Home : Enemies of the People Movie. Enemies of the People | Angela Nagle. As we veer into a brave new age of right- wing populism, a restive mood of contempt for the masses has seized the opposition. Demoralized liberals, still reeling from the debacle of the 2. There are many curious things about this rhetorical shift. For starters, populism cuts across traditional ideological divides. Paralleling Donald Trump’s nationalist anti- immigration takeover of the GOP and the presidency was the left- populist crusade of Bernie Sanders, rallying workers to traditional (capital- P) Populist remedies of public ownership of higher education and health care access, among other things, and a reversal of the present inequalities of federal taxation. Meanwhile, the anti- globalist Brexit vote, captained by the nationalist rightist UK Independence Party, came in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s overthrow of the New Labour neoliberal orthodoxies festering at the heart of British left politics since the age of Tony Blair. You’d think the disenchanted forces of Anglophone liberalism would now embrace viable left populisms of the economic variety as an antidote to the confrontational, xenophobic cultural populism of the right. But you would, of course, be wrong. In but one representative sample of the growing allergy to ordinary people within contemporary liberalism, HBO pundit Bill Maher airily informed Trump campaign spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway during a pre- election interview that her candidate was gaining popular support “because people are stupid.” The tone was strikingly similar in outlets of respectable liberal opinion. In response to the rise of the populist right in Britain and the United States, Foreign Policy magazine ran a title- says- it- all essay under the headline “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.” One History News Network contributor weighed in during the early phase of the GOP primaries with the anguished cry, “Just How Stupid Are We?”Such outbursts at least have the minimal virtue of honesty. But what’s still more curious about this reflexive rhetoric of misanthropic panic is that, prior to the Trump and Brexit uprisings, the right was just as apt to harbor vicious misanthropic sentiments as the left is now. The Pre- Populist Right. Before the noticeable turn among Trump supporters toward populist ordinary- guy rhetoric—at times they started to sound like rousing orators of the kind of trade unions they’ve spent decades trying to smash—their sloganeering was often openly elitist. Prior to landing a six- figure book contract as a Trump evangelist and professional right- wing gay guy, Milo Yiannopoulos relished posing for photos while modeling a T- shirt that read “STOP BEING POOR.” And tireless right- wing provocateur Ann Coulter—an erstwhile outsider who likewise now finds herself awkwardly aligned with the new mainstream of conservative opinion—has long drawn upon the pernicious elite tradition of privileged contempt for the mob. In particular, she updates a variety of moral panic that has characterized her class since the emergence of modernity: fear of the overcrowding, overbreeding, emotionally volatile, easily cowed mass of humanity. The longer you look at all the forces of reaction marshaled behind the billionaire president, the more opportunistic his populist turn seems. In her 2. 01. 1 book Demonic, which explained how “the liberal mob is endangering America,” Coulter praised the work of Gustave Le Bon, the first Frenchman to set about measuring the craniums of Nepalese peasants in an effort to lend pseudoscientific credence to elite European imperialist and economic projects. Le Bon’s influential 1. The Crowd drew admiring praise from Hitler and has been a reliable touchstone for misanthropes and eugenicists since. In fact, the whole anti- immigration discourse, marked recently by Trump’s “build the wall” rallying cry, is steeped in the legacy of Le Bon and those who have always feared the teeming masses and the great unwashed, whether foreign or homegrown. Their alarmist outcries were typically first deployed upon the toiling white masses within Western societies, and then would find a new subject in new foreign ethnic minorities. In both settings, the rhetoric is remarkably consistent: There are too many of them. They breed too much. They’ll swamp our limited resources. There isn’t enough room. They’ll destroy and vulgarize our culture. But what’s striking in our own new political order is how ideologically fungible such sentiments are becoming before our eyes. Put another way: if Hillary had won—or Brexit had been resoundingly voted down—we would be hearing more populism from the liberals and more misanthropy from the right. More confusing still, in the web- native invective of the overtly white- separatist subculture of the new online right—the self- styled “alt- right”—anyone who does not carry into adulthood the strangely adolescent impulse to distinguish herself from the hated mainstream of society is derisively called a Normie or a Basic Bitch, as though white separatism were an obscure punk genre. A common thread of masses- deriding misanthropy runs through the writing and rhetoric of the online white- nationalist right. Indeed, the longer you look at all the forces of reaction marshaled behind the billionaire president, the more opportunistic his populist turn seems. The People, No. The targets of this panic have shifted over time. In Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the intelligentsia reserved its greatest horror for the very mass media that nowadays empowers and elevates the apostles of today’s mass- baiting commentators. In the 1. 93. 0s F. R. Leavis led a campaign in writing against “films, newspapers, publicity in all forms” and warned that mass literacy and new technologies meant that “culture is at a crisis” unprecedented in history.
