1. So I have some thoughts on @rossdouthat, Edmund Burke, Anthony Powell, meritocracy, Perry Anderson, & Karl Marx's love for Balzac.
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2. The Douthat column that has so many feathers ruffled is an articulation of a classic conservative theme: traditional aristocratic virtues are threatened by a crassly levelling modernity. It's Burke's great theme. "But the age of chivalry is gone etc."
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3. Burke: "But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever." Douthat "But the age of Bush Sr. is gone. That of Trumpists, fake-meritocrats, etc. has succeeded."
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4. Conservatives have been lamenting the dying of the old order for 2 centuries. For the left, the question is, when is it actually going to die! After all, the ancien regimes have had a long afterlife. The descendants of the old nobility still doing well.
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5. To pick one example of many, Anthony Powell's great roman fleuve Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975_ traces the triumph of the grubby go-getter Kenneth Widermpool over the languid but charming aristocrats. The same story Douthat is telling, but in a different era.
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6. One easy way to respond to this stuff is to say that it's a persistent but necessary myth: the best way to shore up privilege is threat inflation: pretend that old order is under threat so that change can be fended off.
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7. But there's a curious wrinkle to long story of right decrying nouveau riche & meritocrats, which is that Marxists have long loved the novelists who have told this story.
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8. The favorite novelist of Marx and Engels was Balzac, the monarchist. Fredric Jameson loves the Tory Ford Maddox Ford. Anthony Powell's biggest fans are often leftists (Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, and Hitchens when he was on the left).
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9. Why have Marxists been so fond of these Tory and sometimes reactonary novelists who, time and again, have told stories of the Old Order under siege from new money? Part of the answer is these novelists are all history minded.
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10. But another factor is that capitalist society has long had a curious duality, combining a public culture that celebrates civic duty (sometimes in aristocratic form) and a commercial culture celebrating private greed. These novelists are the ones that notice this duality.
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11. Tory and reactionary novelists (as well as theorists like Burke) are super-sensitive to how the ideological justifications of national cohesion are in tension with the reality that money dominates. That's a theme that Marxists are also interested in.
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12. So as with Marx on Balzac or Anderson on Powell, the proper response to
@DouthatNYT is not rejection but asking what he gets right. I think his critique of meritocracy (or really pseudo-meritocracy) is spot on.5 replies 2 retweets 30 likesShow this thread -
13. I explore some of these themes here:https://newrepublic.com/article/152533/death-wasp-elite-greatly-exaggerated …
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