Hyper-Moral Politics and the Flagellants of 2020

Gazing Into a Distant Mirror

Today’s guest post is by Martin Gurri, former CIA analyst and author of the Revolt of the Public, written for my first, much smaller, Patreon crowdsourced writing platform in October 2020. The essay deserved a much wider readership at the time, which I am now able to give it on a platform an order of magnitude larger than the prior one. Reading it today gives us a window into a recent and recently estranged past whose exacerbated sentiments and pronouncements have already been fed into the memory hole. Those energies dissipated with remarkable speed, but not before being institutionalized across a range of American institutions, including, above all, the white collar workplace.

I will be traveling with my daughter next week to visit her grandparents on the Jersey Shore, but have excellent guest posts in the queue and may write a personal letter on personal matters with more than personal import from the road if time allows. The conceit of the Patreon was to turn a gentleperson’s correspondence with his peers into its own half-public genre in which a select audience of gentlefolk could eavesdrop and join in; this will become a supplementary task folded into the Substack going forward. As always, in this as in all other things, elaborating and modelling a sensibility marked by equanimity in the face of pervasive moral and intellectual atrocity is the object. All are invited to address questions and missives to me if they wish to join in though of course, only those whose contributions are deemed worthy will be included.

By Martin Gurri

Indulge me as I reconstruct the events and mood of a particular period of time.

The mood is overwhelmingly dark.  Society is unsustainable, and may soon collapse.  In the judgment of many, it should be swept away.  Government is in the hands of people who are image-obsessed, shallow as their own skins, given to bizarre behavior, and in equal measures incompetent and corrupt.  The very forms of government appear outmoded, designed for an earlier, simpler age.

There is a vague but widespread sense that a reckoning is approaching.

And disaster does eventually strike:  a lethal pandemic that arose obscurely in Asia and soon engulfs the globe.  The contagion is the more terrifying in that there are no accepted methods of treatment or prevention.  The experts contradict each other.  The rich and the middle classes flee the great urban centers, where mortality is highest, for the suburbs and the countryside – but the working classes and the poor, who must labor to put food on the table, stay behind and die disproportionately.

The question asked by every desperate soul, high and low, is “Why has this happened?”  The answer has many permutations, but in the end all come down to the same thing:  “Because we deserved it.”  The terrible pandemic has tapped into pre-existing feelings of guilt and sinfulness, and its punishment, many agree, has been earned.

Inevitably, a second question arises:  “What is to be done?”  The authorities have no clue.  They mandate stern quarantines that prove ineffectual, and spend most of their time casting blame on one another.  The public, scattered in hiding places, is too dazed and isolated to think straight.

Then, out of nowhere, angry people pour into the streets claiming to have the answer:  total, uncompromising repudiation of the system, present and past.  In city after city, they occupy symbolic spaces, at first peacefully but soon with increasing lawlessness, until looting and violence become commonplace.

Nobody knows who these zealots are but almost everyone accepts their moral authority and yields to their holy rage.  The rich donate enormous sums to their cause in attempts to curry favor.  Government officials, objects of repudiation, appear willing to cave in.

By now, the alert reader will be wondering what sort of moral I intend by repeating this familiar story.  It’s time to come clean and name names.

Although I shaped my language to emphasize similarities, this was not a re-telling of the COVID-19 crisis or the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman.

The street rebels of my tale were known as “flagellants,” because they flogged their bare backs bloody in elaborate ceremonies of contrition.  They occupied places of worship and defied the Church.  The infection that sent them into the streets lacked a name at the time, but we now know it to have been the bubonic plague:  what came to be called, centuries later, the Black Death.  The designated scapegoats, as always, were the Jews:  thousands were slaughtered at the urging of the flagellants.  My source is Barbara Tuchman’s somber 1978 book, A Distant Mirror.  The time was long ago:  the “calamitous” 14th century.

Now, there are no repetitions in history, and this one doesn’t come close to being one.  But analogy has value if it can reflect back to us, like Tuchman’s mirror, the themes and contradictions of our times.

