Western elites: Waiting for Mister Goodbar

Remaking the world in their self-image one cosmetic, sterilizing surgery at a time

John Wojtowicz robbed a bank in an effort to round up the money to pay for (what would pass in today’s parlance as) his partner’s “gender affirming surgery.”  This was 1972, and the experience inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon (1975) with Al Pacino.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar came out in 1977.  “Dedicated schoolteacher Theresa Dunn spends her nights cruising bars, looking for abusive males with whom she can engage in progressively dangerous extreme sexual encounters.”  That’s the one-line synopsis at IMDB.com.  Diane Keaton gets mixed up with some rough characters portrayed by, among others, Richard Gere and Tom Berenger.  “Tom Berenger admitted in an interview that he had nightmares after he was finished shooting all of his scenes as Gary.”  I can imagine it.  It’s a dark film, and Gary is a dark character.

Then there were films like Midnight Cowboy (1969) with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight.  Also dark.

Each of these films project an unforgiving light on homosexuals.  It’s like shining a searing light on garbage bins in a dark alley at night: The diseased rats panic and scatter.  That light illuminates a syphilitic image of darkness and cruelty—cruelty concentrated within the gay community or (no worse) projected outward from the gay community onto others.

Portraying the gay world more as one of the lower circles of hell… surely that was not an intentional, editorial choice, was it?  Rather, I would be willing to guess that the intention was to project an image of the darkness in the world, not so much an image of darkness in the gay world in that any variety of darkness might have done the trick.  Indeed, films have always concentrated on the dark side, but, in this day and age, nobody would dare portray the gay world as anything less than a Disneyland of unicorns and rainbows, notwithstanding the fact that this is “how it’s going:”

As sports commentator Keith Jackson might have interjected: Whoa, Nellie!  But, “family-friendly,” they insist.

Goddamn.  If this is what “living openly” entails, then I put my bid in for returning to a norm of “don’t ask; don’t tell.”

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These film references have been stewing in my mind, but I decided to finally deploy them after coming across this passage in an essay by David Goldman:

America’s elite set out to remake the world according to its own imaginings after the fall of Communism in 1990 and had sufficient power to frog-march the rest of the industrial world into its plan.

The passage immediately preceding that was:

What is the agenda that the voters of the West have repudiated?

This business of repudiation, of course, relates to the first round of parliamentary elections in France on June 30…  as well as to recent results in the European elections and developments in the American political campaigns.

What I see in elections everywhere is that 35% to 45% of the electorate rejects (1) programs of unrestrained immigration of unskilled workers from countries … from failed states in which the populace has never developed respect for democratic norms; (2) government-by-unaccountable-NGO’s paid for with $trillions in deficit spending and by the implicit tax that is inflation; (3) economics-illiterate and physics-illiterate environmental policy; and (4) the demand for the syphilitic queering of everything.  And, if one dare pose an objection to any of that, then the state will label one “extreme right” and might de-bank you and send you off to prison.

A difficulty for the 35-45% is that 35-45% does not exceed 50%.  There seems to be a faction representing 25% to 32% of reliable voters who vote affirmatively for the program of the elites, but then there’s the mushy middle of NPC’s who might casually be Ok with a syrupy presentation of that program.  And so, coalitions of fanatics and NPC’s impose the elites’ agenda on the rest of us.  This seems to be true in Poland, the whole of Britain, Ireland, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Spain and just about everywhere else Northwest of Suez excepting, perhaps, Hungary and Slovakia.  Meanwhile, the Western elites’ program does not fly in Russia and most places East of Suez.  That would include the Gaza strip.

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A puzzle in my mind is: Why the syphilitic self-image of wretchedness, and why require that everyone pay to support it and to celebrate it?

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I attended a conference this weekend organized around “institutional and organizational economics.”  I will suggest that institutional and organizational economics can be very interesting, because, traditionally, policy types don’t recognize that there can be an economics of the design and implementation of policy.  Invoking economics amounts to invoking tradeoffs.  It might even amount to revealing the cruel truth that you can have neither your unicorn nor your rainbow but must settle for the (sometimes) messy business of having to come up with polices and processes that enable genuinely diverse people to get along with each other.  We don’t have to all love each other and invite each other to our social gatherings and pride parades, but, coming up with institutions that enable both personal and impersonal exchange—a lot of good can come of that.  Like, we might thrive in our own idiosyncratic ways.  Not bad, and there is abundant empirical evidence that it works. Look out the window.

