“Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”
On November 3, 2024, two days before Election Day 2024, the prominent journalist and podcaster Megyn Kelly was called to the podium at a Trump rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In her cogent remarks that day, she shot back at the Harris campaign’s aggressive push for women to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris due to former President Donald Trump’s stance on the issue of abortion, while, at the same time, brushing back at the Left’s derision of President Trump’s claim that he will be a protector of women:
“He got mocked by the left for saying he would be a ‘protector of women.’ He will be a protector of women, and it is why I’m voting for him….
And ladies out there who want a bit of girl power in this election, let me tell you something. How can you win when the sons and the husbands and the brothers and the dads you love are losing? It’s not a win.
We care—young women and older—about the lives of our children, the safety of our children, and we need not get so obsessed with what happens when they’re in the womb that we forget about taking care of them once we’re here and they’re here and they’re loved.”
During her podcast eight days later, Kelly amplified the point, taking on the feminist left:
“I was open-minded. I was never a feminist…and then your absolute insanity radicalized me the other way: to stand up against you, to fight you with everything I have, because you’re destructive, and you’re deeply, deeply wrong, and my standing up for female empowerment, which I’ve done my entire life, does not require me to s—t all over American men. I knew what you leftists thought of feminism. It meant abortion and crapping on men, and most of us women over on the side of the normies don’t want that. We love our husband. We love our boys, our sons, our dads, our brothers, our male friends and colleagues, and we are not ready to consider this a zero-sum game where we must advance at their expense. Until you get that through your thick f—ing head, you’ll keep losing.”
At the root of the distinction Kelly was making between the narrow leftist version of “feminism” and the more expansive version of “female empowerment” is a more deep-seated contrast between the manner in which conservatives (not libertarians but conservatives) and progressives (not classical liberals but progressives) see the world.
For contemporary progressives, we are, first and foremost, the intersection of our identitarian attributes—a differently abled black lesbian woman or whatnot—and so political appeals center on our purported interests as viewed from the vantage point of such characteristics. From this logical standpoint, a woman who fails to vote for a pro-abortion candidate and a black man who votes for a candidate who has said racist things are baffling traitors to their own identities. They are voting against their respective best interests. Such identitarian approaches are culminations of a conception of human societies that first came to the fore during the French Revolution and revolves around individuals as loci for an assortment of rights and entitlements. Encoded in various declarations and other documents drafted by jurists and philosophes, these rights and entitlements metastasize in the usual pattern of text simultaneously subject to fixation, interpretation, and re-interpretation giving rise to instantaneously canonical doctrines of which earlier generations of codifiers, such as our original framers, never dreamed. The foremost example is the suddenly sacrosanct woman’s “right to choose” extracted by an activist Supreme Court in 1973 from the “right to privacy,” extracted in its turn by that court in 1965 from “penumbras” found lurking in the Constitution’s First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments. In similar fashion, textual fragments of variously declared “Universal Rights of Man” are twisted and turned over time into rights and entitlements belonging to these particular black men, these particular undocumented women of color, and these particular non-binary individuals, all of whose specific nascent group identities congeal around the pursuit and consolidation of such newfound privileges.
For conservatives, by contrast, we are primarily defined by our embeddedness in particular human communities. A woman, then, is not defined by her capacity to express her stark individuation by separating herself from and ridding herself of the life or potential life inside of her, i.e., via abortion but, rather, through what are, to use philosophical parlance, her various “internal relations,” that is, the relationships that make her who she is. She is a daughter and granddaughter. She may be a wife, a mother, or a grandmother. She may be a sister. She may also be a teacher of students, a wise elder to whom others come for counsel, a doctor to whom patients come to be healed, a member of a community board or church group, and an occupant of countless other overlapping and non-overlapping roles. Thus, though she clearly differs from a man biologically—conservatives today have an easier time offering a strict biological definition of a woman than do their contemporary progressive counterparts—she does not exist, or at least ought not to exist, as an independent political category any more than do the men and boys that may share her home. All of these exhibit certain distinct biological and sociological features—conservatives, again, are far more comfortable than progressives in speaking of typical male and female social roles—but, in the end, for the conservative sensibility, our abstracted identity groupings are far less significant than the organic familial and communal relations that constitute our shared world. This is the grounded worldview that implicitly informed Kelly’s comments on November 3rd.
