Knights Templar

So, here’s the deal. I keep thinking about Trump...as do we all, of course. But, also as we all do (I suspect), there is another aspect of the Trumpian problem that concerns me, perhaps even more. I mean, of course, the people behind him.

Oh, yes, that includes the “deplorables,” who voted for him, and the alt-Right, and Bannon and his crowd of...of...of, well, whatever the hell they are. (Strasserist? Apocalyptist? I really don’t know.)

But, more importantly, I’m thinking of a certain discrete slice of the wealthy and powerful who support him. Not all of them, to be sure. But, a slice...

And what frightens me most about such people is this: Are they a movement? Or a church? A very dark and shadowy church.

To explain, the other day I saw an article in Slate by Rebecca Onion, “What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority.” It is an interview with Nancy MacLean, who has recently done the fascinating book, Democracy in Chains. In the book, MacLean details how certain members of the obscenely rich, and particularly the Koch brothers, have organized into what I can only call a conspiracy (though MacLean dislikes that term) with the goal of imposing on the rest of us a kind of dictatorship of the Plutoletariat, a system in which government would be prevented—by law!—from interfering with the economy. Which is to say, from imposing any real restrictions on the behavior of the rich and powerful.

They’ve even, says MacLean, selected a Marx for their revolution, the anarcho-capitalist academic James Buchanan.

It is terrifying material. But the thing that struck me the hardest was a comment that MacLean made about one of the Koch brothers, specifically Charles. She notes, “I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation.”

I believe this is a very important insight in that it explains much of what really motivates the anti-democratic Right in our day and age. Specifically, it reveals that objectivism/libertarianism/whatever is not, in fact, a rational movement. It is more akin to a religion, and its efforts are more like a crusade than a political movement.

I think it also explains a bit about why we, on the Left, are having trouble opposing such people. We do things like, say, look at the actual record of economic policy and expect law makers to respond in a rational manner. For example, we ask, “do higher minimum wages increase the overall prosperity of the society as a whole.” We carry out our studies, and sure enough, it turns out that they do. So, we point at the data and say, “See? See? It just makes sense.”

But we miss the point. Prosperity is not what these people are after. (At least, for anyone but themselves.) What matters to them is “morality.” For them, it is a sin for anyone to tell them to pay an employee more than they wish to.  If, in the process, they end up bankrupting most of society...well, so be it, so long as their high and holy “right” to do as they please, economically, is not infringed upon.

Which means we are at a disadvantage. We approach them expecting them to behave as we would...expecting them, that is, to be a political movement in the same sense that we are a movement, and, like us, heirs to the Enlightenment tradition.

But they are no such thing. They are a religion, a church militant, armed and zealous...like Templars in Jerusalem.

The difference being, of course, that these Templars worship neither God nor the demon envisioned by the knights’ destroyers. Rather, for them, the supreme law, the supreme judge, the supreme being whose will it is a sin to oppose in even the smallest things, is...

Themselves.

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 Rebecca Onion, “What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority," Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2017/06/james_mcgill_buchanan_s_terrifying_vision_of_society_is_the_intellectual.html