I’m staring my 70th birthday in the eye — and flinching. Seriously, if I had known I was going to live this long, I’d …well, anyway, one of the advantages of age is you see a lot of stuff, and if you’re a science fiction writer and one of Heinlein’s children, you don’t just watch your day-to-day life becoming history, you read history, from Herodotus and Caesar to Howard Zinn. Don’t laugh; he has a lot to teach, by opposites.
So when I look at the last 25 years, I still try to maintain a little sense of distance. I try to remember that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. Thomas Jefferson said it.
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.
The meanings of some of these words have changed a little. The word “democrat” has been taken over by one political party, but not so long ago, we have Chesterton —
The American, if intellectually an aristocrat, was still socially and subconsciously a democrat. It had never crossed his mind that the poet should be counted lucky to know the squire and not the squire to know the poet.
… and Trollope —
He rejoiced to call himself a democrat, and would boast that rank could have no effect on him. —Anthony Trollope
To Jefferson and these others, “democrat” was the opposite of “aristocrat”: that each person was of equal intrinsic worth, that assertions of special privileges by birth are inherently wrong, and that “…all Men are created equal.”
Robert Heinlein succinctly drew the difference in his flat Midwestern style somewhat more recently:
Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."
In the last 25 years, we’ve seen that show up over and over again: climate zealots who want to force us into smaller homes, to have fewer children, to replace reliable power with solar and wind, and eventually to restrict us to “15-minute” neighborhoods. (See my Green New Deal: Nasty, Brutish, and Short, and Elontopia on the results of this.) They want to tell us what to do, what medical care we may have, and when (as Zeke Emanuel would have it) we’re obliged to just die and get out of the way already.
As bad as those are — and they are offensive, execrable, not to be borne — what’s worse is they want to tell us what we may say, what we may read and write, and finally, what we may think. The current crop of aristocrats took it upon themselves, co-operating between the “representatives” of the people and the means of communication, to tell us what we’re allowed to think and to know.
But here’s the thing. The system of the Western Enlightenment, and particularly the system that we evolved in the United States, is largely self-correcting, even though to us mortals, it can seem glacially slow.
The change started in 2015 when Trump made his entrance on the Trump Tower escalator. I missed it at the time. I think most of us did, but Trump was running as a democrat in the old sense. He was running as an anti-aristocrat and running against one of the more powerful aristocrats, even though she claimed to be a Democrat.
Of course they reacted vehemently, viciously. The aristocracy — oh we call them the “elite” now, but that’s what they are, the aristocracy — see that it’s a revolt against the presumption that they are entitled to rule.
They almost got away with it, too, until that meddling kid Musk pulled off the mask.
With that one act of defiance from someone with the money and power to resist, the pendulum really began to swing back, resulting in this week’s election. Because of the wisdom of the Founders, we have the general expectation of free speech, even when the aritoracy wants to restrain it; we have elections in which the power of the aristocray can be beaten.
The aristocracy will fight back, of course. They’re already trying. But the pendulum is swinging back, and we have a chance to defeat the aristocracy for a generation.