Conversely, the progressive worldview is becoming ever-more-ungrounded and unmoored from the reality of everyday life. Testaments to that unmooring are the much-discussed inability, as above, of many in the progressive vanguard even to define what a woman is or to speak cogently to the kinds of male and female social roles toward which the genders typically gravitate across all human societies. And, contrary to what progressives would have us believe, divergent gender preferences are not purely sociologically constructed and manifest themselves even among higher primates, such as rhesus monkeys, among whom male monkeys, like male humans, not only show a greater preference for rough-and-tumble play than do female monkeys but even for wheeled toys as opposed to plush toys. The 4B movement originally from South Korea (the four Bs are bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, translating to no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, and no sex with men)—and starting to find a foothold in the United States after President Trump’s election victory—likewise threatens to sever the link between the individual and society. Even if we might expect that the women partaking in the movement will be largely those who, regardless, would have had difficulty engaging in any of the four Bs and are simply turning their predicament into an ideological position, I also predict there will be a growing market for Artificial Intelligence-infused mannequin companions to discharge sexual functions and domestic chores for the benefit of many men in the developed world. The attempt to reconfigure society in accordance with the dictates of an imposed ideological scheme, i.e., D.E.I., rather than simply endeavoring to fill available roles with those most qualified to occupy them is yet another clear indication of the progressive flailing against reality. If the old, common-sense adage is that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” then the progressive approach to that scenario would be to gouge out the king’s remaining eye and elevate one who is both blind and deaf to the throne. The result is precisely what we are experiencing in our own society today: incompetence on every level.
In his posthumously published (completed by Thomas Luckmann) work The Structures of the Life World, the Austrian phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, expanding upon William James’ concept of the “paramount reality,” that is, the world as ordinarily apprehended by our senses, includes in his conception of the “life-world” our accustomed intersubjective socio-cultural environment as apprehended by most of us: “By the everyday life-world is to be understood that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense,” he explains. When we are in that default mode of apprehension, adopting what the phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl referred to as the “natural attitude” toward our surroundings, “it is ‘self-evident’” that things are what they are, that “that these trees ‘really’ are trees, for you and for me, these birds ‘really’ are birds, and so on.” It is, as is already apparent from what has been said, a shared world, in which we can assume others have the fundamental understandings about the way things are—and in which communication and practical action and engagement are made possible by those commonly held understandings. To this, we may contrast, for example, the fantasy world in which we immerse ourselves when we daydream. “When my attention becomes absorbed in one of the several fantasy worlds, I no longer need to master the external world,” Schutz explains. “But also, as long as I live in fantasy worlds, I cannot ‘produce,’ in the sense of an act which gears into the external world and alters it. As long as I tarry in the world of fantasy[,] I cannot accomplish anything, save just to engage in fantasy.” Schutz uses the example of Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills, where, even when it is windmills rather than giants that have lifted Quixote out of his saddle, “[h]e does not admit that the objects that he took to be giants were windmills all along and that he just must have been mistaken.” Although “the shock which he experiences is a physical one[,] it does not force him to shift the accent of reality, but only to find an explanation for the event suited to the province of meaning of the specific fantasy world.”
Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes. This is especially true of the murky academic domain that is often referred to as “Theory” with a capital “T,” that mishmash of leftist political thought and philosophical musings which has no clear home even within the confines of academia—being not quite literature or literary criticism, not quite sociology or psychology and not quite philosophy—and marking its territory most aggressively within recently created domains such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies and the sundry studies to which various identity groups go to get themselves affirmed.
