Brooke Harrington is on the Sociology Faculty at Dartmouth College. She's researched and written a lot about the odd subculture flourishing at the high end of our wildly top heavy socioeconomic range. This work is of interest to me, I think mainly because it helps explain something I've wondered about while watching the Congress in action: this is the best we got? At the time the Declaration was signed, the population of the country was around 2.5 million, and included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, John Jay. Now we have a transcontinental nation of well over 300 million and among the 535 in the Congress are Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. Were any of the signers such manifest dunderheads? Maybe it's cherry-picking to name these pyrotechnic specimens of narcissism and stupidity, but there are also innumerable low-profile clowns, like Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma, who a few years ago displayed a snow ball on the floor of the US Senate to "prove" that climate change is a hoax. He's still there, age 86, filling the halls of power with his wit and intelligence.
I'm sure there are plenty of brilliant Americans, but relatively few of them are in public life. Most work in the world described by Harrington, where they solve the problems of rich people while becoming rich themselves. The leading fields are law and financial services, which tend to converge at certain points—tax avoidance, for example. American society is a kind of Theater of the Absurd wherein one set of ambitious people figure out what laws we should all live under while another set of ambitious people get paid a king's ransom to help the rich work around those laws.
Well, that would be bad enough: actually, it's worse, since the two sets of ambitious people are in league together to make sure it's not too difficult to reduce the difficulties associated with being rich. All perfectly legal, as is sometimes pointed out by people whom Harrington disapproves of on account of their failure to disapprove.
I got to thinking about Harrington when I saw this somewhat long Twitter thread she recently posted on another topic, Covid deniers and assorted anti-vaxxers. She seems to be interested in the same things I am but, instead of being merely puzzled, she sheds light. Why do people decline to be vaccinated? It's a case of the public and private interest coinciding, an easy call! Yet journalists track them down, in their hospital beds, on oxygen, ranting about the perfidies of Anthony Fauci. In case you don't want to click on the link, it turns out that there's a famous paper in social psychology relating to the behavior of "marks"—people who have been the victims of a scam, such as a business fraud. The truth eventually comes out, but they are not the kind to then place a call to the Attorney General or the Better Business Bureau. It's embarrassing to admit you've been had, that you fell for the scam. Harrington applies the findings of this paper to this new variety of mark, devotees of Fox News and Tucker Carlson. They've been had but won't admit it. What to do about them? They're plainly a danger to themselves and others. Harrington points out that we tend to consider just two options: love, kindness, and understanding (liberals), or zero tolerance (conservatives).* This, she suggests, ignores a tradition of American pragmatism that has worked with addressing other problems, such as driving under the influence: drunk drivers deserve neither loving kindness nor the death penalty, but we need them off the roads before they kill people.
You should read her, not me trying to indicate the flavor of the argument.
*Covid seems to have scrambled the ideological preferences. When an article in the right-wing National Review argued that anti-vaxxers would not be persuaded by ridicule, but needed to be "understood," liberals replied with pictures of right-wingers wearing tees with the message, "Fuck your feelings."
Comments