The Political Class’s Useful Idiots

Everything we know about ruling elites suggests that they are control freaks and that they know what they are doing. 

One of the things they do very well is to create and manage narratives.  Very carefully.  And they have allies, all the while willing to promote their interests.  One of the great allies of the establishment can be found in the legacy media.  We saw this during Covid.

Another great asset of the political establishment is the narrative of establishment party politics.  There are many actors whose personal and corporate interests lie in the maintenance of “politics as usual”.  The two major parties must preserved at all costs – as a system.  This means creating enemies of stability and of sweet reason, as defined by the elites.  And the enemies currently chosen for this task are insurgent parties and ideas. 

Which brings us to the scourge of populism and the outsider class.  And the notion of useful idiots as defenders of the insider class.  What is a useful idiot?

A useful idiot or useful fool is a pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being cynically manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

Lenin may or may not have used the term.

Characteristics of the useful idiot defence of the political class and the status quo might include the following:

·         A narrow Overton Window (area of “acceptable” political discourse), in relation both to policies and political parties;

·         Use of epithets to discredit outsider politics, eg far-right, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, controversial, divisive, racist, xenophobe, deplorables;

·         Constant tacking to an imaginary “centre”;

·         Continuation of the left-right axis as the only prism through which politics can be seen;

·         Innate preference for perceived system stability;

·         Belief in the inherent goodness of the political class and the institutions of government as they have evolved;

·         A willingness to accept false binaries proffered by the political class, such as the lockdown versus vaccine mandates policy “choice” in 2020-21;

·         Defence of the use of institutions of government to crush the perceived threats of labelled dissidents, eg through censorship or the judicial system;

·         Endless fascination with, and focus on, everyday politics, on political detail, on personalities and on events and distractions;

·         Defence of voting systems that deliver government for existing major parties and make life hard for insurgent parties;

·         Use of the tools of control, propaganda and narrative construction and maintenance, often effected passively and perhaps even unconsciously;

·         Selective willingness in the age of woke to accept, even embrace and cheer for, some outsiders (homosexuals, migrants, Aborigines) but not others (Christians);

·         Defence of the decisions of insider politicians against whistleblowers and dissidents, who are routinely portrayed as enemies and dangerous – think Daniel Ellsberg and the Vietnam War;

·         Ignoring or vilifying political insurgents, like US presidential candidate RFK Jr;

·         A lack of political imagination.

Two classic cases of useful idiot defences of the political class relate (of course) to Donald Trump and to Brexit.  Today, the enemy list has expanded to include Nigel Farage, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the Fatherland and Marine Le Pen.  Viktor Orban is a perennial favourite hate figure.

A classic example of the useful idiot media organisation was the National Review in the USA, which became to establishment conservatives’ go-to place for Never Trumpers, from 2015 on.  Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg tacked towards the progressive left in search of collaborators in the Get Trump project. 

The London Telegraph has operated in the same way for the British Tories (to little effect, as we saw the other week).  The British establishment did its best to ignore Farage.

The Australian newspaper acted as a useful idiot for the political class, including unelected, biased bureaucrats, grant-troughing academics and Big Pharma during Covid, faithfully, indeed breathlessly, reporting daily press conferences which detailed either inflated or entirely false “case” numbers (as just one example) and vilifying Covid dissidents.  One need only mention in passing the vile, inaccurate, spittle-flecked contributions of Jack the Insider (Peter Hoysted) as one example of the genre.  For a useful idiot he was.  An exemplar.

They are all on the side of system preservation.

Two recent examples in the Australian mainstream media remind us that the ruling elites still have their useful idiots.  One was an attack on Julian Assange and on those who support him, or at least recognise that he is one of the good guys.  The second was an article in The Australian attacking populism.

A recent piece by Augusto Zimmermann and Gabriel Moens at The Spectator Australia on the return of Julian Assange to Australia noted:

The return of Julian Assange to Australia has undoubtedly been the dominant news item during the last couple of days. In the pages of The Spectator Australia, Alexandra Marshall repeatedly intimated that the Assange matter has divided Australia’s conservatives. Commenting on her opinion, we have contributed a piece in which we argue that this matter should not divide conservatives because Assange’s release is a victory for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and more importantly, is instrumental in reminding people of the dangers posed by uncontrolled governmental power to embark on secret and dangerous missions.

