Symbolic Capitalists
There are two strange, modern ideological hybrids in play in the political system that make the old left versus right divide seem inaccurate, even quaint, and make those who cling to this divide as the way to look at politics and ideology look naïve. They are fighting, or, rather, analysing, the last war.
The old left versus right way of looking at the political world came from the French Revolution. According to Wikipedia:
Origins in the French Revolution. The terms "left" and "right" first appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the Ancien Régime to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left.
It clearly stuck.
One of the new hybrids is the alliance between elements of the old left who identify with the working class and modern social conservatives who embrace the values of ordinary people and who also seek to advance their economic interests. There is, perhaps unexpectedly, also a shared devotion to individual freedom. Let us call them the outsiders.
The other hybrid, and the focus of discussion here, is the “when Hayek met Habermas” ideology. The late F A Hayek is one of the leaders of the Austrian school of economics, a self-described Burkean liberal (a classical liberal) and, with Milton Friedman, one of the godfathers of twentieth century libertarianism.
Jurgens Habermas (still with us, now aged ninety-four) is a German philosopher, closely associated with the so-called Frankfurt School and with so-called critical political theory. Along with Herbert Marcuse and others.
According to Wikipedia:
Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.
No, I didn’t understand what this means either. Post-modernists and neo-Marxists tend to be like that. Habermas preached what he called “Marxist humanism”. Marxism without the bad bits, like Lenin’s brutal economic plans, the elimination of the peasant classes through mass starvation and Stalin’s purges and show trials. Trying to understand Habermas would take a lifetime, and you still wouldn’t get there.
Habermas once had a debate with Pope Benedict.
I link Hayek with Habermas only as a metaphor for the second hybrid.
This is the strange and equally unexpected amalgam of free market economics, aka neoliberalism, and postmodernist social theory. It has delivered rich greenies, woke corporatism, globalism, climate change advocacy from the private equity sector. It draws upon strands of thought from both right and left. Those who hold to the core beliefs of the new hybrid, who have seemingly made an accommodation with their former ideological enemies, might be thought to be victims of cognitive dissonance, of simultaneously holding on to two contradictory beliefs.
Many UniParty governments across the globe are fully signed up. We see it in the enthusiastic support from huge chunks of the Liberal Party for digital ID, online “safety”, the renewables scam, Covid activism, plandemic planning, the globalist takeover of policymaking and big leftist governance.
No one expected either of these hybrids to emerge. And there is a dearth of political theory to explain all this. So far, there is no hybrid philosophy, only a movement.
Hayek was situated in a broad libertarian-conservative movement, with roots in both Europe and North America. Some called the movement “fusionism”, as it contained economically liberal, socially and culturally conservative, religionist and anti-communist elements. It found a home in William F Buckley Jr’s magazine, National Review. It lasted fifty years or so, and needed work to sustain. Eventually it fell apart. It turned out that libertarians and social conservatives didn’t have much in common in a post-modernist world.
Given the importance of individual freedom to both free marketeers and post-modernists, it is hardly surprising that they eventually found common cause. Those who believed in free markets sought freedom from government. Those who believed in free individuals sought freedom from all personal constraints, and from tradition. So there was a shared belief in radical individualism among both economic liberals and post-modernists. There were the same aspirations, only in different spheres. They each wanted to break free.
But there were problems, at least at the level of theory. Those who preached free markets hated communism. And leftists still hated capitalism and all its works. By leftists, we should include post-modernists (who believe in moral relativism), exponents of critical theory, the denizens of the Frankfurt School (like Habermas), neo-Marxists, cultural Marxists and assorted 1960s radical. They were on the same page, perhaps more so than the aforementioned fusionist conservatives.
Then came a divorce and re-marriage. But the second marriage occurred among the people, not the theorists and philosophers. Who were these people?
Musa al Gharbi, writing at Compact magazine, has delved into it, through the lens of practical American electoral politics. He explores context and history:
From the mid-1930s through the mid-1960s, the Democratic Party was defined by a “New-Deal Coalition” that united white rural and blue-collar workers, religious minorities (Jews, Catholics) and, increasingly, African Americans. But following Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 capture of the South and Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey, Democratic Party insiders decided to rebrand the party—to form a new coalition centered around women, college students, young professionals, and racial and ethnic minorities. They doubled down on cultural liberalism, adopted a more dovish posture on foreign policy (to appeal to former anti-war activists, despite the fact that the Vietnam War was started and perpetuated by Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson). They de-emphasized ties to organized labor. Indeed, white rural and blue-collar workers increasingly came to be viewed as a liability rather than an asset. They were depicted by many party insiders as ignorant, bigoted, misogynistic and reactionary—an impediment to the party’s more enlightened future.
Among these policymakers, the biggest political prize of them all was to win symbolic capitalists—elites who work in fields like law, consulting, media, entertainment, finance, education, administration, science, and technology. These are professionals who traffic in data, ideas, rhetoric, and images instead of physical goods or services. As Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argued in his 1991 bestselling book, The Work of Nations, the future belonged to these professionals. However, securing this voting bloc would ultimately require Democrats to “kill their populist soul,” as political analyst Matt Stoller aptly put it. And as they tried to transition to a new voting base, the party faced a long period of crushing political defeats.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-the-clintons-changed-america-twice/
On this analysis, the strange emergence of a new hybrid ideology was born of power politics and the Clintons. And acceptance by an emerging class, born of the bourgeoisie but with leftist (post-modernist) sensibilities. Petit capitalists found they like money but not traditional constraints on personal behaviour, as enforced or at least recommended by traditional family values and the Churches. And the then country club Republicans. The children of the sixties embraced freedom in ALL its manifestations. They came of the age and prospered in the eighties. The wolves of Wall Street were progressives.