As described by thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, Brooks Adams and Sir John Glubb, while the early stages of a culture’s development are characterized by the predominance of hearty men of action who are sure of themselves and feel no particular need to wallow in reflection—the exigencies of life during these early stages being such that survival is the principal imperative, affording little time for waxing philosophical—as a culture matures and begins to accumulate wealth and the opportunity for leisure, thinkers appear on the scene, ushering in, at a certain precious moment, a golden age when great monuments are erected and monumental works of art are forged. This is the age when the culture most makes its mark on world history.
But as time passes, the delicate balance between doers and thinkers shifts decisively in favor of the latter category. The culture goes soft and decadent, taking its stability and prosperity for granted. Intellectuals, would-be-intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals proliferate. Using their predilection for rational analysis, the only tool in their toolbox, they question everything, subjecting the precognitive, quasi-mythical foundations of the State to their rational scrutiny, undermining public faith in institutions and the shared national identity. What Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” creeps in, as more and more credentialed empty suits wander about in search of sinecures corresponding to their lofty self-image, and even those at the upper echelons of the academic credentialing mills, viz., the Ph.D.-pedigreed academics themselves, are either forced to eke out a living at the ignominious outer fringes of the university system as lecturers and adjuncts or are cast out of the academy entirely.
Among the destructive consequences of these developments is the infiltration of the academic world into the life-world. Their intermingling yields something that is less than the sum of the parts. High-level academic discourse is replete with nuance and complexity, but when such discourse—and especially Theory—spreads itself thin by being turned over to the unsteady stewardship of second- and third-rate academics and then is carried over into the ordinary life-world by “overproduced elites,” its cautions and qualifications are disregarded, its exceptions become rules, and its fine distinctions turn crude, thin-slicing scalpels becoming blunt cudgels in the hands of eager political hacks, technocrats, and consultants wielding real and contrived victimhood to accumulate power.
Thus, the haphazard detritus of academic ideas about complex and inherently explosive subjects like power, slavery, colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality, filtering into the life-world, becomes shards poking holes in the delicate fabric of society. Then we get grotesque concoctions such as the manner in which the half-baked ingredients of postcolonial theory turn the complex history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a Manichean battle between European colonizers and colonized natives; the myopic distortions of critical race theory reduce the multifactorial nature of the plight of black people in America to a simplistic narrative of systemic racism; and the psychologically naïve and rigid attributions of critical gender theory and queer theory re-frame tots’, pre-teens’, and teens’ natural curiosity and playful explorations of adult social roles as definitive forays into sexual dysphoria in need of recognition and fixation through hormones and surgery.
In an April 14, 2024 episode of Bill Maher’s podcast, Katie Couric charged that “anti-intellectualism…is what is driving many of these anti-establishment [voters]—which are Trump voters.” In some significant sense, she is substantially correct. In his own election victory speech, President Trump referred to his re-configured Republican coalition as “[u]niting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.” “You know, we’re the party of common sense,” he added, and common sense, another name for the natural attitude with which we approach the life-world, is almost necessarily anti-intellectual, especially when, as now, the “intellectuals” among us threaten a reign of terror in which ordinary things are given new, Orwellian names—e.g., mothers become “birthing people,” bums, junkies, and nutjobs roaming the streets are normalized as “unhoused individuals,” and all species of speech policing and social control are disguised as “defending democracy”—long-held distinctions are eviscerated, revered historical figures are de-pedestaled, time-tested aesthetic canons are toppled, and venerable beliefs and practices are stigmatized. Such flailing against the commonly accepted names, customs, and rituals prevalent in the life-world is a typical feature of aspiring left totalitarian intellectuals, whether the French Jacobins’ renaming of the days of the week and months of the year, the similar attacks on all aspects of society by communist revolutionaries from Russia to China to Cambodia to North Korea, or the vivid depiction of Big Brother’s “Newspeak” by Orwell himself.
