-right American of generations ago who dwelt on fringes of the mainstream.
Far from an eccentric wing-nut, the quintessential right-winger was a solid, respectable small-town businessman who ran an established, prosperous family business.
His experience was that the entire society had turned against him.
Imagine you live in a town of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred thousand souls — in Indiana, perhaps, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Tennessee — with a colonnaded red-brick city hall at its center, a Main Street running its breadth, avenues rimmed with modest bungalows and named for trees and exotic heroes and local luminaries, interrupted at intervals by highsteeped churches. On the outskirts of town are factories. It is June 1959, and, three times a day, they throw up great clouds of smoke, churning out vast pools of cement, cords of lumber, spools of rolled steel, machine parts of every size and description. Although no one who didn’t have to would ever venture inside one of these factories, locals point to them with pride, because they are what make their little town prosper, and because all over the world foundries use machine parts inscribed with the town’s name.
Imagine you are the proprietor of one of these concerns. Your father founded it; perhaps to start things up the cadged a loan from the father of the man you bank with now. Probably, by dint of their shared membership on any number of company boards and fraternal orders and community chests and church committees, the bank let it slide when your father — who had made sacrifices to expand his plant in the hopes that the town’s grandchildren, too, might enjoy its fruits — was late a time or two paying off a note.
Eventually, any provincial businessman who is successful will have to deal with Wall Street, the elite world of finance in a faraway country called New York City.
By the time you took over the plant, the additions you built were too expensive to finance through any of the banks in your town, which was now a small city. More and more you found yourself trudging to New York, hat in hand, for money. New York, after all, controlled over a quarter of the nation’s banking reserves. Your letterhead soon bore an address in Manhattan as well as the one in your town, but it galled you what it took to get the Wall Street boys to take you seriously (you had worked much harder than any of them when you went to college with them back East).
Eventually, the unions came to town.
Unlike in the past, the erstwhile loyal workers joined the union because the political system controlled by Democrats advised them to.
When the union rep came by to try to sign up your men (there are hundreds, but you know most of them by name), you told the workers stories of the sacrifices your father made for their fathers; you reminded them of the times you kept everyone on the payroll when business was slack, of how you were always ready with an advance to help with the new baby or a sick mother. For fifty years they had seemed perfectly happy without a union, but when FDR signed the Wagner Act, the organizers came again, this time with a slogan: “The President wants you to join a union.” A union came.
The Democratic Party had transformed during the Great Depression into a coalition of big government, big business, and big labor.
This left the small businessman out in the cold and on his own with the whole world against him.
You hated Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932 he ran on a platform of balanced budgets, less bureaucracy, and removing the federal government from competition with private enterprise. Then the New Deal threw money at everyone and everything — everyone and everything, that is, but you and your plants. You thought it was a godsend to industrialists who managed thousands of workers, instead of hundreds, and their friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration authorized executives in every industry to regulate their own. The men he picked were inevitably from the biggest companies, no one you knew. You had no say when they set floors so high that they destroyed the only edge you had over them in accessing the market — you could no longer undercut their prices. You had no say when your taxes ballooned to pay for Roosevelt’s deficits, which you knew would only bring inflation.
Bigger companies licked at your heels all through the Depression. Government regulations — whose application was the same for large and small firms, but which invariably fell heavier on the small — began to feel more burdensome to you. The armies of unemployed were as uninterested in fine distinctions as the New Dealers were: when Roosevelt attacked the “economic royalists” at his acceptance speech in 1936, you found yourself as much the object of the poor’s resentment as was the company that wanted to bury you. You felt like a victim.
The small-town small businessman leaned toward isolationism.
Moreover, the Democratic Party’s interventionist foreign policy also had economic consequences that made things worse for him.
Then came the Second World War. You hadn’t asked for this fight; as a leader of the America First Committee you had agitated against U.S. involvement. You didn’t pay your taxes so that Washington could fight England’s quarrels. Lawyers from John Kenneth Galbraith’s Office of Price Administration and the National War Labor Board, small, petty, jealous men who had never met a payroll in their life, now poked their heads into your plant, read your profit and loss statements, told you what to make and what to charge.
It was in this period that the provincial businessman’s isolationism began to transform into a rabid, militant anti-communism.
By the time it was over, Roosevelt, not happy just to sell out this country to the collectivists, was busy selling out the rest of the world as well: first by tying MacArthur’s hands in the Philippines, and then by handing over vast tracts of China to Stalin to get him to join the war against Japan. His striped-pants diplomats had been busy signing secret agreements at Yalta that would leave the countries of Eastern Europe in the hands of godless communists — and one by one by one they entered the ranks of the “captive nations”.
To his consternation, in the postwar period, the Republican Party began to adopt the policies of the Democrats.
