Spot on observation by Ace, who spots bipartisan attacks on Pam Geller in the overculture and responds “I have long ago decided that I do not wish to be on the list of the Acceptable Ones, and will take no action whatsoever to secure my place upon it. Maybe I have an advantage here: I do not seek the approval of those who bestow Respectability, as I simply do not respect them.”
Noting that “as a personal matter, I have had sharp differences with Ms. Geller. We do not get along. But this is entirely besides the point,” he adds:
A woman spoke.
Men with guns shot at her for speaking.
Do we really need to take an “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach here.
And we need not talk about “tone” or whether Ms. Gellar speaks for us on all things.
One does not award Style Points on a battlefield.
This is why we have no actual conservative movement worth a damn: Because our political officers and our thought leaders are all drawn from, and aspire to advance in, the same Upper Middle Class Northeast-and-California cultural consensus of “respectability.”
Some people are ideologues are are intensely and primarily interested in Ideas.
Most are not.
And thus most people’s first loyalty is not to any abstract Idea, but the more tangible Class they come from, and which gives them Identity, which gives them Place in the world, and which is, for far too many thinkers, a major source of pride and, I dare say, egotistical joy.
The current dominant class, the class that controls the political-media establishment, is this Upper Middle Class, leftism-inflected consensus, and until people can begin seeing this and seeing past it, and until they can begin making their first loyalty to Idea and Principle, which are universal and eternal, rather than Class and Cult, which are nothing but happenstance and ego, we will continue having an “opposition” which continues genuflecting to leftist conformity rather than standing up for ideas.
Which also explains why some elites on both sides of the aisle could defend Charlie Hebdo — a French socialist publication, by its very nature, has a certain amount of exotic, elitist cache — and turn their backs on an American conservative woman, largely because of her tone. But then, tone and class are often interchangeable signifiers for elite status. They explain why William F. Buckley, P.J. O’Rourke and Tom Wolfe could move fluidly through the elite (left-dominated) overculture, and why say, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the late Andrew Breitbart were never accepted.
Oh, and just to place the past couple of days into perspective, Katie Pavlich writes at Towhall that “ISIS has officially taken responsibility for the attack Sunday night on a Muhammad art exhibit in Garland, Texas. This is the first official ISIS attack to be be carried out on U.S. soil.”
Which the Washington Post demands the principal victim apologize for.
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