"Planet of the Grifters"

 From American Affairs Journal:

The word “grifter” seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue today. On the left, grifters are identified and called out with ever-increasing paranoia. On the right, the term is thrown around with almost equal ease, and often with good cause. The grifter is a threat to every movement; he lurks in every shadow. Even the most honest and laudable political causes are seemingly powerless in the face of the grifter’s corrupting influence. And so accusations of “grifting” fly around in contemporary America with a frantic energy reminiscent of an earlier era of Soviet folk denunciations. The “grifter” has become modern America’s equivalent of the “wrecker” or “capitalist spy.”

Pause a second here and think about the implications: Did “wreckers” actually exist inside the Soviet Union? Well, probably; studies have shown that even in the world of eusocial insects, some worker ants do the lion’s share of the work, while others find far more joy in just slacking off. Moreover, outright sabotage of industry did occur to some extent, whether for political reasons or otherwise. Still, only the most credulous would conclude that the Soviet Union’s all-encompassing paranoia about wreckers and spies was justified, or that it did not arise from deeper sociopolitical roots.

Similarly, the popularity of the “grifter” narrative to explain political trend lines today—and more often than not, political failures—ought to engender some skepticism. “Grifters,” as typically understood, are particularly shameless individuals whose greed or ambition drives them to find easy marks and parasitize on political movements. The grifter, in this telling, is at least partly responsible for the failure of everything from left-populism to the incompetence of the Trump administration and beyond.

Of course, just like the wrecker of the twentieth century, that these people exist in some number within political movements is not really up for debate. Grifters and con men have existed in every hitherto known society and will likely continue to exist for as long as humans walk the earth. But to what extent do they actually play a systemic role in shaping politics, and how might they do so? The problem with the contemporary paranoia surrounding “grifters” is that, in our haste to morally condemn the greedy or the unprincipled, we ignore a vast social process playing out in front of us: the growth of a social class of increasingly radicalized elites who are dependent on, and seek recognition for, institutionalized “grifts” that are being built into the bedrock of our societies. This phenomenon is increasingly prevalent in the West, though not in societies like modern China.

Today’s popular usage of the term—and the sneering with which the “grifters” are usually dismissed—obscures more than it reveals. At this point, “grifting” in the West is no longer a case of individual or moral failings. Neither is it a mere “industry” that employs people. “Grifting,” in the fullest sense, is a social and political phenomenon that lies at the heart of why contemporary politics has become so unstable and polarized. 

Blinded by the Right

One of the unfortunate legacies of Cold War politics and the battle against Soviet Communism is a serious ideological hangover that has persisted for several decades. As a result of this hangover, the American Right has found itself very much unprepared to face—or even to understand—the political forces being arrayed against it since the 1990s. I speak here of conservatism’s blithe, ideological dismissal of material interests and class as the prime drivers of politics, in favor of a view in which abstract metaphysical “principles” are, or at least ought to be, what drives rational humans to make political choices and pick sides. It is impossible to adequately describe just how intellectually vacuous and historically illiterate this “principled” view is, so instead I shall merely point out that it is completely antithetical to the conservative worldview for essentially all of human history before the twentieth century.

To an old-style conservative of any ancien régime, the idea that ideology was the prime mover of politics would not only have been seen as ridiculous, but subversive and dangerous as well. In a hierarchical society, it is the height of folly to imagine that people are somehow free to arbitrarily pick their political positions or interests. In such a society, it is obvious to everyone that the interests of the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, or the nobility are by and large tied to their status as peasants, burghers, or nobles. To try to deny the intrinsic link between political interest and social and economic station would have been the work of subversive political radicals, not defenders of a stable order.

Moreover, the vacuity of the contemporary “conservative” view of politics is proven by the speed of its intellectual and political collapse in recent years. Far, far back in the halcyon days of 2018, Jordan Peterson was taking the right of center by storm; the “intellectual dark web” was gearing up to launch powerful counternarratives against the creeping domination of “cultural Marxist” ideas inside academia and the media; and figures such as Jonathan Haidt were attracting attention as critics of a failed educational apparatus and its “coddling of the American mind” (which was assumed to be behind much of the rising social and political tension).

By 2021, however, this cottage industry intent on defeating the Left by dissecting its faulty ideas mostly lies in ruins. In fact, it has proven itself utterly impotent in the face of a very real political and institutional grand offensive that started in earnest in 2016 and that some people (foolishly) hoped would calm down once Trump was removed from the White House. The “libs,” as it turns out, were at the end of the day hardly just kids who would grow out of their silly ideas once they graduated into the real world.