For all of President Trump’s flaws, what was hard even for his detractors to deny is that he came across not like a politician but like a real person saying things he actually believed, things that, to many of us, simply made sense. Conversely, Vice President Harris came across as consummately political, a fake production rather than a flesh-and-blood human being, a cypher incapable of anything other than predigested talking points and vapid, insincere doublespeak. As Holden Caulfield would attest, one thing most people cannot stand is a faker. The aversion is instinctive, fine-tuned by the same evolutionary processes that make us acutely sensitive to all of those indicators—a different appearance, the slightest trace of a different accent, whether foreign or regional, or any other marked deviation from the local norm—that mark someone as “not one of us.” Just as it takes education to overcome our in-group preferences, education is required to rationalize away our precognitive aversion to fakery and pretense. For better or for worse, normal people approach what they do not understand with suspicion, but education—and especially years of immersion in an ivory tower milieu—habituates us to highfalutin rhetoric and even accustoms us to stand in awe of those who put on airs and say things we cannot quite grasp. Thus, while, at its best, education opens our minds to all manner of otherness, it also blinds us to obvious truths as we make a habit of ignoring and overriding our intuition and think and talk ourselves into falling for intellectual charlatans and accepting nonsense. This is why it is sometimes said that something—something like the idea that tons of kids are born in the “wrong” gender, know it from an early age, and can transition to the other gender—is so stupid only an intellectual would believe it.
As soon as Vice President Harris entered the race, I told anyone who would listen that she, like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before her (but unlike President Joe Biden, who, despite all his other substantial deficits, has always had a certain grounded sincerity about him), would lose because the working class would see through her and never go for a faker. But the result of the 2024 election and the political realignment unfolding before our eyes was not just about her. It was a process decades in the making, as the Democrats transitioned from a broad, working-class party of unions, social freedom, and civil liberties into a party of big corporations, wealthy white-collar elites, celebrities, media, academia, and a shrinking contingent of older legacy voters and hoodwinked minorities.
Befitting its new contingencies, it had become the party of unrestricted illegal immigration benefitting large corporate employers by flooding the market with cheap labor exerting downward pressure on wages throughout the economy. It had become the party of inflation helping employers implement effective wage cuts and offering abundant opportunities for using the across-the-board rise in prices as cover for price gouging. It had become the party trying to push through a bare-faced loan forgiveness scam as a giveaway to its college-educated voters, who had made a voluntary choice to take on debt to get useless degrees, as contrasted with those who had, for example, made more financially responsible decisions to get degrees that would allow them to pay back their debts, to attend cheaper universities, or to forego college entirely and pursue a skilled trade. It had become the party of forever wars affecting transfers of billions upon billions in wealth from American taxpayers to the elites of the military-industrial complex. It had become the party of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and free speech restrictions driving a windfall for Big Pharma, while claiming to represent a new, infallible church called “the Science” (bearing little relation to the self-correcting enterprise we used to call “science”) but representing, in reality, a far older, though markedly less sacrosanct, institution called “the Dollar.”
To get voters to go for its anti-working-class, pro-corporate, anti-free-speech policies, the new Democrats, aside from fearmongering about fascism and the danger to democracy, resorted to a well-worn tactic: pandering to minorities and the underclass. The stratagem falls squarely within the rubric sketched out in the 20th century French political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power (1945), in which Jouvenel describes the manner in which power has become concentrated in the hands of centralized authority over the course of centuries. Dispelling the commonly perpetuated myth that we have gone from an age of absolute monarchs exercising limitless authority over the lives of subjects to an age of popular sovereignty, Jouvenel points out that those monarchs of old could not so much as summon up a military force without the cooperation of the class of aristocrats whose favor they needed to court. Without modern systems of universal taxation, their financial means to undertake war or for any other purpose were likewise severely limited, as was their ability to exercise any real control over the goings-on in faraway localities within their nominal jurisdiction. It was not until the 20th century and the likes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong that true totalitarianism became possible. But even the information and power networks commanded by these dictators pale in comparison to the resources available to today’s powers-that-be. Contrary, then, to the myth of increasing people power, we have seen a growing concentration of power flowing upward and inward to the center.