Following Assange’s return to Australia, Terry Barnes, in a brutal article in this publication, lambasted Assange’s release from prison in which he refers to him as a ‘convicted spy’. Relevantly, he contends that, ‘For every Australian politician, journalist and activist who hail Assange as a hero of press freedom and a shiner of light on the less savoury doings of Western governments, militaries, and security services, there are many more who shudder with revulsion at the very thought of him and his actions.’ In support of his view, he quotes frontbench opposition MP, Jane Hume, who demonised Assange for recklessly releasing ‘information that put counterintelligence and intelligence communities at risk’. In short, Barnes is clearly of the view that Assange is a disgrace to Australia and a criminal convicted of a felony. As an aside, he also criticises the Albanese government for chartering a private plane to bring Assange back to Australia, accompanied by the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the High Commissioner of Australia to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/australians-should-celebrate-the-return-of-assange/

This is a classic political class protection manouevre.  And in the case of Barnes, his attack deployed the oft-used tactic of labelling an enemy “convicted”.  We have seen this previously with Trump and George Pell.  It is seen – wrongly, where legal injustices have occurred – as a trump card (no pun intended).  It confers moral superiority on the user of the term and places the opponent in the jail cell of public opinion.

Another attack on Assange was also aired in The Spectator Australia.  Assange is seen, in this portrayal, as the dangerous enemy of Australia’s and Western “security”.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/julian-assange-is-not-the-hero-many-want-him-to-be/

The perpetrators are useful idiots for the UniParty regime and for the deep state.  In the case of Assange, they are simply repeating Asio’s talking points.

Assange was typecast as merely a tool of the enemies of the West and its politico-military order.  The sort of order, incidentally, that gave us the war on terror, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, Five Eyes surveillance and their direct descendants in the bioweapons establishment that delivered us gain-of-function research and Covid 19.  Oh, and the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Challenging all this was demonised at the time.  Just as opposition to Vietnam was, half a century or so ago.

The second recent example.  Paul Kelly, endlessly promoted as the venerable “guru of Australian politics”, lamented in The Australian the rise of Nigel Farage, Trump (re-rise?) and Marine Le Pen.  Well, he got his wish on the last of the three.

Source: The Australian, paywalled, 6 July 2024.

All this new politics is “divisive” for Paul Kelly.  In other words, it upsets the existing political order to which Kelly is committed.  It is all a bit off.  The peasants revolting.  In Kelly’s carefully ordered world, the outsiders and their deplorable views are dangerous.  Dangerous to the established order of the UniParty.

But there is a bigger story here.  The comfortable political world of the establishment has fractured, and is waning globally.  The useful idiots are backing a loser in the age of post-modernist, all-bets-are-off political disruption.

As the German scholar-journalist Eugyppius notes:

The centre-right is dying a slow death. It is an epochal change for politics across the West.

We see it in the Labour victory in the United Kingdom, the rise of Trumpism in the United States, the humiliation of Emanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition on 30 June in France and the decline of Forza Italia in Italy. The steady erosion of the centre-right is also behind the authoritarian turn in Germany, where the political establishment are desperate to prop up the Christian Democrats and save them from the evil fascist populists of Alternative für Deutschland.

We are still at the beginning of this epochal trend, and it is not yet expressed everywhere. The centre-right remain well entrenched in the European Parliament, and the Conservatives are polling very strong in Canada. The winds, however, have finally turned against this particular political constellation.

The centre-right is dying a slow death. It is an epochal change for politics across the West.

The future of politics, of course, is landing in different places at different times and with unequal force.  And no, it certainly hasn’t hit Australia, as the hitherto poor electoral performance of the micro freedom parties and their predecessors like One Nation.  On the other hand, the internal insurgents in the Coalition appear to have made ground under Peter Dutton.  But the direction of travel seems clear, internationally.  Hence the worries articulated by the media’s defenders of the status quo.

It is time the punditocracy caught up.  We have moved far beyond BAU politics, and many still don’t see this. 

There is an emerging literature on the decline of democratic governance and on the need for a way out if our freedoms are to survive in a shape that is even vaguely recognisable. 

The starting point is to name our predicament.  Managerial elites now run everything in politics and the culture, and their rule is not only complete but also consequential.  It is not as if the people are left in peace to get on with their lives, distant from a remote, non-interventionist ruling class.  No, our new rulers meddle and bully and steal from us.  Their control our fates, and it is worsening by the day.  Some see the current pickle we are in as a class war, in Marxist terms.  There is much to admire in this view.

Having named our problem, then we need to determine what is to be done.

The American political scientist Patrick Deneen, author of the book Why Liberalism Failed, sees our dilemma as an ancient one, between the rulers and the “demos”.  It is something over which there has been argument since Plato and Aristotle.  Much of mainstream political theory over two millennia has been mulling over how to resolve the dilemma.

