Uncertainty #3: Cancel Vultures
Uncertainty #3: Cancel Vultures
Adaam leaves our conversation with Peter Turchin with elite overproduction on the mind — and a whole new theory about cancel culture’s true origins.
Hello,
This newsletter thing still feels new for me and in need of some explanation. So if you’re also new to Uncertainty, a quick primer: for our Uncertain Things podcast, Vanessa and I strive to get guests we find fascinating — and be as ready as we can to push the conversation forward (preparing, researching, conducting, and then editing after). Given the annoying dearth of hours in a week, we long ago decided to publish our episodes biweekly. But, given that our episodes tend to be of, um, considerable length, we thought it might be smart to use the time between episodes to sit down and work through our post-interview ruminations. And here we are. We started this newsletter to offer you, our dear subscribers, another take on a familiar theme, sharing where our minds are and what we’re currently working on, plus a few recommendations for other reads and listens we think are worth your time.
Ok, expositing over.
Though before we get into cancel culture, the looming civil war, and all that good stuff, allow me a detour about drunken college students. As you may or may not know from personal experience, drinking copiously is a time-honored tradition of young college students. What better way to celebrate one’s youth than singe the liver with booze and then embarrass one’s self in public? But sozzled asininity also has a way of turning violent. Sometimes ridiculously violent. At the Swindlestock Tavern on Feb. 10, 1335 a bunch of Oxford students, supposedly displeased with the quality of the wine in which they were marinated, picked a fight with the barkeepers. The arrogance of the scholars struck a chord with the local townsfolk, whose resentment quickly turned into something deadlier. What started as a brawl grew into a two-day riot. A mob of thousands fell on the university, dozens were killed and several were scalped. The affair is usually recalled as a grim but droll historical oddity. A bar crawl gone wrong. But there’s something more to it. Listeners may have noticed that I used the incident as the cover art for our latest interview with Peter Turchin. If the connection still isn’t clear, I promise I’ll get to it shortly. But first, let’s talk about the End of the World.
Ode to an Ending World
Eschatology is front and center for Uncertain Things. The pod, which we started at the apocalyptic Annus Domini 2020, was a way for us to have conversations at a slower pace and think through — or you might say, cope with — what seemed like a general collapse of institutions which we'd taken for granted, from our political order to our information sources to the ineffable cultural suppositions that we once thought glued us together.
That so many parts of our society seem to be unraveling makes it impossible to unite around a single explanation or tell a single story about what’s going on. Whatever is happening is shaking us on a deep and foundational level, and our vocabularies are just not up to the task. I suspect that’s part of the reason our public discourse is stuck repeating the same clichés that feel more detached than ever from the shattered reality that we experience. The best we can do is shiver uncomfortably whenever that funny feeling hits.
So What’s Really Going On?
Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.
When we spoke with historian Niall Ferguson, he invoked Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of The End of History. Fukuyama’s work often gets mischaracterized by people as overly naive and patently debunked.1 But read Fukuyama’s own words from 1992 (which Vanessa texted to me in the summer of 2020 as we were deciding to start the pod) and tell me if he sounds off the mark:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
So is that it? Classical liberalism and democracy are in regression because the people got bored with it? We just got tired of winning?
In our interview, Ferguson mentioned another contributing factor: pointless complexity. Liberal democracies in general and the United States in particular have grown so unwieldy, so technocratic, and so legalistic that individuals can no longer engage in a meaningful way with the state, whose activities seem increasingly untethered to the needs of the public. In fact, there’s a whole class of mediators (or, depending on your perspective, rent seekers) who thrive on this systemic bloat: lawyers, consultancy firms, lobbyists are all vocations whose prosperity depends on key parts of our system remaining largely inaccessible to the public. “Complexity is a subsidy,” as Mary Katherine Ham once summarized a century of economic conservatism in one tweet.
This disconnect between state power and the public breeds feelings of disempowerment and resentment, as observed by author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri. We spoke with him last year about his prescient masterwork The Revolt of the Public. Public disaffection and (to return to Fukuyama) boredom, Gurri argues, are supercharged by the social media revolution — dubbed by Gurri as “The Fifth Wave.” Angry people plus unrestricted information equals boom. While many commentators in 2012 believed the rise of social media would carry the Western gospel of freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, Gurri, still at the CIA, maintained that it would do the opposite, bringing public unrest, political upheavals, and even social collapse to the West. In 2020, with many on the American right embracing election deniers (who would soon break into the Capitol building waving the flag of their God Emperor — cc: Peter Meijer), and many on the left making callow excuses for rampant mob violence that claimed the streets of once-great cities (cc: Nancy Rommelmann), Gurri’s grimmer predictions for our social order seemed to be coming true.
The Disempowered Elite
Which brings me to Peter Turchin. In 2010 he was among a number of sociologists and historians asked by Nature magazine to offer their projections for the country a decade hence. Most contributors were quite bullish on America in 2020. Turchin was not. His work on Cliodynamics — a field of prediction-yielding historical analysis which he pioneered — led him to conclude that political instability, social turmoil, and economic crises “all look set to peak in the years around 2020.”
Can’t say we weren’t warned.
If you listened to our talk this week or have read his essays, you know that he made these predictions after observing three disheartening trends in America, the first two of which tie in neatly (if imperfectly) with the works of Gurri and Ferguson. First is what Turchin calls “immiseration.” By this he means the regression in material and psychological wellbeing, from economic insecurity to dipping life expectancy. As Ferguson shows in his book The Great Degeneration, this at least partly stems from the overwrought and sclerotic nature of our current financial and political system (see above). This leads neatly to the second trend: a weakening state due to loss of public trust. Um. Yeah. If you’re a regular listener, I think we can leave it at that.