2.

As with all human affairs, the disturbances that followed Floyd’s death and spread across the country and much of the world admit to multiple overlapping explanations.  That the events were instantly refracted through the looking-glass of digital culture may be the most significant.  That they took place during the deep freeze of a quarantine, and became a kind of passion play performed before an idle and restless public, has not been much remarked.

Least commented on has been the question of why the elites surrendered so easily.  It happened everywhere, reflexively, and seemed a natural reaction, particularly in the reports of other elites for whom it did seem like the only possible response.  Yet this question goes to the heart of our tortured hour.  The groups in revolt are limited in numbers, and represent nothing greater than extremes of nihilistic rage and repudiation.  No material reason exists why the authorities should have been overawed by them.  A determined pushback by the forces of order, in the normal course of things, should have been expected.  It never came.

Today, you have to slide all the way to Donald Trump before you reach a dissenting voice on the legitimacy of the protests and the virtue of dismantling the established order.

None of this is exactly new.  For two decades, our political and cultural elites have resembled glamorous actors on stage before a vast audience, who have irretrievably forgotten their lines.  They posture and improvise, but know themselves to be the sterile heirs to the great achievers of the 20th century.  Listen to Barack Obama grumbling:  “Well, we’ve lost our ambition, our imagination, our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam…”  But who is the “we” in that complaint?  Decadence, digitally amplified, has become a crushing burden on the backs of our diminished leaders.

Before the pandemic, before Floyd, these people were consumed by feelings of inadequacy that sought release, for some, in grotesque sexual escapades, and for most in doomsday fables about resource exhaustion and climate change.  They felt cheated by history, betrayed by a century without ambition or imagination.  That is the reason a child prophet like Greta Thunberg could be invited to the United Nations for the ritual flogging of the assembled heads of state:  “How dare you! …People are suffering.  People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing…  How dare you!”  Impossible to picture Ronald Reagan or Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Khruschev or Fidel Castro, sitting through such a sermon without bursting into Homeric laughter.

Still, it took the pandemic for elite inadequacies to curdle into a secular sense of sin.

In the 14th century, nobility and clergy held power by the grace of God.  That was the source of their legitimacy.  The plague, universally interpreted to be God’s punishment, shook the foundations of established authority and plunged the entire system into crisis.  Medieval elites confronted the mayhem of the flagellants unsure of who had right on their side.

In a similar vein, modern government rules by the grace of science, experts, and numbers.  Those in command of its colossal machinery once believed, with a pure mystical faith, that they personified these abstractions, and could apply themselves to fixing whatever ailed the human condition.  Legitimacy flowed from that faith.  Democracy was just a ceremonial endorsement.

Together with the great construction projects, the proudest boast of government is that it has eradicated diseases like yellow fever and polio.  Here reality has come closest to the ideal of that sacred title, modern:  that is, superior to all past governance.  The combination of science, data, and political power has delivered the public from age-old maladies.  Life-expectancy numbers implicitly justify the authority of these top-down institutional structures.

The shock of failure in handling the COVID-19 pandemic has therefore bordered on the metaphysical.  Government sought to speak with the voice of science, but public discussion of the pandemic fractured along fault lines made familiar by the turbulent politics of the 21st century.  The great health institutions like the WHO and the FDA were beholden to despotic powers like China and in thrall to mindless bureaucratic procedures wholly inadequate to the occasion.  Famous experts like Anthony Fauci advised one thing and later the opposite, and uttered each judgment confidently, wholly unaware of contradiction.  Nobody spoke with authority – it became possible to talk, in some circles, of “medical populism.”

The elites, having lost the mandate of science, confronted the Floyd protests feeling abandoned by God and naked before their enemies.  Oppressed by decadence, consumed with a sense of sin, they finally understood the part they had to play and the lines that were expected of them.  All they needed was a theater of secular contrition and a properly virtuous audience to absolve them.

3.