The ideal is a functioning “mixed constitution” polity in which the rulers don’t have too much power and the people too little.  Or in our case, none.  When this occurs, it leads to trouble.  The apologist-pundits sneeringly term what we are experiencing a populist revolt.  Well, it is.  But they see “populism” as a problem to be solved.  What they don’t get is that this is precisely what is needed to break the broken system.  Clearly the likes of Paul Kelly don’t see the system as broken.  The truly awake do.  For us, it is the system, not the reaction, that is the problem.  The reaction is the solution.

Do the elites have too much power?  We are here in Blind Freddie territory.  We have a political and cultural crisis.  Two quotes make the point.  Here is Jean-Claude Juncker, former European Union President:

We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens.  If no clamor occurs … because most people do not grasp what has been decided, we continue – step by step, until the point of no return is reached.

Quoted in Michael Lind, The New Class War, 2020, p 54.

Astonishing.  At least he is disarmingly honest about the way the world now works, and who is charge.  Then there is Michael Lind, referring specifically to just one of the ways that democracy has been hollowed out.  This is the march of globalism and its impact on nations:

For global elites, countries are merely exotic names for trade zones and labor camps, and citizenship has about as much ethical or emotional significance as a gym membership ...

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/war-on-citizenship

Trashing the tradition of patriotism is one thing.  Of course, it isn’t only nation states in the elites’ sights.  They have gone after anything that bespeaks “tradition”.  Truth.  Citizenship.  Community.  Faith.  The family (as it once was).  Human rights, like medical freedom.  The working class and its values.  The middle class.  Boundaries (like borders).  The classical virtues.

On citizenship (for example), Mark Twain wrote (1906):

What keeps a republic on its legs is good citizenship.

Quoted in Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen, 2021.

Hanson sees three things “destroying the idea of America” (for which, also read Australia) – progressive elites, tribalism (identitarianism of the woke variety) and globalisation.  He also notes, soberly, that “empowered citizenship” is very rare in history.  Rule by elites, often tyrannical and sometimes cruel, has been the norm.  But often, historically, we also had very small government to go with the tyrannical rule.  Small in terms of reach.  Now we have huge government – big government just doesn’t do justice to the abomination we now experience – to go with tyrannical rule.  Yes, it is a crisis.

In Hanson’s schema, you can’t have active, empowered citizens if you hand over decision-making and public policy to Geneva and to the domestic-unelected.  Why would you bother even turning out to vote, or doing anything else in the public square, when your values and input are so demeaned by the rulers, and you are excluded?

Other scholars have plumbed the problem of out-of-control elites, such as Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy – God knows what he would think now, in a post-Covid tyrannical world – and the late Angelo Codevilla’s The Ruling Class (2010).  Lasch speaks of a “democratic malaise”.  Then we had the Polish MEP and political theorist Ryszard Legutko’s book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016).  He knows a little of totalitarian temptations, and sees the same tendencies in the ruling class of the West that he witnessed in the East.  He has written on the EU thus:

“The Brussels leviathan casts its shadow on Europe:”

https://hungarytoday.hu/prof-ryszard-legutko/

Patrick Deneen’s recent book, Regime Change, is also valuable reading in relation to the current state of play, in what he sees as a coming “post-liberal future”.  Particularly useful is his characterisation of the so-called right and left as being to branches of progressive liberalism.  The conservatives and economic libertarians hail “progress” in economics.  The socially liberal (woke) forces in either major party hail “progress” in culture.  One side lauds untrammelled freedom in economics, the other absolute freedom in personal behaviour and values.

Deneen’s work can be found here:

https://www.patrickjdeneen.com/blog-posts

And there is an interview about the book here:

Deneen, in effect, identifies two complementary sides of the one liberal coin.  Others call the current political establishment the UniParty.  It is this consensus world view that the useful idiots noted above are defending.  And, again, they are most likely backing the wrong horse.  Deneen sees the liberal consensus as collapsing, a little like Eugyppius’s analysis of the old (establishment) right.

R R Reno at First Things provides a useful summary of the book, from a sympathetic perspective:

A regime amounts to more than a system of government laid out in a constitution. It is a hierarchy of power and prestige, a mechanism for the allocation of wealth, and a climate of opinion that justifies the power of those in power. The present regime rests on three pillars: a meritocratic ideal, broad middle-class prosperity, and the commonality of ­experiences and attitudes across social classes. As Deneen documents, each pillar has fallen. Our elite go to great lengths to ring-fence their privilege. The current economic system has benefited the upper end of ­society while imperiling the American middle class. And a cultural divide has opened up. A few decades ago, prosperous coastal elites began to speak of vast swaths of the nation as “flyover country,” a dismissive attitude unthinkable in my childhood.

