COVID-19, America's professional-managerial class, Donald Trump, Christopher Lasch, Demolition Man, and pandemic science as America's political proxy war

A commentary on America's losing war for survival

Raymond Cocteau: an avatar, although not quite, of 2020 America’s professional-managerial ideology.

In 2020, a period of crisis had reached its peak. Citizens had suffered enough. They accept as their leader an enlightened technocrat. He changes the country’s laws. It becomes a utopia of public health, humaneness, and sterility. Physical contact is made illegal. All social problems have been eliminated. All except one: a group of rebels who refuses to follow the rules. They resist the technocracy on principle.

This was not the United States. This was the film Demolition Man. Matthew Yglesias, writing for The Atlantic, once called Demolition Man “the only plausible dystopian vision for our time.” That vision is allegorical. The movie ends cleanly when the film’s enlightened leader is killed and the criminals he unleashed upon the city are brought to justice. In America today, no such ending is possible.

Rather than a single technocratic leader, in America today, there is a professional ruling class, which constitutes 20% of the population and includes lawyers, media, artists, academics, scientists, journalists, administrators, bankers, tech professionals, and more. As with the technocratic leader in the film, this class is unelected but wields enormous power over the lives of ordinary Americans.

But this class dominates American institutions not through central planning by a single enlightened individual. It dominates through an organic, spontaneous coordination between individuals all holding the same vision for society and mankind, and all simultaneously exercising control over nearly all the levers of power.

The professional class’s organic domination is not accompanied by any self-awareness; the professional class does not for a moment consider that perspectives other than its own might have any validity, much less wisdom. Those with other perspectives cannot speak the idiom of the professional class, an idiom on the basis of which the class claims its conclusions have legitimacy. “The science says X.” Meanwhile, those not trained in the lexicon of science cannot generally speak well using that idiom, even though they may have valid concerns that systematically differ from those of elites. These concerns are thus poorly represented within science.

Thus, "science" becomes code for professional class political interests and "anti-science" becomes whatever is at odds with these interests. Political struggles become expressed in a proxy war over scientific interpretation. Subordinate political interests are systematically dismissed as “misinformation.” Political repression occurs in the name of science.

The professional class thus dominates by ignoring and suppressing anything that contradicts it. It regards those other perspectives with contempt, and it can afford to do so, since it has almost all of the institutional power, and its opponents have almost none.

While in 1993 the philosopher Christopher Lasch could not precisely identify any unifying political perspective of the professional class, this problem has been “solved” today. Their ideology was formulated in the universities, made dominant by the strictures and sterility of affluence, codified in law, transmitted through education and media, and enforced at the margins through the threat of social and professional ostracism. This ideology, like a virus, progressively overrides, reshapes, and replaces all expertise in all fields and domains of human endeavor with a simulacrum of its former self--and calls this "science".

The ideology’s dramatic and sudden ascent to unchallenged dominance in America’s institutions in the 2000-2010s was publicly heralded by a notable counter-event: the election to the presidency of one Donald J. Trump. Trump’s election was no mistake: it occurred as a response to precisely the moment when a corporatist left-wing ideology had finally consolidated its status as the orthodoxy of the professional class, and the rest of America panicked and embraced revolutionism as a response to that threat. Revolutionism embodied in that incredibly unwieldy and unlikely figure of Donald J. Trump.

Sterile and totalitarian, the philosophy of Demolition Man produced unambiguous results: health, wealth, and a crime-free if dreary society. In real-world America, on the other hand, that very same vision has shattered the country. In the name of health, life expectancy has plummeted; in the midst of a ubiquitous therapeutic culture, rates of mental illness are surging; and in the name of "enlightened drug law", a drug epidemic rages across both America’s once great cities and even its small, rural towns. Our professional class, meanwhile, isolated from the common lot around it, has ceased its interest in the decline of the country, instead pursuing its own quixotic ideological fantasies.

Unlike in the film, it is impossible to deal one fell, fatal blow to the ideology and the class that has commandeered American society: that ideology and its champion class is now embedded in the very fabric of American society and institutions. And yet, also unlike in the film, our criticisms of our deranged professional elites are not a matter of principle; they are a matter of civilizational survival.