Rabble Rousing

Several days ago Claire Willett noted that among the elite their elite “status cuts across all other demographic and ideological markers”, adding that the elite versus the rabble “is so much more important to them as a line of demarcation than any vector of ideology or belief or politics”. All of which, of course, was prompted by the mainstream hagiographic response to the death of a nazi.

Today, in response to Ezra Klein’s defense of having claimed that Kirk had been practicing politics “the right way” (a centrist, liberal whitewashing of Kirk’s profound nazism simply because he used words rather than guns)—especially in the newer context of hosting Ben Shapiro on his podcast—T. Ferox went a step further in diagnosing the problem of the elite.

Klein is the latest example of the fact of how easily class (both cultural and wealth) solidarity can override ideology. Klein identifies with Kirk more than he identifies with the readers and critics that have excoriated him for whitewashing Kirk's bigotry. Kirk is real to him in a way we aren't.

Emphasis mine, because that last line is so deflationary—by which I mean it correctly identifies something I’d rather not be true and almost would rather not have to concede. I’m easily right there with everything else but then that last bit just insists I go further and recognize a deeper truth.

Charlie Kirk was wrong when he infamously disdained empathy, but the ways in which the elite in the wake of his death have shown that they primarily believe empathy is only for people they consider to be like themselves ironically makes him in this case, or particular analysis, situationally right. Research has suggested the idea that people are more likely to feel empathy for people they consider to be like themselves, and in effect what Willett and Ferox are pointing out is that the elite see their fellow elites as people in a way they simply do not see the rabble as people.

What’s been crystalized for me by the Kirk shooting and its fawning response is that the cultural and economic class solidarity of the elite firmly rests upon this deep lack of empathy for those who comprise the rabble. What’s deflationary about this for me is that it places people like Ezra Klein beyond our reach. There’s a part of me that would like to believe that centrist liberals somehow are persuadable, even if it would take a tremendous amount of effort. The problem with that contention is that the effort would be entirely one-sided. People like Klein simply have no motivation to move past their elite status, and no interest in understanding that this class allegiance is a real and actual harm to the rabble whose interests even centrist liberals like himself will claim to have in mind and take to heart.

You can’t, though, platform as “civil” the violent and bigoted fantasies of people like Kirk and Shapiro just because they use words rather than guns to communicate and then at one and the same time claim to be working in the interests of the rabble. You can’t defend someone who said Jewish money was ruining America, that Black woman don’t have the brain power to be taken seriously, that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, that we should distrust the qualifications of Black pilots, that George Floyd was a “scumbag”, and that men should deal with trans people the way they did back in the 1950s—and then claim to be anything other than a class apologist who is willing to sell out the rabble in order to maintain your own class status.

David Brooks this past weekend admitted on air that he had friends texting him to say that Charlie Kirk’s murder was “our George Floyd”—a stunningly open act of public confession to class allegiance on his part. You judge someone by the company they keep, and if the company you keep includes Charlie Kirk and those like him and those who like him, this would seem to be telling the rabble all they need to know about where not to look to find solidarity for themselves.