The principal historical struggle Jouvenel traces on the way from there to here is the one between the central authorities and that subsidiary layer of aristocrats, peers, and other variously denominated rivals to the throne, as it were, from whom the rulers are perpetually trying to break free. In Jouvenel’s framework, the fuel on which they must rely in order to attain escape velocity is the people themselves. Both that uppermost layer of the ruling strata and that secondary layer of rivals compete over the allegiance of the populace by advancing warring claims to being the true vehicle through which the masses or some substantial sub-components thereof may further their cause and free themselves of all the forms of oppression that seem to be multiplying over time despite such repeated exercises in liberation.
With each successive iteration of this power-play won by one or the other of the competing factions of elites, the sum-total of power concentrated in the hands of whoever comes to represent the ruling authority increases, while the sum-total of power in the hands of anything standing between the individual and the ruling authority diminishes. This is because the masses, in entrusting those elevated to power to protect them from purported peril and oppression by competing elites, necessarily hand over their independence and agency to their would-be-saviors.
Empowering an official standing army to protect us from foreigners diminishes our power to take up arms and form smaller bands on our own behalf, this being all the more the case when the State proceeds to exercise a monopoly over certain weapons of war. Similarly, empowering police, judges, and other law enforcement officers to keep society safe and orderly diminishes the sphere within which we can resolve our own disputes as we see fit. Empowering an official system of state-run schools to save us from the peril of ignorance necessarily hands over the critical function of education to the State’s “professionals,” while disabling us from educating ourselves and our children in accordance with our community’s and our own values rather than those prioritized by the State. Medical accreditation schemes, enacted ostensibly for our protection from harm, to grant the State or certain organizations closely tied to it the exclusive power to license those who diagnose, treat, and prescribe medicines diminish the sphere of our agency over our own bodies. Each additional installment in the burgeoning category of anti-discrimination law, sold to us as protections from various kinds of oppression, diminishes our freedom of choice and association. In essence, each law and regulation added to the books by authorities claiming to champion our causes diminishes us while empowering them and their growing array of boards, commissions, agencies, professionals, and technocrats—call it the “Deep State” or what you will—that, as the political theorist James Burnham already saw back in the 1940s, increasingly exercise power over every aspect of our lives.
At the same time, as we arrogate ever more power to the centralized state and undermine what the sociologist Robert Nisbet called “intermediate associations” between us and the State—village communities, guilds, clubs, community groups, fraternal orders and so on—we find ourselves progressively atomized. We become isolated lumps of shapeless, easily moldable clay, no longer defined or held in place by our distinctive community, our regional culture, or even familial network. Where once we depended on the stability of our local community and, most of all, our family unit to fulfill our essential needs, including to provide for our financial security, now, mass media and interstate and international commerce undermine all localism, while the State, in the guise of providing failsafe mechanisms to keep us from poverty, creates perverse disincentives that render families supererogatory, causing the divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate to skyrocket. Ultimately, stripped of all organic bonds to one another, we become not a coherent, particular “folk” but an undifferentiated, pliable mass.
Reduced to this condition, we are easily sorted and manipulated by those in power. For the Democrats, the party most closely associated with the explosion of state power at the expense of intermediate associations, identity groups that artificially subdivide us and pit us against one another are useful tools to pursue precisely the kind of accumulation of power Jouvenel describes. Democrats can claim to be protectors of one or another of these identity groups against the oppression of the purportedly powerful white male heterosexual cisgender Christian overlords while, in reality, representing and furthering the interests of their party elites, donors, corporate backers, and propagandists and mouthpieces in media and academia.
Meanwhile, every additional measure that severs our organic links to one another distances us further from the life-world. Those not embedded in the kinds of ordinary social relations typical of the life-world are not as deeply steeped in the natural attitude characteristic of the life-world and, lacking that critical base of common sense, are inherently more susceptible to manipulation by intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. Common sense is our redoubt against authoritarianism because it revolts against all the Orwellian re-definitions, re-framings and dystopian re-imaginings of reality that the operatives of the State try to impose upon us when seeking to consolidate their hegemony. Lacking such common sense, the young, whose social worlds, occupational pursuits, and property relations are usually not as yet consolidated into those prevailing in our life-world, tend to glom on to wild, radical, and oft-impractical or nonsensical ideas. Similarly, for all the talk of the “gender gap,” President Trump actually won married women by three percentage points, 51-to-48. It was single women, not yet embedded in familial life in the manner of married women and, thus, easier prey for the Democrats’ identitarian appeals based on gender, sexuality, and abortion, that President Trump lost by a large 60-to-38 margin. His support also came disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, places where local communities still matter and where President Trump won 63% of the vote.
