It strikes me too, listening as I am to an interview with David Foster Wallace from 1997, that those fighting on the fronts, without the luxury (?) of an attendant sense of detached literary irony (some of the various techniques of which Wallace himself was accused of abusing, and which he also critiqued in himself and others), will do anything to secure their own doom: I mean, just look at the ratio of job ??seekers?? to job ??openings?? in the present U.S. situationthose souls are consigned to perdition by default. But Wallace didn??t kill himself over culture; he just killed himself. He alternately infuriated and bored me, but I will miss him.

Giving people help they don’t want is a quick way to generate resentment, the more so if the help implies an insult and the most if there’s no clear anthropological reciprocity. Traditional elites have the luxury of leaving people’s ideas alone (and are free to seem to share them), since the basic functional conservatism of that burkeian mishmash is unlikely to come together into any significant change agency. Cheney, for example, just drips with contempt for the intellectual capacity of the masses but wouldn’t dream that something could or should be done about it, and directs his public disdain at liberals so his more comprehensive elitism is not evident.

The respectful/resentful subalternity of the commons is historically ordinary; what needs to be accounted for is its activation for deployment in mass politics. Well, first there has to be a mass politics…. So to the variables already well covered I’d like to suggest adding the entitlements of consumer society. When the business elite is telling me as a customer that I’m always right, the contrast with educational/critical intelligentsias crabbing about my bad thinking and bad biases is vivid and grating.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here (and mixing metaphors rather recklessly, too, sorry about that), but it’s well worth remembering that the Nazi government was a government of men, not of devils incarnate suddenly beamed into Berlin. It was a government that enjoyed significant popular support right up into the very end, and it was a government that left many of its people — and their probably unreconstructed beliefs — in parts of German society that has repercussions down to this very day. (Specifically, for example, high-level police functionaries transitioned into the Bundeskriminalamt, and Nazi-period or Nazi-inspired ideas about particular groups were used in police training well into the 1980s. Even if the materials were all eliminated by then, some of the people trained by these methods are certainly still in office.)

Anyway, it’s off topic, but I think it’s important not to stop thinking or talking when a Nazi analogy occurs. Under the Bush administration, torture became the official policy of the United States of America. How much further will we go?

The idea that the people should go after the real elite instead of the fake elite is seductive, for sure, especially for those of us who are alienated and shocked by the Bush-era political elite. As I read, it struck me that it has the same kind of appeal, and the same kind of flaws, as the classic economist’s model of a rational economic man. Whether that analogy holds up or not, I think you’re right that people react to whatever’s in their face or stepping on their toe. I guess we need to get used to that and figure out a better angle.

You’re suggesting at the end that we recoil from the culture war because it has such potential to get out of hand? Offhand, it seems like a good theory, though it doesn’t capture my personal reaction, which is aesthetic–the culture-war mindset is reductive in a way that I find depressing and ugly. That applies to both the Orthogonian and anti-Orthogonian sides, I think, though of course my gut reaction is mostly to the former.

Many thanks for such a rich post.

What’s bad about Culture War for me is not anxiety about losing position: it’s about undoing all the worthwhile work done by educators, scientists, health professionals, engineers and other “elites.” Rotwang’s wrong about the exception: it is only granted in theory, because in practice the culture war makes it harder for those indispensible experts to function, or to exist in the first place. Culturally, there is an exception for “genius” because it occurs naturally, but hard-won cultural capital and “book learnin'” doesn’t really fit.