MAKE THE PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL CLASS MODEST AGAIN.

American Spectator contributor Auguste Meyrat does not write, "deny coherent beliefs, enjoy incoherence," and yet he notes precisely that.

As much as the Left’s anti-intellectualism (what else can one call it?) hurts conservatives, however, it hurts the Left even more. Because they define intelligence and argue about it so superficially, they end up with embarrassingly ignorant and incompetent leadership. They elect leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, both of whom struggle mightily with articulating a single clear thought. They appoint justices like Sonya Sotomayor, who fails to understand the basic facts about a virus that has deeply impacted the country for over two years. They continue to worship experts like perpetually wrong Anthony [der Giftzwerg -- Ed.] Fauci.

Contrary to [Atlantic contributor David] Graham’s claims, it seems that leftists are the one struggling with dumb leaders — except their leaders don’t seem to be pretending. Even if mocking conservatives makes him feel better about this sad truth, he and the rest of writers at the Atlantic would do better to take a step back, consider their arguments, and offer constructive solutions.

In other words, they can use their brains and be “smart” for once.

Apparently, they haven't been mugged by reality enough. As long as they can get away with their heretical incantations, they might keep on keeping on.

In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.

No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words, even though they’re pretty much always bogus.)

Yes, that's the kind of rhetoric you might expect from a Pajamas Media type. The heresy isn't coming from Knoxville alone, though.  "I see a replication of an odious and all too familiar culture war dynamic pitting finger-wagging urban liberals against an ever-radicalizing right wing that pretends to stand up to elites and speak up for workers."It's Jacobin, so you can expect the category errors. But credit even leftists for noting the failure of the professional-managerial classes and their incantations.

Far-right politics do not exist in a vacuum or arrive suddenly like a random weather event. They flourish in conditions of economic hardship and social alienation and are often aggravated by the cynical behavior of traditional political elites eager to distract from their own failures.

The current moment in Canada is no exception. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the country remains in a quasi–state of emergency, but the language of togetherness and social solidarity of its early months are long gone — along with many of the benefit programs that supported people throughout the initial lockdowns. Even as the highly infectious Omicron variant has rampaged across the country, elected leaders (including Trudeau himself) have continued to place blame for the pandemic squarely on the unvaccinated. Though it’s since been abandoned, the premier of Quebec even floated the idea of a punitive new health tax on anyone who refuses a jab.

Why nobody has bothered to note that people who refuse the corona shot are doing so at their own risk, which would be a valid observation if the corona shots worked, the same way public health practitioners and primary care physicians do with the annual flu shots, for which receiving the injection is voluntary, and nobody is panicking, continues to escape advocates of the continuing tyranny.

In addition, and contrary to what Jacobin writers think, there is a conservative populist riposte.

Right-wing populism, whatever its champions might say to the contrary, has no solutions to offer here. But a key lesson of American politics since 2016 is that reactionary sentiment cannot be beaten back through shame and moral condemnation, and will continue to gain steam in the absence of a strong populist left alternative to the COVID culture war. For a variety of reasons, millions of Canadians have yet to be vaccinated. We simply can’t afford to write them all off as irredeemably backward deplorables nor leave any more of them to be organized by the Right.

Unfortunately for the professional-managerial class, reality has a vote.  The professional-managerial class have for too long been spoiled by their ability to click an icon or swipe on a screen and have something happen (it's a mind-set that is destroying higher education, the book reviewed is probably not the one in which I saw the argument) and they thought that being able to have food or furniture ordered in gave them the authority to order around the people who were actually delivering the stuff.

Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).

Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks.

The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing.

Meanwhile, even the narrative reframing trick – which usually works great – has been failing. There’s simply been too wide a gulf between what citizens have been told and what they can see with their own eyes. Sympathy for the truckers’ cause actually seems to have grown. More than half of Canadians now oppose continuing to mandate vaccines, and two-thirds now support removing COVID-19 restrictions. Multiple Liberal MPs have turned on Trudeau to speak out against his approach. Five provinces have now moved to end pandemic restrictions, including Ontario.

No matter how desperately Trudeau has scrambled to change the narrative, he hasn’t yet succeeded. Even a gambit to threaten the truckers with having their children removed by child protection services – presumably to make it easier to instigate a narratively convenient violent confrontation – has only led to backlash so far. Relentless discipline by the truckers has provided him with almost nothing to work with.

Which is why the Virtual elite have steadily escalated up the ladder of more and more coercive informational control, leveraging their hold on state power to try to compel compliance by the revolting Physicals.

That might work in Canada. Good luck with that approach in the United States. "Perhaps they are imagining that, should the Physicals outside – who they once felt safe to ignore – engage in not just scattered protests but a full-scale revolutionary revolt, or even simply a general strike – suspending all movement of goods – their bastions of enlightened civilization would be starving, shivering, and buried in trash within a week."

People have autonomy, and treating them like so many icons to click on will not work if there's no mutual benefit to it. "For the Virtual elite, the most unforgiveable thing about the Physicals, and the physical world in general, is that they stubbornly refuse to yield to full, frictionless control. There is a reason the dominant informational class is today most comfortable in a purely virtual environment – it’s one where they can have direct, instantaneous control over (virtual) matter."