I was struck by al Gharbi’s phrase “symbolic capitalists”, though. It rang a few bells. One, coincidentally, was called Bell. Daniel Bell. He was a writer and scholar back in the 1970s, who identified “the coming post-industrial society” and “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. He seemed to pick the trends, ahead of time.
Bell suggests that capitalism has created a consumer culture that emphasizes instant gratification and materialism, and that this has led to a loss of traditional values and a weakening of social bonds.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/734077
Here is one explanation of the ditching of tradition by the emerging petit-capitalist class unleashed by neo-liberalism. Part of the lost tradition as Judeo-Christian morals and virtue, and the acceptance of any trendy new ideas to come along. The chief among them being socially progressive ideology. And, of course, they kept on believing that capitalism was fine.
So, there was some theorising about the unexpected emerging ideologies, power plays and power structures. Ideologies, power plays and structures that now drive our world. This is the backstory to our current ideological world.
Symbolic capitalists have been defined as follows, by al Gharbi again:
The early 20th century saw the rise of a new constellation of social and cultural elites whose wealth and status was tied to the production and manipulation of symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, drawing from Bourdieu, let us call them symbolic capitalists. From the outset, symbolic capitalists have defined themselves as champions of the desperate, vulnerable, marginalized and otherwise disadvantaged in society.
However, as they have grown in affluence and influence, various forms of inequality have not only persisted, they’ve grown. And although symbolic capitalists are among the most likely in the U.S. to identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, or ‘allies’ to LGBTQ Americans, they are also among the primary beneficiaries of systemic and institutional inequalities. Their lifestyles and social position are contingent on exploiting and reproducing many of the social conditions they explicitly condemn.
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/vhgh-3s29
This new ruling class had already been identified by a number of scholars. Richard Florida called it “the creative class” in his minor classic of 2002. David Brooks parodied them as “bourgeois bohemians” in his own minor classic, published in 2002, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Many observers called the new polity as “the knowledge economy”, run by “symbolic analysers”. Much of the 1990s theorising about the new economy revolved around these definitions of an emerging class of what we would now call “influencers”. Much earlier (in the 1940s), James Burnham identified a “managerial class” as the new form of post-capitalist governance.
In other words, the new world is run by people who don’t make things, or own things, but who move information around. The new game is about controlling information. Big Tech helped, indeed, drove the changes. For many of us, for many years, “big data” was merely a cliché. Now we know what it meant, and means.
What all of these writers suggest is an emerging class, not an emerging theory. As I say, the theory of the new ruling hybrid philosophy is still to be written.
But wait, there is more. As Tim Shaw, the TV salesman’s salesman, used to say. It wasn’t just bohemian bourgeois people who discovered a new way of being and thinking.
Capitalism and socialism both changed from the 1980s on, and these changes sealed the deal for the emergence of the new hybrid philosophy. Capitalism morphed into corporatism, then woke corporatism. And socialism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, morphed into progressivism. The “watermelons”, as James Delingpole called the activists who were green on the outside and red on the inside, came to occupy positions of power.
In Marx’s own terms, these people formed a new class. With its own interests. And, thanks to a corrupted higher education system, they came, fully formed, to occupy positions of power in public sector bureaucracies, non-governmental institutions, corporations, private equity companies, political parties, churches and supra-national institutions. They run the show. Many have never heard of Karl Marx. How could they? They didn’t learn history.
The working class suddenly became less interesting, in times where, as Andrew Breitbart suggested, culture was upstream from both politics and economics. The working class has come to be hated by the new ruling junta. Technocracy rules, as Burnham predicted.
Which brings us to today. The symbolic capitalists are in charge. Money still talks. Now, more than ever. In the service of neo-Marxism. Some call it globo-cap. Its voices resonance across governments and universities and all the other institutions that now matter. Tony Blair and Klaus Schwab now rule the political class, and the political class rules all. Post-Covid, they are going for tyranny-gold.
Hayek once met Habermas. A very peculiar marriage. But a marriage that now rules the world. Laissez-faire, but now with an overview of surveillance, social control, big government, tech-driven censorship, China worship, rule by teenaged fact-checkers, democracy in ruins and the individual rights that both parties to the new marriage craved all but gone.
Paul Collits
26 April 2024
All this comes down to the 3 defining characteristics of human nature - stupidity, ignorance and arrogance.
All this when we have clown show elites here in Australia, Canada, USA, UK, France and Germany to name just the principal offenders.
All this when we, in the remnants of our democracies, are faced with ambitious imperialist regimes in Russia and China and Islamist lunatics in Iran.
It looks like a neck and neck race to ruination whoever wins. But there is a third runner - the common people. Slow to start but with proven staying power.
The Populist Right versus the Unpopulist Wrong?