It is a right-wing cliché to say that the American ruling class does not deserve its status. A more precise statement might be that if we ever had a truly responsible government in this country, then all of the tech barons, court intellectuals, global bankers, “foreign policy experts,” “socially conscious” CEOs, diversity consultants, Serious JournalistsTM, Vox-splainers, clickbait writers, Hollywood perverts, woke socialists, Bernie bros, Deep State bureaucrats, corporate PR specialists, corporate HR specialists, and every single member of the New York-DC managerial axis would have been identified as dangerous cranks fifteen years ago and banished to a volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, before they ever got the chance to become a real threat to society.
Unfortunately, we have not had a responsible government for quite some time. So, not only have these people not been thrown to the outer darkness where they belong, they administer parts of the machine. And adding insult to injury, this class actually seems to think that it owes its status to its own intellectual prowess.
Of course, this pretense of intellectual superiority is all just a pose: a cargo cult whereby the mouthpieces of the ruling class pose as a thoughtful avant-garde by adopting the mannerisms of genuine intellectuals from the past. This is seen most obviously in the hipster tendency to wear big, horn-rimmed glasses, mimicking the 1950s scientific-managerial elite. Likewise, the Ivy League that earned the awe of the masses by grooming a ruling elite on Greco-Roman classics now uses the same vine-draped Gothic buildings where Brooks Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes once studied to teach its affirmative-action clientele about free bleeding and cis-het privilege. The average man on the street, for instance, is likely to view a Harvard degree as a sign of aristocratic gravitas. But last November, Harvard held its seventh annual Sex Week, which included seminars like “What’s What in the Butt: Anal 101” and “Beyond the Hub: Broadening Your Porn Horizons.”
Moreover, even after they pass through these formerly impressive universities, the establishment leftists are unlikely to read much on their own. When they do, it is typically superficial and limited to a narrow set of pre-approved sources. It is a slight exaggeration to say, as the meme goes, that they only read Harry Potter. They consume a lot of blog content, from places like Slate and The Huffington Post. For books, they will also read Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Dave Eggers, Junot Diaz, and even, somewhat anomalously, Cormac McCarthy, despite the right-wing implications of his work. But their reading never departs from the type of book you could safely find recommended on NPR, and typically revolves exclusively around middlebrow authors who their friends will find “impressive” but who do not require effort or introspection from the reader.
Their political beliefs are an extension of this. Most of the establishment leftists that I know did not settle on left-liberalism out of reasoned conviction. Rather, they did so because it is the right thing to do, and all good people do it. In this way, being a liberal has become more of a consumer product than a philosophy. Espousing liberalism serves the same function for them as spending their vacation time backpacking to Machu Picchu: it shows that they are tasteful and high-minded.
During my own time first in intellectually rightist circles, virtually everyone I met would have an interesting story about how he came to adopt his intellectual positions, usually through books, websites, or podcasts that he discovered on his own time, unauthorized by family or formal education. By contrast, I have never met a liberal with anything interesting to say about their intellectual development. If they were born on the coasts, they were likely liberal their entire lives, and will be shocked and offended that you would ever imply that they could have been anything else, the way a normal person would react if you asked if he ever used to molest children. If they came from the Red states, they may have been raised by conservative or Christian parents, but will say that they became “progressive” once they got to college and learned about their privilege.
The old libertarian movement, of which I was once a part, used to try to attack these people by critiquing texts from their supposed luminaries like John Rawls or John Maynard Keynes. But the only people who take supposed left-liberal “philosophers” seriously are libertarian nerds. The actual leftists just intuit their principles from the cultural miasma around them, and could no more justify them intellectually than a twelfth-century serf could explain St. Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God. They know what they believe, and they believe it fanatically, but treating them as dispassionate intellectuals who can be reasoned out of their positions is to fundamentally misunderstand their nature.
Which brings me to Dennis Rodman.
The smart set has spent years treating Dennis Rodman as a laughing stock. In a healthy society, this would not be so surprising. As Reason magazine described him back in 2003, Rodman is “a cross-dressing, serially pierced, tattoo-laden, multiple National Basketball Association championship ring holder” who “set an X-Men-level standard for cultural mutation” with “flamboyant, frequently gay-ish antics.” This sounds like a type that the Left would ordinarily like. Nonetheless, since Rodman’s NBA career peaked in the 1990s, his “antics” have gone from cutting-edge to campy. If anything, publicity stunts like wearing a wedding dress seem downright wholesome in a cultural context where leftists earnestly bemoan that fact that a post-op transsexual cannot find a date with straight men. If anything, the modern Left could accuse Rodman-in-a-wedding-dress of actually promoting heteronormativty: there should be nothing notable about a man in a dress, and for Rodman to treat it as groundbreaking may inadvertently expose him as trans-exclusionary. Perhaps worst of all, for a group so obsessed with appearances, everything about Rodman began to carry the whiff of the lowbrow, encapsulated by his appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice.
