Dazzled by Bullshit

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Writing in the  UK's Alt Fem Guardian, Moira Doengan had this to say about Pete Buttigieg,

"He responded to questions ... with his accustomed air of rehearsed imprecision, never deviating from his robotic affect and never giving a straight answer

"His answers sounded more like marketing copy for a nefarious tech start up than like statements of political principle. He looked, more than anything, like a man who has not relaxed since he was a child.

"Through his cloud of consultant-speak and imprecision, it became clear that Buttigieg was trying to attack Sanders..."

Good copy!  Barfo has previously discussed Buttigieg's rehearsed emollient, reasonable sounding consensualism that covers all bases and none.    He is a master of evading the question in an ever forming cloud of words that say absolutely nothing but create an aura of high minded purpose. 

Or, as they might say down home, he dazzles 'em with bullshit.

And yet, his "demographic" is affluent, college educated whites - the profesional and managerial class that comprise the Nine Percent.    So I have been pondering: how is it that the better educated and erudite of our country are dazzled by bullshit?

The first answer is obvious: they want to be.  As I have said before, investment in a capitalist system is what fealty was in the feudal.  Gentrified Liberals are invested in the system and are its loyal vassals.  They instinctively appreciate it just as they instinctively resist anything that threatens the status quo.  Of course, they like to think of themselves as being in favor of change. After all, there are so many injustices out there!    Some may even feel a nagging guilt about that surely reasonable,  and hardly blameworthy injustice that is called "being comfortably well off."    In either case, they look for causes to fret about and injustices to change all of which have the one common feature of not affecting their real estate holdings or 401k's.

But there is another factor at work as well.  Precisely because they are well educated and erudite they tend to think (money aside) in conceptual categories.   They don't think of "fish" or "shoes" -- that would be too childish -- but of "goods" and from "goods" to summi boni

Aristophanes made fun of Socrates by depicting him as floating about in a basket hanging from the clouds.  Aristophanes was being most unfair because if anyone, it was Socrates who made a point of lancing the balloon of people's abstractions 

There is even on dialogue in which Socrates meets Pete Buttigieg -- although at that time he was called Gorgias.   "What do you do for a living?" Socrates asked.   Gorgias replied

Gor. Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.

Soc. Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a teacher of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned?

Gor. With discourse.

Soc. What sort of discourse, Gorgias?   To what class of things do the words which rhetoric uses relate?

Gor. To the greatest, Socrates, and the best of human things.

Soc. That again, Gorgias is ambiguous; I am still in the dark: for which are the greatest and best of human things?

Gorgias:   What is greater than treating of justice in the courts and of governance in the assembly?

And so it went... Socrates trying to find out exactly what Gorgias believed in and what compass he used to guide his counsel and conduct; Gorgias ever sliding about in evasive generalities which sounded impressive so long as they were swallowed without being chewed.   In the end, Gorgias never provided an answer as to what he actually professed.  His discourse was committed to nothing above the technique of persuading.

In Socrates' day, rhetoricians were barristers or pleaders of causes.  Today Gorgias would just as easily be a branding or media consultant. In either case, what is involved is peddling an image.  It doesn't really matter what the image is so long as it sells.  Indeed, where everything is viewed as a commodity, selling is all that matters.

All of which leads back to the question of why Bootigieg's particular imagery is so attractive to the affluent educated?  We might begin by asking what the imagery itself is.  Its nature is to give the impression of treating an array higher goods in a disinterested fashion bearing in mind principles which are both fundamental and transcendent, uplifting and unifying.  By the same token, its nature is to ignore the specific class interests of the professional-managerial class; to act as if they somehow were not in the game or at issue.  Black lives really do matter!  Women's Right to Chose!  But not a question of the tax breaks I got simply because I am wealthy enough to "earn" them.

And so... we are left with our original hunch.  The "better sort" in our country are charmed by Mayor Pete because he presents no threat to their survival and distracts the "less fortunate" from seeing what is necessary for theirs.  

They talk of "working together as a country" or some such vaporous nostrum at which Buttigieg exells.   How come never sharing together as a country?

©barfo 2020