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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Well in Europe, the elites used to refer to class elites. The aristocracy and the bourgeosie. That's how it was in The French Revolution.
The alternative idea of the intellectual elite came about in the end of the 1790s, when a French right-wing priest published a book saying that the Revolution was started by The Illuminati, that's where all modern Conspiracy Theory originates from. It was because a nasty catholic priest wanted to make sense of a popular movement against the Catholic Church and its Royalist Backers and so said it was done by these intellectuals who manipulated people into giving them rights they didn't ask for, didn't need, and of course they were allied with Jews. And that played a part in fascism where they said the intellectuals were foreign and Jewish manipulators.
In America, this conservative fear of ideas, conservative definition of elite preceded the liberal and socialist definition of elite. Whereas in Europe, the latter came first over the former. There's also the fact that in the Anglophone, intellectuals generally supported colonialism, class subjugation and so on, not only in USA but also the UK. The first real left-wing intellectuals were folks like Thomas Paine, Percy Shelley, William Blake and they were a minority. In America it was Henry David Thoreau (who inspired Gandhi).
This right-wing Conspiracy Theory eventually crossed party lines and moved from right to left wing cycles...the big example is the JFK conspiracy theory which is a frank embarrassment of the American left, so much ink spend sanctifying a warmongering incompetent flake just because he had the bright idea to do a motorcade in a convertible. And so much time is spent blackening the reputations of Justice Earl Warren. It's a criminal shame that he's known more for the JFK assassination then for his time on the Justice bench advancing civil rights and making the Constitution into a document for a modern America, or that LBJ the man who passed the Civil Rights Act is blamed for Vietnam (which Kennedy got America involved in) and not known for his work in passing Civil Rights.
Yeah, because we all know that Donald Trump took inspiration from Michel Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and others...Come on, let's keep our eyes on the prize and focus on what happened.
edited 2nd Dec '16 2:55:26 PM by JulianLapostat
The Dragon of the Eastern Sea
Alternative Character Interpretation. Wasn't Trump just crowing about how this was a victory?
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
It is a victory. You're assuming giving benefits to corporations and widening the wealth gap isn't Trump's goal.
Oh really when?
The first thing is that in the poor-media discourse of the USA, Postmodernism refers to a lot of things that actually aren't postmodern and is mostly categorized as such by its critics who 1) Haven't read it, 2) Are too dumb to understand it. Now I do agree that postmodern stuff has included amidst its flotsam a bunch of silliness and opportunist careerists (like Camille Paglia) but I don't think it's had that impact. It's basically just a bugbear to fit a pre-existing stereotype and its an example of intellectuals Not Helping Your Case.
This article on political correctness by guardian shows how that happened. And points out the massive propaganda campaign and conservative investment to damage and destroy the intellectual standards.
Starting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow “cultural relativism” and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.
In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an “assault on the canon” was taking place and that a “politics of victimhood” had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments such as African American studies and women’s studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” or “The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?”
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I was more specifically talking specifically about postmodern assertions about objective truth and absolute reality and so on. While it's interesting for philosophical discourse, it's extremely impractical in non-academic environments, even dangerous since it validates the sort of "post-truth" politics we saw this cycle.
Certain elements of postmodern thought (along with nilhism) are definitely a major influence on a particular strain of Trump supporters.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:13:42 PM by CaptainCapsase
Certain elements of postmodern thought (along with nilhism) are definitely a major influence on a particular strain of Trump supporters.
Post-Truth has had a long history in America. From the Lost Cause, to "welfare queens" to the Hippies spitting on Veterans, to everything that Fox News has done. Well before Trump, Breitbart got Shirley Sherrod and others fired thanks to a Smear Campaign.
It precedes postmodernism and will succeed it.
And Nihilism existed before post-modernism too.
Look, rather than blame strains on the left you dislike, why don't you think about making common cause, hmm..
I'm aware of what post-modernism is about in intellectual circles, but as with many perfectly valid concepts, I would argue some elements of it have filtered down to less intellectually rigorous circles in a manner that wasn't really anticipated by the intellectuals who pioneered the post-modern school of thought, helped along by a certain degree of laziness among sectors of academia. The nilhism is something separate, and also is Flanderized to a significant extent, but it's there and it matters.
the original post-truth politics certainly preceded postmodernism, but the modern revival definitely has some (misappropriated) elements of postmodernism in it, even if most of its adherents don't realize it's the case.