But once Rodman became friends with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his status as an object of derision was secure.
As spiritually empty people motivated largely by resentment and spite, our fellow elites’ favorite forms of humor are irony and snark. The sight of gangly, retro-throwback Rodman unironically enjoying basketball with the dour little dictator was just too much for their lofty sensibilities—and they laughed and laughed. (Rodman now reports that, upon return from his first trip to North Korea, he faced death threats and had to go into hiding for a month. His tormentors, after they had their laugh, likely just retreated to their Tinder profiles and hoppy beer, and probably forgot about him until the next time his name entered the news cycle. That is just what being a “tasteful intellectual” means in modern times.)
In retrospect, now that the historic Singapore Summit brought together Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un for the first visit between U.S. and North Korean leaders in history, it seems like an oversight for the foreign policy establishment to have ignored Dennis Rodman this whole time. Odd as he may be, he was an American that Kim publicly admired and trusted, who developed a high-profile relationship with the world’s most reclusive leader, and who even offered the Obama administration to work as a go-between to defuse tensions between the two countries. (As he now reports, “Obama didn’t give me the time of day.”) No less an insider than former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper even claimed on CNN that Dennis Rodman is now “our best resource” for understanding the two sides of the negotiation.
But really, this oversight is not surprising. Barack Obama was the ultimate bugman president of essentially the same type as the hipsters who supported him. Obsessed with coolness and fashion, he would have never stooped to engage such a gutter figure as Rodman. Far better to surround himself with the Hillary Clintons and Samantha Powers of the world: as the Left liked to call them, circa 2012, “the adults in the room.” These are the same adults who turned Libya from a stable, if authoritarian, society to a war-torn Islamist-dominated hellhole, where the former president, an interesting political theorist who envisioned an Arab-oriented third way between global capitalism and communism, was sodomized with a bayonet and murdered in the street. Then they laughed about it.
Clinton and Power, though, are credentialed, and the media—however implausibly—spins them as hip. So, it doesn’t matter to the cargo cultists what their actual results are, even when those results are manifest destruction and misery.
Dennis Rodman is by all accounts uncredentialed and no longer hip. If this was not clear enough, he arrived at the Singapore Summit sponsored by PotCoin, a cryptocurrency meant for buying marijuana. And yet, as buffoonish as he may be, the inescapable conclusion is that he understands more about the practical aspects of realpolitik than foreign policy experts.
The smart set apparently believes that diplomacy should only consist of hectoring other countries about their human rights records, treating world leaders the same way they might treat a frat boy who got doxed at Charlottesville. We are apparently morally compelled to do this even if it accomplishes nothing; thus, they act appalled that Donald Trump would shake Kim’s hand instead of bloviating about “humanitarianism.”
Rodman, on the other hand, is willing to engage with Kim where he is, and lend his advice if he can help mediate some kind of understanding. If Kim likes basketball, then Rodman will talk with him about basketball. It is not the most profound statesmanship, and explaining it to the great statesmen of the past might seem like explaining to Michelangelo that a painter paints with brushes. But that only shows how far away our own foreign policy, which gave us Iraq, Libya, and the European migrant crisis, has fallen from anything approaching sanity.
Of course, the outcome of the Korean talks remains unclear–nor is North Korean “integration” with a sick and dying West necessarily a great thing; it would be tragic if the North Koreans escaped communist totalitarianism only to become another outpost of corporate consumerism. But anything that defuses Cold War tensions with a nuclear power is a good thing. And the fact remains that, after last week, Rodman has done more to achieve those goals than any of the Beltway think-tankers and foreign policy experts who make lucrative careers promoting their supposed expertise.
This may be taken as a damning indictment of our elites. But it can also be a positive affirmation for the future. Normal men with healthy instincts are too weak to attack the system head-on. Anyone who gets exposed as a right-wing wrongthinker will quickly lose his livelihood and be drummed out of polite society. The leaders who will emerge from this milieu are unlikely to be the wise, responsible men of a foregone time, who understand our crisis on a civilizational level and acted purposefully to counteract it. Those types still exist, but are forced to operate mostly under pseudonyms, with too much to lose to publicly identify with forbidden causes. The only leaders capable of emerging are meme figures like a Donald Trump, who marinated for decades in the surreal world of Big Media and accumulated the massive fortunes that allow them to wreak havoc against fellow elites, or outliers like a Tommy Robinson, who, while not insulated from backlash, are heedlessly willing to take risks and accept costs that no normal man would ever accept.
We may not like this, but it is the world we have. Our way out of dystopia is not to impotently rage against it, but to embrace the bizarre. Rodman in the meantime serves the same function as the little boy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.