May 7, 2024
Thoughts on the Protest Industrial Complex
By
Christopher Chantrill
Who can forget the
wise words of President Eisenhower:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the protest-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Alas, it is the way of humans to forget the wise words of their ancestors.
But how did this happen? How did our society get captured by a brutal and oppressive protest industrial complex? Ernest Hemingway knew: “How did you go woke? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
I blame Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. It was the flooding of Europe with cheap books replacing expensive parchment scrolls that prompted the rise of the educated class and led to the Age of Revolution. But then what? What happened after the educated class came to power in the 19th century?
The answer comes from
Gaetano Mosca, member of the Italian school of elitism, and his book
The Ruling Class. Ruling classes do not rule by power alone, he wrote, but invent a moral or legal basis for their power. Mosca called this a “
political formula.”
Rulers never say: “I’m in it for me; get used to it, peasant.” Oh no. They are always serving the people, or the nation.
Our present rulers justify their power with their advocacy for marginalized communities and their benign support of movements of the oppressed demonstrating for justice.
But when did it start? With
Babeuf, after the French Revolution?
Saint-Simon, advocating for the needs of the industrial class?
Fourier and his Phalanstères? Marx and his communism that would stop the “immiseration” of the workers?
Never mind: by the end of the 19th century all the right people were agreed that the way to raise up the workers was by pulling down the robber barons.
