Marko Elez, a staffer at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Oversight, operated an anonymous X account that spewed out-and-out race hatred. He called on Americans to “normalize Indian hate,” said “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and proudly declared that “I was racist before it was cool.”
After the Wall Street Journal outed Elez on Thursday, he resigned. By Friday afternoon, Musk reinstated him at the behest of Vice President JD Vance. “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” Musk posted on his platform.
Yet forgiveness requires contrition, and there’s no evidence Elez has any. He has not publicly apologized or even repudiated his ugly comments. In Trump’s America, you can engage in this kind of publicly performed cruelty without any real consequence.
This, for some, is actually the point of voting for Trump. New York’s Brock Colyar attended a swanky Trump party where one attendee said he voted for Trump because, in Colyar’s paraphrase, “he wanted the freedom to say ‘f**got’ and ‘r****ded.’” An anonymous “top banker” recently told the Financial Times that they felt “liberated” after Trump’s win because “we can say ‘r***rd’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting canceled.”
The new ethos of cruelty reminded me of a passage in the philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Warning of the rise of a right-wing American strongman in the not-too-distant future, Rorty predicted that such a political shift would also herald an alarming new cultural era:
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘n****r’ and ‘k*ke’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Somehow, Rorty anticipated our cultural moment nearly three decades prior. To understand why, you need to study with his broader argument in Achieving Our Country. It is a theory of the politics of right-wing backlash that’s mistaken on some key points — yet so prescient in others that we ignore it at our peril.
What Rorty got right — and wrong
In the book, Rorty’s primary concern is the long arc of the American left. In his view, the central focus of the left has shifted from economic to social inequalities, from class to race/gender/sexual orientation.
This change has carried with it an attendant shift in culture. The “reformist” left, which focused on reducing economic inequality through public policy, gave way to a “cultural” left focused primarily on “change in the way we treat one another.”
The shift from reformist to cultural left, he argues, was in part necessary. The old left had little interest in the concerns of women or Black people, let alone LGBTQ Americans. So long as the left kept those groups out of the aperture, it would never bring true equality.
But in his view, the rise of the cultural left came at a severe cost. In a post-Reagan moment when economic inequality was skyrocketing and globalization was eating American jobs, the left abandoned its commitment to addressing the concerns of the working class.
“It’s as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time — as if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa,” he writes.
Rorty’s ultimate fear was that this inattention to rising inequality would allow a right-wing demagogue to rise to power. In a passage that was widely cited after Trump’s political victory in 2017, Rorty describes a series of events that sound eerily familiar:
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
The rise of this strongman, he predicts, is what will cause “sadism” to start “flooding back.” His election on a platform of vicious cultural warfare encouraging those people who were never comfortable with a more diverse America to start once again openly performing cruelty.
Rorty saw, more clearly than many of his peers, that the post-civil rights normative consensus in favor of social equality was far thinner than many expected. Not only did he foresee such a future, but he saw the precise vehicle through which it could be cracked — a right-wing demagogue who claimed to stand for the people against the liberal elites. Being able to predict such events at a moment where American politics seemed contained within (relatively) centrist bounds is nothing short of astonishing.
And yet, his forecast was also off in notable ways — most notably in its class analysis.
Rorty predicted that the base of the authoritarian movement will be those “left behind” by globalization. But that thesis has been repeatedly tested since Trump’s rise and found wanting. Trump’s base is primarily people who are less well educated but financially comfortable. The GOP’s inroads with non-college voters in recent elections are explained not by a backlash to free trade and offshoring, but rather a combination of short-term inflation, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and a sense that Democrats had moved too far to the cultural left (this last point Rorty did indeed anticipate).
You can see this, notably, in the kinds of people who are publicly performing cruelty right now. The examples we’ve looked at are not laid-off factory workers yelling slurs at the evening news. Rather, it’s computer programmers, bankers, and glitzy DC ball attendees — members of the elite class who use words like “r***rd,” “p***y,” and “f**got” to assert their cultural dominance in elite workplaces and on social media.
Their cruelty is not born of displaced pain, as Rorty predicted it would, but rather of power repressed: of people who felt like they couldn’t act on sadistically finally feeling “liberated” to do so, as the FT’s anonymous banker put it.
Understanding Trumpism’s true roots requires not only grappling with arguments like Rorty’s, but also with the increasingly clear evidence that the politics of status have a potency independent of class antagonism. That people want to be able to demean others not out of displaced rage at their own standing, but because they genuinely believe it is their right as social superiors to do so.
It’s a phenomenon that the cultural left, for all its faults, can help us make sense of.
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
The post An eerie prophecy of Trump’s second term — from 1998 appeared first on Vox.