But the third trend was the one that really stuck with me: elite overproduction.
Put simply, this means that the number of Americans expecting elite status — influence, income, reputation — has grown at an exponentially higher rate than available elite positions.
This is where things start clicking together. Peel off one or two layers from recent examples of social ferment and you'll find at its core a rotten, petty struggle of elites against elites.
After all, who is this “public” who, according to Gurri, so deftly exploits the Fifth Wave of media to stir shit up? Who are the disestablishmentarians who, in Ferguson’s telling, were impelled to war by systemic decay and boredom? These aren’t, generally speaking, working class people. Working class people are usually too busy…working.
Cancel Vultures
The people who drive our current culture war dumbassery tend to be overeducated, overgroomed, ambitious upstarts who are just oh-so-thirsty.
Think of the pathologies on the left: by now we're all familiar with the story of a moral crusade being rallied by angry activists for the purpose of destroying a fellow academic, journalist, or coworker just because they used “insensitive” language once, or because they expressed a mildly contentious view, or because it's Tuesday. Sure, the activists claim that this is about fairness and reckoning and whatnot. But does anyone really believe that the absurd ostracism of documentarian Meg Smaker or the elbowing out of Alexi McCammond from Teen Vogue or the defenestration of Mike Pesca from Slate or of James Bennet from The New York Times are truly about justice and accountability?
But things make a whole lot more sense2 when you start seeing cancel culture not as a highly charged and deeply ideological moment, but rather as rampant pettiness, repressed envy, and invidious social climbing that got gussied up and rebranded as “doing the work.”
The same is happening on the right, of course. JD Vance and Blake Masters wax populist about America's delusional and corrupt elites. But as graduates of Yale and Stanford Law (respectively), their Men of the People pose isn't looking so sincere. (Yes, yes, I've read Hillbilly Elegy, and actually liked it quite a lot.)
And what about the ideological infighting within the conservative movements? Post-liberal NatCons against Classically Liberal squishes, Sohrab Ahmari versus David French — truly the Burke v. Paine of our lifetime. If you want elucidation, I’d recommend our talks with Mark Lilla and Matt Continetti, but for now suffice it to say that many of the objections raised by the New Right sounds less like “here's an honest vision for a better, happier, more thriving America” than “it’s our turn to be in power.”
And all the while these bored, power hungry parvenues remain obstinately blind to their own elitism. Take the scores of journalists touting Biden's loan forgiveness program as a coup for underprivileged Americans. They will rarely-if-ever acknowledge how heavily they themselves will benefit from this elite-minded subsidy, all while leaving it to tax-paying working class Americans who never completed a 4-year college to foot the bill. (Friend-of-the-pod Batya Ungar-Sargon has been ferocious on this.) Or consider the far right’s political machine that fleeced their poorest supporters for millions in the name of beating the aristocratic left. For both sides, the end justifies, and the end is ultimately nothing more than gaining an advantage in a crowded and increasingly immiserated field.
Let Them Eat Elites
So what, you might ask. Let the elites devour each other.
Here's the thing: my problem isn't that I hate elites. I want to live in a competitive world that produces high quality journalism, and art, and scholarship, and scientific research. I just want better, less petty, and less self-involved elites.
But beyond that, there's a chance that as go the elites so go we all. Remember the Oxford douches on St. Scholastica Day? Their wine snobbery triggered an unbridled bloodlust that got nearly 100 people killed. Now scale that up. Imagine what can happen on a national level when millions of bored and moderately powerful people decide to go to the mat for the power that they believe they're entitled to. And imagine the reaction of the folks who think they aren’t.
Things Worth Your Time ⏰
📚 I just now finished The Name of the Rose a second time. If you haven’t already, read it. If you have, read it again. Some novels are just worth it.
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them… Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
🎧 LA Times journo Arellano Gustavo joined The Fifth Column pod to drop some context on the LA City Council scandal. Was laughing start to finish. Listen asap. (Plus, it ties in surprising ways with our talk with architect Vishaan Chakrabarti about progressive hypocrisy in local politics.)
🎧 The Meg Smaker interview on the Making Sense podcast… oh boy.
What We’re Working On ⏭
We just had an unadulterated pre-midterms punditry sesh with recurring guest Andrew Heaton, the erudite and euphonious host of The Political Orphanage. Patrician diction aside, Andrew possesses a trait quite unique in modern journalism known as “studying up on a subject before talking one’s ass off.” As such he’s the perfect companion to help us figure out exactly what it is we should — and shouldn’t — care about in the coming elections.
One Last Certain Thing…
Vanessa found some magic in our gloomy city today.
😇 Like Uncertain Things? Share us with your friends — and enemies. 😈
Is this, say his rebukers, the Great Boredom at the end of history, in which liberal democracy reigns supreme and all that’s left for humanity to do is figure out how to handle all the peace and plenty?
The media industry is contracting: fewer positions, lower salaries, and diminishing prestige. Same applies across most strongholds of the liberal-elite, from the academy to entertainment. Vanishing opportunities lead to vicious competition, which is then rationalized as a fight for justice. I had an extended back-and-forth about this with Matt Taibbi, if you’re looking for more follow up.