THE USUAL SCAPEGOATS

I keep thinking about the op-ed M.T. Anderson published in The New York Times a couple of days ago, in which he told us that labor shortages, rising prices, and onerous conditions for workers after the medieval Black Death led to unrest and upheaval.

In the years after the plague, all across Europe, landowners and noblemen watched, first in outrage, then in fury, as people walked away from their jobs and went in search of a better life. What followed was a hysterical wave of legislation that tried to return the economy to where it had been before the plague. Statutes and ordinances froze wages at pre-plague levels; they made it illegal to leave a master’s land, illegal to flee; they, in effect, made unemployment itself illegal....

Eventually, the pressure became too great. In the second half of the [fourteenth] century, violence erupted across Europe. Workers swarmed through the streets of the great towns. They burned manorial records and labor contracts. They destroyed any evidence of their service and their ties to the land....

Nobles, in turn, began burning villages and slaughtering laborers....

In England, popular resentment about taxation and outrageous inequities burst into vandalism and violence in the Great Rising of 1381. Mobs executed the chancellor and mounted his messily severed head up on London Bridge. They demanded the end of lordship and recognized no authority but the king’s.

Anderson thinks something similar could happen in the aftermath of our present plague, although he suspects that we're more likely to direct the anger at the wrong targets.

The mood of the country is dark and fundamentally splintered. If we do see spasms of violence, I predict they are less likely to resemble the revolutionary politics of the medieval uprisings than the feckless, irrational atrocities that often went on in the shadows of those uprisings, when mobs targeted out-groups: Jews, accused of poisoning wells; the Flemish, accused of stealing English jobs, some of whom were hunted down in the streets and killed on sight.

I think he's right, for the simple reason that the dominant anger of our era -- conservative rage -- is never directed at the rich because they control all the wealth and decide how we live and work. It's always directed at "elites" -- occasionally the rich, but frequently just the upper middle class or educated people -- for cultural reasons. Teachers are teaching critical race theory! "Woke" capitalists hired Colin Kaepernick to do an ad! Anthony Fauci wants you to wear a mask!

I thought about Anderson's op-ed when I read Michelle Goldberg's report from the Ottawa anti-vaxx blockade. Whether the demonstrators have right-wing rage or leftish leanings, they're responding to their pent-up frustrations with anger at the government.

When I asked Matthew Wall, a 36-year-old electrician from Manitoba, what brought him to this city, which has been overwhelmed by a giant protest encampment, he answered with one word: “Mushrooms.” Searching for his purpose in life, he said, he went on a psychedelic spiritual journey and had an image of the Freedom Convoy, a demonstration against Covid rules that has converged on the Canadian capital with trucks and other large vehicles.

“I’m here for the rights of our kids, for parents’ rights, for everyone’s rights,” said Wall. “So kids can live in a future where they don’t have to have something covering their face, lose emotion. You don’t have the human connection, don’t see them smile anymore. It’s dehumanizing.” His daughters, he told me, were seeing a school therapist weekly because of the emotional fallout of the pandemic. “You’re taking away the love!” he said.

... at the occupation, I met Dana Wilson, who told me was raised in Mississippi and had served in the U.S. military in Central America before moving to Canada in 1987. He gestured to a cluster of men nearby and said they were veterans as well, and that he was part of a group led by a retired colonel. “From a military man’s perspective, you want to talk jargon, this is the last hill,” he said, describing Trudeau as “a narcissistic globalist sociopath” who has used “medical tyranny” to control the population, all for profit.

Also see the piece Lili Loofbourow published in Slate this week:

In March of 2020, when the pandemic was just beginning, I wrote about the strange metaphors that began circulating as Americans—mostly though not exclusively conservative Americans—tried to figure out how to confront the coming threat.... They positioned the virus as the enemy and resisting it as continuing, uncowed, to eat at restaurants. Gathering at football games became heroic and dancing in bars patriotic....

I’m struck, looking back, by how completely and quickly the Us and the Them in the metaphor changed, even though the overall frame—of warfare in search of an enemy—remained. At the start, the virus was the bad guy. Now the villain is, depending on the sources you consult, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Big Pharma, or Democrats, or liberal authoritarians, or Bill Gates.

This outrage, of course, is no longer confined to the right -- the "liberal" media, on the virus and on other subjects, is becoming decidedly post-liberal. It's prematurely declaring the pandemic over even as deaths remain over 2,000 a day. Post-liberal pundits hate the mandates and hate those of us who still wear masks, which they think we're doing as an act of tribal solidarity and not because we fear death, hospitalization, or long COVID.

THe virus is invisible, so we can't seem to tell ourselves that it's the enemy. Capitalism also seems invisible -- or so inevitable that it's impossible to fight. As Anderson notes in his piece, many of us are quitting jobs and there seems to be an uptick in labor agitation, but we don't seem likely to declare all-out war on the the capitalists. Instead, we're declaring war on "the authorities," and on liberalism, because government and liberalism are the dogs you can always kick.