I should add that this line of thought isn't an attempt to blame academia for Trump as much as me think about what could have been done differently to avoid the present situation.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:27:07 PM by CaptainCapsase
The law in the night
If my theory is right, it'd have come down indirectly through media and pop-culture—one thing that's apparent from looking at conservative forums is that plenty of them enjoy the same media that we do—more than directly from academia. Yes, and pointing out that they've essentially re-purposed post-modern positions to rationalize away what for practical purposes is objective truth when it disagrees with their world view might be one way of forcing certain people to be a bit more introspective.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:34:20 PM by CaptainCapsase
"So which strain of post-modernism filtered down below exactly, hmmm? "
The "Belief can be true if you grin your teeth enough"
Because everything you said earlier about lost cause, the hippies are just typical party lines, the whole "this is our ideas and and we believe it" but right now, it have become more a "I dont need true as long im happy about it", trump is right because he said thing that I like and he said thing that I like because he is right.
a simple way of life, right?
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
Well the Right enjoys stuff like Frank Miller and there isn't a lot that's postmodern about him. They enjoy 24, Walking Dead and other stuff. Stuff that's really post-modern like say, Thomas Pynchon, Alan Moore and others definitely didn't get Trump elected.
My sense is that these folks are incapable of irony and introspection. They are truly indifferent. Their ideal is Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass:
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!" '
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
All we can hope is one day a new Alice will come and tell everyone, "You are nothing but a pack of cards". Or that Trumpty-Drumpfty will fall down. But that's more or less how the Trump-MSM media debate has been going on all this while and we are all in Lookng-Glass World.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:46:05 PM by JulianLapostat
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
Well, a surprising number of people completely miss the point of stuff like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, so I wouldn't be so sure about that. Or at least, I wouldn't be so sure that such works are incompatible with the Right. They'll find a way.
Oh God! Natural light!
The law in the night
She keeps using that word, it doesn't mean what she think it means.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Asgore Adopts Noelle
If Sarah Palin of all people says that what Trump did was dumb and crooked, then I can only hope that the other Tea Party elites give Trump Hell for 2-4 years.
Please, Tea Partiers, be actual disciplined obstructionists and not just Republicans. Please.
Technically, what Trump did is a form of Welfare, which would be Socialist to most Republicans. Sure, it's Corperate Welfare, but it'd still be Welfare.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:53:43 PM by DingoWalley1
Professional Forum Ninja
The watchmen movie was a box-office failure much to Alan Moore's delight so there was not a lot of room for that to inspire anything. And V For Vendetta has inspired Anonymous, which unlike Wikileaks hasn't become a fifth column for the Right.
The thing is that conservatives and American conservatives don't have an intellectual dimension anymore. The Nazis took inspiration from a great artist like Wagner and enjoyed Shakespeare, distorted and briefly damaged Friedrich Nietzsche's reputation and other smart guys and did evil things and that's because conservatism in that time did have an intellectual dimension or a pretense of it, a Mask of Sanity.
There used to be American conservatives interested in art and culture like William F. Buckley, and Antonin Scalia liked opera and stuff. But these days there really aren't that many. Stephen Bannon and some of these online racists spout blather on the other hand but that doesn't mean anything.
If there's anyone that has inspired the American rights, its economists like Hayek (a favorite of the Kochs and Thatcher even if he is rightly despised by academic economists), Ayn Rand (a total fraud and hack and a favorite of Paul Ryan), Milton Friedman who is a legit economist and did advocate LGBT rights and a UBI and a "useful idiot" for the right. But there's really nothing else.
edited 2nd Dec '16 3:57:17 PM by JulianLapostat
Not as angry as the name would suggest.
Well, Anonymous are hardly the only group people who can be inspired by the movie. And I wasn't really thinking of the movie.
Granted, I don't know how familiar the average Trump voter is with these works, but I believe they have achieved popularity with young internet right-wingers. They may not be all that influential, but I do think that it's still noteworthy.
Oh God! Natural light!
"An example of how distorted things are in America is the idea of "elite". It never refers to the real elite"
to be fair, that applies to everyone since is a clasical populism straegies: your enemies are "elite" who move and control the world, unlike THE LEADER who is good because he love the country(and who do you know that? because the leader said so of course).
Well, I have seen a lot of people saying trump is a genius(really) for not saying he is not going to jail Hilary since it will allow the country to "heal", that can show you how warped their worldview are.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"