From Party to NGO: The Grifters Come for the Left

There is probably no better illustration of the populist Left’s structural failures than the attempt by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters to restore a “pro-worker” Left politics to Britain. When Corbyn assumed leadership of Labour, the party had been slowly shedding working-class voters and replacing them with well-heeled, well-educated urban voters for a long time. Labour was not unique in this regard; most of its sister parties on the continent were going through the same process. But Corbyn’s ascent was widely perceived as a welcome break, a return to more “traditional” class politics that had supposedly been kept at bay by various “neoliberals” inside the social democratic parties of the West. In reality, however, Corbyn never halted the trend of shedding working-class votes. In fact, with Corbyn’s hand on the tiller, Labour lost the “Red Wall” and finally managed to complete the process that Tony Blair had started so long ago.

Clearly, there were many signs of the coming disaster that should have been obvious even before the dismal electoral failure of late 2019. For all the talk of a return to working-class politics, the people who actually carried Corbyn to power—and who swelled the membership ranks of Labour—weren’t members of the working class, by and large, but the same well-educated urbanites that the party had long been tilting towards. Yet this fact was overwhelmingly ignored. The Corbyn campaign (like the Bernie Sanders campaign) insisted that it was a working-class movement and that it objectively represented the interests of the working class, regardless of any skepticism on the part of the constituents themselves. Obviously, this did not work out. In 2019, Labour’s remaining working-class voters abandoned the party in droves, either sitting out the election entirely or even voting for the Conservatives.

There is, however, an illustrative postscript to the failure of this putative workers’ revolution. After leaving the party leadership position in disgrace, Corbyn smoothly transitioned into the radical world of . . . NGOs. Of course, a visitor to the website of Corbyn’s newly founded Project for Peace and Justice will be hard-pressed to find much that stands out in an already crowded field of “progressive” NGOs. Upon clicking the highlighted “donate” button, the visitor is told that, while billionaires are always spending their wealth on extending injustice, the Project for Peace and Justice has something the billionaires are not prepared for: you. You (the reader is informed) are more than a donor; you are part of a powerful movement. And for the price of no more than a coffee a month, you can help find, highlight, and end injustices not just in Britain, but across the entire world.

Visiting the “vacancies” tab at the Project for Peace and Justice offers its own delights. At the time of writing, the organization is looking for a “campaigns and communications officer,” who will “help the Project deliver high level campaigns and strategic communications supporting exciting work streams of research and activism work.” Beneath the listings of job openings, there is also a fairly standard (but oddly revealing) diversity statement. It reads:

We are committed to providing equal opportunities for everyone regardless of their background. We acknowledge that people from certain backgrounds are under-represented in progressive movements and we are committed to doing what we can to correct this. We are particularly keen to receive applications from people of colour; disabled people; people who identify as being LGBT+; people who have a mental health condition; and people who identify as working class or have done so in the past.

Though Karl Marx was not exactly known for brevity, it is clear that he lived in simpler times. At the highest levels of the “movement” he inspired, his faithful disciples now finally declare: people who self-identify as working class or have done so at some point in the past, unite!

It should perhaps go without saying that anyone who believes Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project represents any significant challenge to “billionaires” would have to be supremely credulous—as credulous as anyone who believes Jordan Peterson or Jonathan Haidt are going to change academic culture. In addition, one must be able to overlook the fact that the sort of people who will actually work at an NGO will tend to be people who have already worked for or will work for several NGOs. The vacancies page of Corbyn’s NGO tacitly admits this, with its claim to favor people who identify or have at one point identified as working class. To add such a qualification is in its own way an admission that this is certainly not a working-class job by any stretch of the imagination. Critically, moreover, this point puts the lie to all the formulaic expressions of anti-plutocratic radicalism elsewhere on the site; it is after all the donors who keep the lights on, the wages paid, and most of the entire ecosystem going.

The Politics of Overproduction

Many readers of this essay will no doubt have heard of Peter Turchin and, in particular, his theory of elite overproduction. The idea that societies at various points produce too many elites—who cannot be absorbed into the social structure, and instead cause instability and strife—has a certain natural appeal given the current state of Western politics. Indeed, I would argue that today the most visible political activity of the Left is primarily geared toward satisfying the frustrated material and social ambitions of this “lumpen elite.”....

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