Rebels in the Elite
Source: radixjournal.com
Perhaps the greatest power of all is the ability to impose one's narrative upon the minds of others. Without coercion, without violence, one epistemologically dominates others through the values and "facts" that they takes for granted. The greatest power is to determine what is "normal." Cultural struggle is thus one of the highest political struggles.
I am always astonished at how unconscious most people are to the character and nature of the cultural power elite. If a figure is demonized by the media, academics, and the official intelligentsia, most people (even self-styled “free-thinkers”) will follow. Paradoxically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, a leftist—who is happy to cite Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “cultural hegemony” or Noam Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent”—will be the most prone to this sort of Pavlovian reaction, being the most intolerant of the “Emmanuel Goldsteins” manufactured by the regime (who are termed “racist,” “fascist,” “homophobic,” etc). The leftist will gladly admit that the media (except, of course, for the liberal sites they read) are dominated by plutocratic and corporate interests. But if he works in public education, as is often the case, he will deny that his employment by the State somehow makes him an agent of regime propaganda. And while he may denounce bias in the media due to corporate ownership and White ethnocentrism, he will become hysterical, frothing at the mouth, if the examination of the ethnic composition of media ownership were pushed further, towards the recognition that the most culturally powerful ethnic group in America, certainly at the elite level, is of Middle Eastern origin.
And while a classical leftist may fulminate against the bourgeoisie—the class whose interests are different than those of “the people”—he will take offense if this were formulated in terms of “rootless cosmopolitans,” who exist in a world above nations. (Are not the interests of Carlos Slim and Rupert Murdoch objectively different and generally antithetical to the peoples they roam among?)
While intellectual accomplishment is, above all, an individual activity—of each generation having at best a handful of those outliers’ outliers whom we call “geniuses”—producing culture for both elites and masses is a work for tiny, networked elite minorities: Hollywood, the music industry, print and audiovisual media, the Ivy Leagues, and so on.
All cultural regimes are biased insofar as they are produced by particular oligarchies that subsidize this culture in order to legitimize and further their power. So it was with the Frankish aristocracy and the medieval Church, so it is with the current increasingly transnational plutocratic elites and the media-academic establishment. The victims of political correctness—that is, victims of censorship, censure, and ostracism, who in the past would have been called heretics—can be forgiven for terming the current regime “totalitarian.” In truth, such taboos exist in all regimes. The West today, while intolerant of nationalists, allows for a fair amount of pluralism on the margins. (We don’t live in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and certainly not Stalin’s.)
This relative pluralism is evident in the fact that there is substantive debate on many topics, which reflect legitimate divisions within the elite, and which contribute to reorienting policy in particular areas as the globalist regime marches forward. If a critical voice is allowed to exist in mainstream culture, it is because it is promoted (whether explicitly or implicitly by being tolerated) by elite factions, sometimes in competition with each other. The question I want to pose is: is nationalism a possible option and subject debate for our elites, particularly in Europe? Is electoral politics and mainstream debate a worthwhile enterprise, or should we sit tight and prepare our cadres for “the revolution”?
Three Struggles Within the Elite
Intra-elite debate and struggles on major issues are evident in three recent and important books:
- Stephen Walt’s and John Mearsheimer’s Israel Lobby (2007), on Jewish and neoconservative influence in the United States’ foreign policy.
- Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide(2014) on the Surveillance State.
- Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) on rising inequality.
Each of these books represents broader intellectual and cultural movements, and debate among American and Western elites on how to move forward. The conflicts are quite real.
Stephen Walt said that publishing The Lobby meant he could never serve (like Samantha Power) in the U.S. government. Greenwald, no doubt, will never have privacy again and has faced a certain amount of harassment. Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was detained by the British at Heathrow airport. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has spent over 1,000 days holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Edward Snowden has fled to Russia and fears ever returning to the United States. For his part, Piketty, a prudent academic, has never taken any political risk (his attacks on the semi-nationalist/socialist Jean-Pierre Chevènement on free trade or his refusal to accept Légion d’honneur from President François Hollande’s do not count).
The point is, Walt, Mearsheimer, Greenwald, Assange, and Snowden have enemies because of the political decisions they have taken. Nevertheless, these three books were published and promoted in the Western media and, because they represent the interests of certain powerful factions, they have even been fêted. These come in stark contrast to attacks by individuals, organizations, and even governments on Kevin MacDonald, Robert Faurrisson, Alain Soral, Richard Spencer, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, and others, who know what ostracism really is. In each case, the book forms part of a dialectic, a response to an excessive or inefficient use of American power. Walt and Mearsheimer’s Israel Lobby is a response to the undue influence of Israel-centric neoconservatives and Likudniks, not because this is detrimental to Palestinians and other Arabs but, more pointedly, because it is detrimental to the State Department, the National Security State, and the Military-Industrial Complex. Was war with Iran really in the interests of the American Empire bien compris? These rather “WASPy” institutions—top CIA officials and military brass—tend to think not, as do the liberals, who form the American Jewish mainstream (as opposed to the hysterically ethnocentric Jews, who are part of the neoconservative clique, FOX News “hawks,” and the Israeli Right).
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