In one session of paper presentations, the presenter brought up data pertaining to the last two rounds of parliamentary elections in Poland.  The research question involved something about “democratic backsliding.”  The idea here involved the kind of thing we absorbed ourselves with on June 30 in France: authoritarian, “extreme right” parties seemed to have success; democratic, “liberal” parties gave up some ground.  Sound the alarm!

The question in the Polish case involved the fact that the “extreme right” Law & Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS) had secured and maintained a ruling coalition for eight years.  It was only in recent elections that PiS narrowly lost its capacity to maintain a ruling coalition.  The new ruling coalition is headed up by the party of Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska or PO).

As it was explained, the PiS party tended to attract social conservatives, people who maintained a strong Catholic faith and generally conformed to “traditional values” voters.  There is more to it than that, but the liberal parties, as I understand it, have been more likely to denigrate traditional values.  Under the leadership of Donald Tusk, for example, the ruling coalition has banned both personal and institutional expressions of Catholic faith in the civil service.  So, no crucifixes either on the walls of the government office or on one’s person.  But, in place of these things, Tusk and his people promote expressions of LGBTQ+ pride, flags and all.  The ruling coalition thus supplants expression of one form of religion with a new religiosity.  The former is right wing and authoritarian; the latter is liberal.

In exploring the research question, the researcher assembled data on voters who had deep experience with the Solidarity movement of the 1980’s.  Solidarity mounted effective resistance to the authoritarian, Communist regime.  Would veterans of the Solidarity movement, especially those who had done time in prison—would these people tend to populate the anti-authoritarian resistance to the rule of the PiS party?

The researcher was surprised to find that the old Solidarity vote was not uniform but effectively split between the pro-PiS vote and the anti-PiS vote.  If anything, the vote of the Solidarity veterans was more pro-PiS than anti-PiS.  Hence an apparent puzzle: How could people who had demonstrated a willingness and capacity to bear the heavy costs (like time in prison) of bringing down an authoritarian regime turn around and support yet another authoritarian regime, the PiS regime?

A little more digging suggested that many (most?) of the Solidarity veterans were serious Catholics… One reason they resisted the Communist regime was because the regime suppressed their rights to freely practice their religion.  Solidarity veterans were not, on the whole, “liberals” in the modern, inverted and perverted sense of the word.

I give credit to the researcher for illuminating this puzzle and recognizing that the puzzle actually amounts to a puzzle when one views the world through the elite establishment’s lens.  Which is: any policy outcome that does not conform to the elites’ orthodoxy is anti-democratic.  The elites identify “democracy” with Our Democracy™ or, the same thing, their preferred policy outcomes.

That amounts to a shockingly unsophisticated and self-serving concept of democracy, for a more sophisticated concept identifies democracy with process, not with outcomes.  Democratic process might yield outcomes that any one given individual disfavors.  Welcome to the messy business of being an adult and having to get along with other people who don’t agree.

So, how might one offer a comment or helpful suggestion to the researcher, if at all?  Coming right out and attacking the unsophisticated language of “democratic backsliding” might not prove productive.  No one’s mind is going to be changed.  But, I did speak up, and I suggested that history does show us examples of deeply conservative, authoritarian factions innovating genuinely liberal institutions and processes for getting along with each other.  The one example I illuminated was that of factions of religious fanatics—Puritans, Quakers, Separatists, Anabaptists, and on and on—in the British colonies of the 17^th century instituting norms of religious freedom.  The earliest example on paper might be the royal charter for the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682.  Section XXXV:   

That all persons living in this province, who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and eternal God, to be the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the world; and that hold themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceable and justly in civil society, shall, in no ways, be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion, or practice, in matters of faith and worship, nor shall they be compelled, at any time, to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place or ministry whatever.

Admittedly, not all religionists recognize the one Almighty, but not a bad start for the liberalizing of institutions.

Thus, I pose this proposition: The most conservative and authoritarian among us have sometimes proven both motivated and skilled at innovating the most fundamental and enduring liberal reforms.  The self-styled liberals?: not so much.  Donald Tusk and his party, for example: they’re no less illiberal and religious than the members of their principal political competition.  It’s long past time for them to catch up to the genuinely liberal innovations of the 17^th century.