Eisenhower talked a good game about returning government back to the states. Yet his first recommendation to congress was to establish a new cabinet department of Health, Education, and Welfare! He left the heroic Senator McCarthy to twist in the gale-force winds issuing from the Eastern Establishment Press. He worked out a humiliating “truce” in Korea that tied us to the United Nations’ war aims. You pledged to fight against our boys serving under any flag but the American flag, so long as you lived.
But the fight was getting harder and harder. In 1958, recession set in, and practically every real Republican was voted out of Congress. You watched as the presumptive nominee for 1960, Richard Nixon — the man who brought down Alger Hiss! — announced a trip to Moscow. Worse, you heard rumors that the archinternationalist of them all, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, would be the only one to challenge Nixon for the nomination.
You despaired of every having a chance to vote against the socialistic Republicrats. You despaired of Washington ever balancing a budget. You despaired of ever again seeing a President who had read the Constitution. You despaired of real Republicans receiving anything but ridicule from Eastern “Republican” newspapers…. You despaired for a country brainwashed into believing it was approaching paradise, and you despaired of anyone ever waking up. You sent more and more, bigger and bigger checks to any patriotic, pro-American, pro-Constitution organization, candidate, radio program, or publication that asked. Better they get your hard-earned money than the Internal Revenue Service.
The provincial businessman was therefore opposed to:
- socialism and communism,
- corporations and Wall Street, and
- internationalism in foreign affairs.
This disparate collection of enemies were, in his mind, fused together and personified in the Democratic Party and, later, in the Republican Party.
Sounds Jewish.
That is, classic anti-semitism famously attributes every possible negative stereotype to the Jews — even contradictory ones.
This is just like the shark in Jaws, onto which Steven Spielberg wanted audiences to project their own various fears (of death, of aggression, of the unknown, etc.).
But much the same has been said about the white whale in “Moby Dick”.
The whale represented nature but also symbolized the forces arrayed against nature — capitalism, industrialism, expansionism, imperialism.
The ship that hunted the white whale likewise stood for the aggressive forces of modernity, but also the victims of modernity.
The Pequod was named after a tribe of Native Americans who had been wiped out, but the ship was also a manifestation of what exterminated the native peoples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pequod_(Moby-Dick)
It is revealed that Pequod was named for the Algonquian-speaking Pequot tribe of Native Americans, decimated and scattered in the early 1600s by the Pequot War and by the epidemic that preceded it.
The classic fascist historical narrative unites opposites by claiming that:
- Once Upon a Time, society was a harmonious and happy hierarchy, with noble rulers who took care of their people who lived an unchanging and orderly life, until one day
- money-obsessed wanderers came in and corrupted everyone by putting a price on everything and thereby created a competitive rat race, and then
- everything kept on changing ceaselessly, with the social order as much in a state of flux as an economic realm which was now constantly buffeted by automation and obsolescence.
- To make things worse, these outsiders also introduced scholarship, science, and democracy, so that now everything was distressingly up for debate and discussion, and
- the outsiders brought in universalistic ideas of human equality (Christianity) that eroded tribal boundaries, and
- the outsiders also pointed out how society was riven with conflict and exploitation, and they advocated reform and revolution.
Several ironies about this fascist nostalgia include:
- despite their sentimental attachment to village culture, fascists want technological hyper-modernization;
- despite their exaggerated commitment to orderliness in the cultural and social realms, fascists are chronically disorganized and irrational; and
- fascists as individuals are very greedy and constantly scheming against one another (although they remain fanatically loyal to their figurehead).
(Zizek on “Jaws” & blaming outsiders for every problem as a cure-all)
(“The Believer”, 2001, @1:03:12)
https://youtu.be/GwBVHxjlMfU?t=3792
Perlstein’s book is a reminder that although the popular image of the 1960s is of a colorful, youthful leftist insurrection in the streets, there was a right-wing populist insurrection as well.
In some respects, the hippies and Goldwater Republicans were protesting against the same thing.
They were both opposed to the rise of an expert-led form of governance that fused the state and the corporation, and co-opted the working class.
Theodore Roszak explained the rise of the counterculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_a_Counter_Culture
The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition is a work of non-fiction by Theodore Roszak originally published in 1969.
The Making of a Counter Culture “captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels–and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy–the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman.”
Technocracy is rule by experts, and some ambivalence toward experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci might be expected in a democracy.
However, extreme hostility toward expertise would be a characteristic of a populist fringe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
Technocracy is a system of government in which a decision-maker or makers are elected by the population or appointed on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. This system explicitly contrasts with representative democracy, the notion that elected representatives should be the primary decision-makers in government,[1] though it does not necessarily imply eliminating elected representatives. Decision-makers are selected on the basis of specialized knowledge and performance, rather than political affiliations or parliamentary skills.