The good news, at least as of 2024, is that there remains, in America, a clear majority of citizens who have not yet been stripped of their organic social relations and atomized into pliable fodder for the State’s growing machinery of social control. The visions of elite apologists like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays—who saw the masses as essentially mindless subjects inherently unable to understand the demands of a large, technologically advanced society and in need of having their blank slate of opinions shaped by the ruling class—remain as-yet not fully realized because they are heartily opposed by a critical mass of people in the middle, those who are neither part of the government and its underlying power structure nor entirely dependent upon the benefits it confers. Such people are generally content to let the professionals run the show. Busily immersed in the day-to-day of their own lives, they are not, by their nature, activists. But they also will not abide having their beliefs or their children’s genders dictated to them from on high. When they find their small businesses, churches, and schools shut down by a government that lets those strict “lockdown” rules fall by the wayside when violent rioters take to the streets, when they see those same rioters let off with impunity by activist prosecutors who save their ire for those forced to defend themselves and others against psychotic druggie bums permitted to wreak havoc among us, when they are compelled to ponder how our borders could have been opened to a flood of law-breaking opportunists, drug-dealers, and violent criminals even as we squander billions to defend the border of a doomed nation thousands of miles away in a conflict we ourselves provoked, when they watch their kids coming home from school spouting the divisive and hateful rhetoric of critical race theory or the utterly absurd provocations of gender ideology, and when they see themselves and those political leaders who represent them censored, silenced, persecuted and prosecuted, they have no choice but to rise up in the name of common sense to vote for “the party of common sense,” countervailing the madness.
George Washington, whose hallowed name still rings out first and foremost in many of our minds when we think of that larger-than-life, heroic generation of America’s Founding Fathers, was, befitting our country’s national character, no intellectual. Armed with no more than a primary school education, at least as far as formal education went, lacking any knowledge of Latin, French, or any language other than his native English, Washington was a practical man through and through. He was a businessman and a soldier who rose through the ranks because of his undeniable talent, his discipline, and his wisdom. He read widely on his own, studying politics, religion, history, agriculture, and military tactics, but his reading was largely of a practical, not a theoretical, character. He learned what he needed to learn to get by in his life-world: its flora and fauna, his fellow men, and their ways. Yet he became one of the, if not the, greatest leaders we ever had, both as a general and as a President. And try as they might to tar him with their holier-than-thou, standing-in-judgment-over-history charge of participation in the practice of slavery, our latter-day haters cannot diminish his greatness.
Far be it for me—one formally educated in the very universities that are the source of our problem today and who has always cherished and continues to cherish learning, including utterly useless theoretical literature, for its own sake—to make an argument condemning those who are or aspire to be intellectuals. I make no such argument. I heap high praise upon those who possess the drive and curiosity to engage in the pursuit of truth and beauty, though I do not believe that most of those who are befouling our political climate today, including the graduates of these same universities, are true intellectuals in this vaunted sense. Rather, they see ideas as barbs to be hurled at political enemies. But I reserve my very highest praise for those who are not intellectuals at all, those who, though not possessed of any ready stockpile of good ideas to battle back against the bad ones, have had to endure the onslaught—the fearmongering, race-baiting, propaganda, disinformation, and social control—and who have neither succumbed to the pressure nor lurched to some opposite extreme in reaction but, like that exemplary paramount American, that greatest of generals and Presidents who led us through war to peace and beyond, stayed steady while the storm was raging overhead, and leaning not on lofty conceptions of the good but on the tangible good sense instilled by being who they are amongst others like themselves, emerged white-knuckled but ruddy-cheeked, holding firm, growing stronger.
Alexander Zubatov is a lawyer in New York, as well as an essayist and poet. He can be found on X @Zoobahtov