Anyone interested in the psychopathology of our elite class is invited to watch the video of Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis, sobbing uncontrollably over George Floyd’s casket at the latter’s funeral.  The display would be scarcely appropriate for a beloved spouse or child – yet Frey never knew Floyd in life.  The two men moved in vastly different circles.  A white lawyer from the affluent Virginia suburbs of Washington DC, Frey joined the Minneapolis city council at age 32 and was elected mayor at 36.  He endorsed the usual urban causes, organizing the “Big Gay Race” and opposing climate change.  No doubt he considered himself an advocate of the disadvantaged:  a protector, from the heights, of the likes of George Floyd.  The outburst of grief sprang from symbolic, not personal, motives.

At stake was the interpretation of the street revolt that first broke out in Minneapolis immediately after Floyd was killed.  The killing itself needed no interpretation.  It was a self-evident miscarriage of police power.  Videos of the event, dreadful to watch, ensured an enormous audience and a commensurate rhetoric of rage, stoked by protesters under the banner of Black Lives Matter.  Violence and looting accompanied the protests, resulting in several deaths and property damage in the tens of millions of dollars.  Minnesota governor Tim Walz was compelled to bring in the National Guard.

The question of meaning lingered over the chaos like an avenging ghost.

Automatically, Frey fell back on conspiracy theories.  “We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state actors, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region,” he tweeted on May 30.  While this fantasy disintegrated of its own dead weight, it revealed an interesting frame of mind.  The world for Jacob Frey was Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil.  He just had to find his place in it.  Four days after the unfortunate tweet, in an interview with the New York Times, he arrived at the canonical explanation:  “This is not just about the eight minutes of time where our officer had his knee on George Floyd’s neck,” he said.  “This is about the previous 400 years. This is about a hundred years’ worth of intentional segregation and institutionalized racism.”

These sentiments have been repeated so often of late, that one has to take a step back to grasp what is being expressed.  The killing of George Floyd, we are told, was not a singular instance of injustice.  It symbolized the lack of legitimacy of American government institutions, not just in one place and time but everywhere and across history.  Our democratic process, now unmasked, is really institutionalized oppression, deserving obliteration root and branch.  The rhetoric matched or exceeded the most nihilistic utterances of Black Lives Matter agitators – yet it was voiced by an elite class desperately in search of absolution.

Frey, elected mayor, exemplar of a system he had described as incorrigibly sinful, was in essence repudiating himself.

He was not alone.  New York City mayor Bill de Blasio declared that the taint of racial injustice “transcends any notion of politics.”  “The original sin of the United States of America – slavery, and all the effects over 400 years being brought out into the open in a new way and a chance for this country to get it right, to address this problem, to move forward, and it’s summarized by the three words:  Black Lives Matter,” asserted de Blasio in his own version of the Act of Contrition.

Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, Oregon, offered black city employees 40 hours of bereavement leave to recover from “a collective grief and trauma coming from a culmination of oppression that is over 400 years old.”  Jenny Durkan, mayor of Seattle, Washington, viewed the occupation by protesters of an unpoliced “autonomous zone” as “block parties” that might induce “a summer of love.”  Durkan could recite the dogma:  “[W]e have to acknowledge and know that we have a system based on systemic racism, and we have to dismantle that system piece by piece.”

Penance extended beyond politics to media, culture, commerce.  The New York Times led the way before the Floyd episode with its “1619 Project,” inaugurated on the “400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery” and dedicated to reframing “the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”  The introductory essay for the project, by Nikole Hannah-Jones, bluntly held that “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.  Black Americans have fought to make them true.”  The prestige media without exception followed where the New York Times rushed in – and Hannah-Jones received the Pulitzer Prize for her condemnations.

Since, as has been endlessly reiterated, the original sin occurred 400 years ago, atonement required an immense bonfire of American history.  Offending films and television shows had to be removed from sight, public monuments toppled, commercial products abandoned, names scrutinized and edited.  After 150 years of artificially sweetening our waffles, Aunt Jemima was gone, because her “origins are based on a racial stereotype.”  Eskimo nebula was now “planetary nebula NGC 2392,” because NASA thought “Eskimo” was “a colonial name with a racist history.”  Nothing could be considered too cosmic or too trivial if we were to be washed clean of the defilement of the past.

