BIDEN, TRUDEAU AND THE POPULIST PARADOX
MONSTERS FROM THE ID
My early impression this morning has been that a lot of Americans are feeling a little shell shocked from the naked display of super-legality exhibited by President Biden in last nights speech. Ripping one’s opponents is a mainstay of electoral party politics, for sure. However, this apparent move to virtually declaring all out war, all but criminalizing the 70-plus million Americans who have thrown their hats in with Biden’s political opposition, seems unprecedented for a regime that fancies itself a liberal democracy in spirit, and a federal republic in fact.
However, Americans just don’t pay enough attention to their northern neighbour. (Yes, substack spell-checker, we spell it with a u.) For over half a year now Canadians have been experiencing a similar move to virtual criminalization of Prime Minister Trudeau’s opposition, not only accusing his opposition — in the form of “anti-vaxxers” — of threatening social well-being and literally the lives of “our” children, but openly questioning how much longer Canadians should “tolerate” such people.
Leaving aside for now the question of whether Biden and Trudeau are anything more than sock-puppets or poster boys, as the avatars of the ruling class their recent rhetoric indicates that the managerial class is removing the gloves, as they say. It’s bare knuckle time, kids. The fact is, there’s always been a paradox deep at the heart of these managerial class regimes that fancy themselves beacons of popular sovereignty — whether formally so in the U.S., or informally so in Canada. This paradox is revealed in that within such regimes, on the one hand, the “people” are promoted as the virtuous fount of sovereignty, legitimacy and democratically expressed wisdom; while, on the other hand, the very same “people” are despised as the festering, deep-seated repository of irrationalism, atavism, and bigotry.
In the past, this paradox has been successfully papered over by managerial class ventriloquism. That technique though doesn’t seem to be working as well any more. Perhaps we’ve reached the limits of managerial class rationality. In a classic 1950s science fiction film, I think of as a continental cultural cooperation, since two of the top three billed leads were Canadian, Forbidden Planet, we eventually learn that the ancient Krell people achieved the ultimate of rationality, by turning themselves into pure, disembodied, mind. What they hadn’t counted on though was this unleashing of pure mind would also unleash their darkest impulses. In the words of Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius, they unleashed monsters from the id.
I suspect something like that is how the ruling faction of the managerial class is feeling about now. Since the late 19th century they have ushered in a world of mind boggling technological achievement — from combustion engines to lightening speed communications, with the promise of AI and transhumanism just around the corner. From their perspective, we should all be part of the great new hive mind, basking in the rapidly approaching singularity. And just as it seemed they were on the pinnacle of their great technological achievement, the populist monsters from the id have risen up to challenge their accomplishments, their value assumptions and their rule.
As I’ve been saying for over a month in this substack. The new populism is an existential threat, it is the managerial class’s monsters from the id. They’ve papered over the paradox at the heart of their liberal democratic mythology with managerial class ventriloquism apparently as long as they can. Expect naked super-legality from here on. And we’ll be here, doing our theoretical best to make sense of it as it happens. So, if you haven’t yet…please:
And of course, please:
The superlegality push underway is IMO a response to the emergence and persistence of populist resistance. By its nature this resistance makes the rule of the professional and managerial classes contestable. It is a political challenge of the first order. It is also an ethical challenge because the aspiration for autonomy, for the opportunity to develop or defend organic, freely developed, community genuinely shocks the technocrats and strikes them as unconscionable.
The reliance on superlegality, as opposed to any of the possible alternative responses, is that the system cannot rely on the old structure of civil society to discipline or contain opposition (this has been hollowed out by social engineering and the relatively successful disruption of most forms of organic community). Neither can it rely on representative democracy to function as a safety valve for disaffection because the political system is losing credibility. Poor economic performance precludes buying off the discontented. The mass media no longer convinces. All they, the PMC, have left is replacement level immigration and superlegality.
The political narratives of the PMC do not allow for opposition to either social engineering or the class privileges of the PMC. To acknowledge the legitimacy of opposition risks exposing the fact that the regnant ideologies are largely composed of self-serving fictions rather than unassailable truths. Opposition from below also reveals the fact that the masses, or at least growing elements of it, do not truly believe in the eudaimonic character of our masters. This scepticism reflects the lived experience of those who are the objects of the therapeutic dirigisme of the PMC. For believers in the system, the criminalisation of dissent is easier, or more palatable, than compromise, let alone admitting that the PMC may be deeply flawed or fundamentally objectionable.
Accepting the legitimacy of countervailing political force (the Polybian solution to the reality of competing interests) is impossible because the PMC's collective self-understanding rests on a conviction that the masses exist as the object of politics, never as its subject.
'' And just as it seemed they were on the pinnacle of their great technological achievement,''
I don't think the achievement belongs to the current managerial class. They are largely thieves, bullies and inheritors of those who did. That's probably why the shift in the current managerial class behavior. They don't have the talent, merit or foresight of those who set up the system for the .