Deneen makes a convincing case that our present distempers arise because the people who run our country have little or no contact with the vast majority of their fellow citizens. “Progress” has come to mean “globalism” and “borderlessness” working in tandem with liberation from traditional moral and social norms. This new fluidity suits the elite, who can insulate themselves from the negative consequences of instability while exploiting its opportunities. Detached from the common man, they become rapacious, their consciences lax.

Cheerleaders for the regime insist that the changes of recent decades have been win-win. America has never been richer and more inclusive! But an ever more liquid society runs counter to “what most ordinary people instinctively seek,” Deneen insists. They want “stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future.” These desires reflect a proper judgment about the conditions for human flourishing. Today, deprived of these conditions, the general population tends toward dissolute and self-destructive behavior. The citizenry is decaying into an irritated, angry rabble.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/08/deneens-new-deal

The pretend-alt organ Quillette (Damon Linker) has provided a classic establishment put-down of Deneen’s book.

Patrick Deneen has written a book that reproduces and encourages a form of self-deception that’s pervasive in the United States on the populist Right.

https://quillette.com/2023/06/06/america-doesnt-need-regime-change/

By the way, the editor of Quillette, Claire Lehmann, a favourite at The Oz, turns out to have been a pro-vaxxer, as Tom Beakbane notes here. 

Quillette’s Heterodox Fail.

Why Claire Lehmann’s position on vaccines is a betrayal of the growing heterodox community.

https://tombeakbane.medium.com/quillettes-heterodox-fail-7be9fff49ba4

And it cost her. 

Claire Lehmann, owner and publisher of Quillette defended their “strong pro-vax editorial position” articulated in four articles: “Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines,” “Vaccines and the Coronavirus Crank Crisis,” “Making the (Conservative) Case for Vaccine Passports,” and “Vexed by the Un-Vaxxed.”

A number of Quillette readers expressed outrage and disgust in social media and on the Quillette forum. In an email to subscribers Lehmann defended her mainstream position of, “being pro-vax during a pandemic [is] supported by the overwhelming majority of people in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US today.”

Another useful idiot for the political class, then.  Backing the wrong horse.  An attack on Deneen from Quillette does not surprise, then.

Beakbane goes on:

I am among those who are disappointed by Quillette’s coverage of the pandemic. Her defence of socially compelled immunization misses the point that there is a growing community who objects to being placed in the traditional boxes of leftwing or rightwing, communist or capitalist, liberal or conservative, libertarian or patriot. Nor can we be described fairly as either “Vax” or “Anti-Vax.”

Members of this heterodox community are diverse in background and outlook. We are parents, professionals, and entrepreneurs who have realized that legacy institutions, including political parties, educational institutions and mainstream media, no longer reflect our values. They appear out of touch with the reality of earning a living and raising a family.

The heterodox community seems a useful way of describing the outsider class, and Beakbane nails its core attributes.  And identifies its enemies in the political, insider, “orthodox” class.  The outsiders, the heterodox, want to challenge the political order itself.  For example, Nigel Farage wants a new voting system in the UK.  The political order at it has evolved has declined to a point, where, as Deneen suggested, the establishment simply doesn’t care about the rest.  The civil war is “vertical” (the top tier versus the rest) now, not “horizontal” (between parties).  And it isn’t “civil”.  And we-the-people are far less inclined now to defend things and people that, perhaps, we were happy to defend in the past.  There is, indeed a schism.  The Paul Kelly’s of the world blame us.  We blame him and them.

Whether Deneen’s optimism and solutions are warranted is a debate for another time.  It may not end well for those who have over-reached.  As Mike Yeadon says:

They who would make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.

Mike Yeadon’s Telegram channel, 7 July 2024.

What Deneen does well is to characterise the great modern hybrid of economic and social liberalism as the party of the globalist establishment elites.  What I want to do is call out that establishment’s quiet achievers in the media and the academy, who decidedly do NOT want regime change.  They themselves profit from it in two ways, at least.  They benefit materially, as mostly they derive their salaries from defending it.  And they get to feel good about themselves, and to project this onto the world at large.  Mostly, we now call this virtue signalling.  And we see it most in the types of reactions to Trump, Le Pen, Farage and Assange that have emerged of late in our mainstream media.

Just so long as we recognise it and call it out, we will remain aware of its presence and power.

Paul Collits

10 July 2024