Our broken elites have learned to mimic the racial obsessions of Black Lives Matter because they look on the protesters as a tribe of priests with the power to grant them legitimacy.  Inconveniently, this survival strategy is based on obtaining absolution and protection from the very people who are intent on repudiating them, their institutions, and their history.  Whether such a move is possible – and if so, on what principles – remains the central plot twist to this strange secular-theological drama.

4.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York could be said to have spoken for the entire progressive elite class when, on June 13, he officially surrendered to the protesters who had taken over, and devastated, Manhattan’s shopping district.  “You don’t have to protest.  You won.  You won,” Cuomo insisted.  “You accomplished your goal.”  Plainly baffled, he went on to ask:  “What do you want?”

It was a telling question.  Elected officials like Cuomo, Frey, and Durkan were anxious to embrace and enforce the goals of the street protesters, while having no clue about what those goals were.

As has been the case with all the great revolts of the last decade, the protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd lacked leaders, organization, programs, or a coherent ideology.  They were driven less by political goals than by digital slogans repeated with a conformism that transcended locality:  “Defund the police,” “Black lives matter,” “I can’t breathe.”  The protesters assume a rigid egalitarianism and distrust programs on principle, as the handiwork of devilish hierarchies.  Consequently, the few documents they leave behind aren’t representative or enlightening.  The “Demands of the Collective Black Voices at Free Capitol Hill” in Seattle, for example, consists of a random list of things to be abolished (the police, the prison system, drug laws) and things that should be free of charge (health care, housing, college).

From the perspective of ordinary politics, the rebels of 2020 in fact have no goals, no shared vision of society, and little hunger for power, revolutionary or otherwise.

Here the analogy with medieval flagellants isn’t far-fetched.  The protesters see themselves much as the politicians perceive them:  as the last righteous people on earth.  They, too, imagine that they stand at Armageddon, the climactic struggle, and theirs is the army of the Lord, seeking to lead sinners to salvation not by prayer or programs but by the force of their magnificent example.  One can watch these mostly young people for hours on YouTube and not hear a single discussion of policy, yet they often express pride in being models of new social relations.  For all the racial rhetoric, the faces are mostly white.  There are times when this feels like a revolt of college-educated hipsters, who are searching for something and have settled for the buzz of moral superiority – the flagellant’s posture.

We should not be surprised to learn that moral purity has typically concluded in practical failure.  Seattle’s autonomous zone, where protesters took control and kept the police out, collapsed within three weeks amid lawlessness and bloodshed.  The corner of Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, also a police-free area, has been called a “battleground,” with nightly shootings and drug overdose victims.  The “Wall of Moms” protest vigil in Portland imploded when the organizer was accused of sanctifying white motherhood.

It bears stating that such failures have had almost no impact on the protesters.  In part, this is because they are encased in an indestructible self-righteousness.  In part, too, it’s difficult to ascribe failure to a movement that lacks specific goals.  Yet I believe such an otherworldly indifference signifies something fundamental.  The protesters have never expected to succeed, in the sense of seizing control and reorganizing society.  Redemption for them comes from negation.  The dream is not revolution but abolition:  to purify society by erasing it.

A profound existential pessimism attaches itself to these notions.  Many of the young insurgents share with Greta Thunberg the apocalyptic conviction that our species has been doomed by its sins.  Failure is thought to have metastasized beyond politics to poison every aspect of modern civilization, and the task of the hyper-moral activists is to bring about the end, which must entail their own – thus making way, one can hope, for more highly evolved beings, a race of angels.

Here, then, is the answer to Cuomo’s question.  The protesters want to smash down the established order, then wait for a new Jerusalem under a new sun and a new moon.  George Floyd lives for them mostly in the nine minutes of his digital death.  Racial rage stands in token of a cosmic discontent, a sense of approaching end-times, which propels a depressive generation to the streets in search of something that will not be found.