Politically, however, there is more to the ruling coalition than government by experts.
In fact, it could be argued that the peculiar fusion of big business, big government, and big labor sometimes excludes experts.
Institutionally, this involved a coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests.
This is known as an “iron triangle”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_triangle_(US_politics)
In United States politics, the “iron triangle” comprises the policy-making relationship among the congressional committees, the bureaucracy, and interest groups.
Central to the concept of an iron triangle is the assumption that bureaucratic agencies, as political entities, seek to create and consolidate their own power base.
In this view an agency’s power is determined by its constituency, not by its consumers.
Apparent bureaucratic dysfunction may be attributable to the alliances formed between the agency and its constituency. The official goals of an agency may appear to be thwarted or ignored altogether, at the expense of the citizenry it is designed to serve.
An iron triangle relationship can result in the passing of very narrow, pork-barrel policies that benefit a small segment of the population. The interests of the agency’s constituency (the interest groups) are met, while the needs of consumers (which may be the general public) are passed over.
One example of an iron triangle might be the US Forest Service, which has been disparagingly called the “US Lumber Service”.
For example, income derived from the harvesting of timber on public land is dedicated to transportation projects for the American public.
However, virtually all those funds end up building roads on public land for … loggers.
Again, experts — technocrats — can be excluded from these alliances.
One can find this is the conflict between certain federal institutions.
For example, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council was established by Congress in 1976 to manage offshore fisheries.
In reality, it serves as a tool and mouthpiece for the fishing industry and those employed by it.
This leads to conflict with the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has nominal oversight over Wespac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pacific_Regional_Fishery_Management_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration
The point is that this coalition of overwhelming forces arrayed against the small businessman in the periphery can also be turned against the expert.
In the New Deal, and then later in the Republican Party’s absorption of New Deal economics, the small businessman found himself up against a political duopoly.
In the 21st century, the marginalization of the small businessman has become even more profound because it is not only about money, but about status.
At one time, the regional businessman who owned a chain of, say, laundromats or grocery stores was a household name and a pillar of the community.
For example, Ted Turner’s father was regionally famous for being the “billboard king of the South”.
There are still billboards everywhere, but who knows who owns and rents them out?
Ted Turner saw the future and went from selling billboard space to owning TV stations, and then went into cable television, becoming an international celebrity.
Therefore, most of us remember Ted Turner.
Perhaps the financier Warren Buffet enjoys a nostalgic celebrity status (appearing on daytime dramas) because he outwardly resembles a throwback to the earlier era.
Today, the revered business leaders are guys from Silicon Valley.
Hence, the MyPillow guy might be a classic rags-to-riches American success story, but nobody actually knows his name, and so he loves Donald Trump.
Right-wing populism finds its roots in the very real experiences of the provincial small businessman.
Right-wing populism in the USA has been on a long journey for almost a century, in which it:
- took form in the 1930s,
- got organized in the 1960s,
- found a foothold in the 1980s, and finally
- ejected and marginalized the conservatives and libertarians from the Republican Party in the 2020s.
Again, this ties in with popular cinema.
The experience of the provincial businessman resonates with the sniper movie and its patriotic-hero-stabbed-in-the-back-by-the-elites conspiracy theory.
As Gore Vidal pointed out, a political party is a conspiracy, and understood this way, some conspiracy theorizing resonates with actual lived reality.
It is interesting that the sniper may be a soldier, but he is, like the entrepreneur, on his own.
If working people identify with lonely hero, that might be a recent development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
To reiterate the narrative above, these political and economic developments have their counterpart in mass entertainment.
The spy movie from James Bond to Jason Bourne:
- came into its own with James Bond as an aristocrat (or at least a member of the British establishment) based on WW2 characters,
- moved into the middle-class meritocracy with George Smiley during the Cold War,
- moved into the working-class with Harry Palmer in the late Cold War, and
- became an outlaw movie with Jason Bourne in the post-Cold War era.
- This history of the spy movie over the past couple of generations corresponds with the shift in political orientation of educated voters who dominate their political parties.
- In the past, educated people who were affluent dominated conservative parties;
- today, educated yet less affluent people are representative of progressive parties.
The war movie from the 1940s to the present:
- was a WW2 movie about a diverse but cohesive group focused on a job,
- became a postwar movie since the Vietnam war,
- became a revenge action thriller with Rambo, and
- became a conspiracy movie in the form of the sniper movie.
- As a conspiracy thriller, the sniper movie came to reflect the experiences of the small businessman, not so much that of the small-town white working class.
- In the past, less educated people who were less affluent typified progressive parties;
- today, less educated people with higher incomes are representative of “conservative” parties, which are actually populist.
