The Blind Spot of the Anointed

When your core belief is in your entitlement to rule

Frank DiStefano wrote,

From the political left to right, Americans are angry at the system and people running it. They’re angry about ineffective government, but also ineffective private institutions, lack of transparency, poor leadership, corruption, middle-class decline, and unaccountable control. These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust. Abundance is an answer to repairing this lack of trust, but not alone. Abundance is part of the solution to what’s broken in America, but America isn’t only broken because of anti-Abundance.

… I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America.

A central dogma of American politics is that everyone is entitled to dignity. That is what “all men are created equal” has traditionally meant.

My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans. Contemplating otherwise is as difficult for the moderate wing of Klein and Yglesias as it is for the wokest of the woke.

The classic analysis of this core belief is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition.

The anointed see opposition not in terms of a mere difference of opinion. It is illegitimate. Their yard signs that say “We believe” in science, justice, and so on are nothing less than an accusation that you don’t believe in such things unless you are on their team.

Voltaire supposedly said something like “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The anointed will instead condemn what you say as hate speech or misinformation.

I read into DiStefano’s call for “an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America” a longing for the anointed to be restored to a place of honor. It reminds me of an anecdote from David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.

When Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for President on March 16, 1968, he said,

At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.

This was the year in which the Vietnam War was the issue dominating American politics. David Halberstam pointed out that some in the anti-war movement were appalled at Kennedy’s phrasing, because it sounded like the hubris that took us into that frustrating conflict. In their view, Kennedy had failed to learn the chief lesson of Vietnam, which was that we should not be trying to impose our will on an alien culture.

For the anointed, losing the confidence of the public is like falling off a horse. The “abundance movement” is, like the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy candidacy, a campaign to get the anointed back on to the horse.

The blind spot of the anointed is their inability to see that they do not belong on the horse to begin with. There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Instead, each of us should be modest about what we claim to be the best way to approach political problems.

You can stir up resentment in America by talking about inequality. You can rail against “oligarchs,” landlords, and grocery stores. Or you can champion “abundance,” meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way. But if you do so from the standpoint of assuming your own moral and intellectual superiority, you will find your popularity is limited, and deservedly so.

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Abundance and Mugwump Movements