For Cuomo and his kind, the bad news is that they can never obtain forgiveness from such unyielding sectarians.  The good news is that, given the lack of organized thinking among the protesters, elite overtures can never be definitively rejected.

5.

Moral zealotry and power are hardly strangers to one another.  True legitimacy and authority, for example, must rest on a bedrock of morality before either can rise to institutional form.  To the degree that one can claim moral certainty, one can therefore impose one’s opinions on those who are mistaken or misled.  This is not to be confused with persuasion:  it’s the purest essence of power, exercised without any need to call out the cops or the National Guard.

The flagellants of the 14thcentury vented their moral authority on establishment clerics and, above all, the Jews.  Bloody massacres were perpetrated with impunity.  So far at least, the avatars of the 21stcentury haven’t aimed for that level of murderousness, but have been content with harassing their chosen targets into losing their jobs, being de-platformed, or offering abject confessions of their sins.

The relationship between the anti-racist street warriors and what has been called “cancel culture” is uncertain.  The latter often appears to be a weapon wielded in intra-elite squabbles.  But the language is the same.  The assumption of moral absolutes to obliterate the opposition is the same.  While much remains unproven, my working hypothesis is that the internet mob is contiguous with the mob on the street.  There is a direct line of kinship between the museum curator fired for saying he would “still continue to collect white artists” and the nonconformist shoved to the ground for preaching Christianity in the autonomous zone.  Online, participants can be one and the same:  their voices merge into the roar of a ruthless moralism.

That such moralism translates into raw power is beyond question.  In political, sexual, and racial matters, it’s the zealots who determine which opinions are allowed to us and which are taboo.  They control the conversation, and – a rare accomplishment for our century – they can silence the public.  Many more Americans are afraid to reveal their opinions today than during the anti-communist crusade of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

This brings us back to the political elites and their surrender to the protesters.  The politicians hope for absolution – but, given who they are, they also crave power.  They dream of wrapping themselves in the mantle of moral absolutism and shutting down dissenting voices, which, with some degree of sincerity, they truly believe to be bigoted and destructive.  By abasing themselves before the protesters, by embedding themselves among them, elected officials believe they can rise out the slough of despond to the heights of righteous condemnation.

Since the protesters could not be transacted with, elite figures have simply shown up.  Ted Wheeler showed up at the protests in Portland, and was no doubt elated to be tear-gassed for his trouble.  Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser showed up at the protests outside the White House.  Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate, showed up at the protests in his home state of Delaware.  On occasion, the tactic has backfired.  The hapless Frey was booed by the sectarian crowd he so keenly wished to join.  But the insurgents lack structures and standards – they repudiate the existing system with all its iniquity, but are largely incapable of deciding whether any individual crashing their party should be heaved out.

The presence of Biden among the rebels should alert us to another complication in this already tangled web.  The presidential elections are the great prize in the politicians’ game of higher morality.  At stake is the fate of that demonic figure, Donald Trump.  It is not too fanciful to say that Trump has played the scapegoat to the current crop of moral militants.  He stands accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own country, of enriching himself through mysterious schemes, of bringing death by the thousands to honest Americans.  By these indictments, he has been converted into the single point of confluence between the progressive elites and the crowd.  To the extent that the former can direct the nihilistic energy of the protesters against Trump, they will have achieved, at long last, the earthly aims of their sacred journey.

In any case, given the electoral time-table, it is unlikely that the tide of frenzied moralism in politics will soon recede.  Displays of zealotry are certain to recur with ritual regularity during the campaign.  Should Trump once again defy the odds and win reelection, outraged virtue may well be unleashed on the streets with a ferocity that will make the post-Floyd episode seem mild by comparison.  If Biden is elected to the presidency, however, we should be prepared to witness an unprecedented spectacle:  hordes of flagellants in austere business casual, eager to purify the nation’s soul, heading for the halls of power in Washington DC.