enemies Of The People (2009 Film)
Baudelaire condemned photography as a “sacrilege,” which allowed “the vile multitude” to “contemplate its own trivial image.” One can imagine his horror at today’s selfie culture. But what exercised this founding cohort of misanthropic intellectuals was less the proliferation of mass literacy than the people absorbing suspect new forms of cultural content.
Enemies of the People. 2,814 likes · 1 talking about this. Enemies of the People DVD out NOW! http:// Six hours of. · These are the American people Trump calls enemies of the American people. The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. 32 Responses to Monty Python, Enemies Of The People. EngineerScotty says: May 22, 2017 at 3:04 pm. I never wanted to get into politics. So bloody, so ruthless. Quotes About Enemies. Quotes tagged as "enemies" (showing 1-30 of 462). not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! The education reforms at the end of the nineteenth century introduced universal elementary education. As literary critic John Carey has argued, it was the formation of this new reading public that created the demand for the popular newspaper, which became a handy synecdoche for “the masses” among the opinion- forming classes. T. S. Eliot called newspaper readers “a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass.” D. H. Lawrence argued for going to the root of the matter: “let all schools be closed at once,” he proposed, since “the great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write.” Aldous Huxley wrote, “universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid”—a distinctly unwitty title with a very Bill Maher ring to it. Most important, according to Carey, was fear of a growing population. From 1. 80. 0 to 1. Europe’s population rose from 1. This, together with the specter of cultural degradation that went along with it, sent the intelligentsia into a panic about mass culture. At its zenith, this fear merged with proto- fascist politics, eugenics schemes, and genocidal fantasies. H. G. Wells called the age’s new influx of human beings “the extravagant swarm of new births” and “the essential disaster of the nineteenth century.” A whole panic genre of books about the masses emerged in response. The Revolt of the Masses by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, published in 1. Western high culture was held to be on the verge of complete annihilation at the hands of an animalistic mass public. It’s more than a little shocking to discover that so many revered literary giants from this time thought the vast majority of people were essentially subhuman. No one is especially surprised to hear that Nietzsche warned that “a declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed” to bring “the superfluous” under heel. But figures like W. B. Yeats also thought the ideas Nietzsche articulated were “a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.” A member of the Eugenics Society, he wrote, “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes. Since about 1. 90. Flaubert wrote, “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable.” Ezra Pound, later a notorious enthusiast of fascism, regarded humanity as a “mass of dolts” and Virginia Woolf bemoaned “that anonymous monster the Man in the Street.” Mass society was, in her scandalized judgment, “a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff . . . The Mass Art of Mass Hatred. Today, of course, our middlebrow cultural consensus would consider such self- regarding tirades as the height of elitism, or indeed as fascist complaints about “cultural decadence.” Strangely enough, though, many of these same exterminationist fantasies have now been absorbed into contemporary mass culture itself. The very mass media they saw fomenting the tyranny of the mob was soon conveying the hatred of the masses to the masses. In many ways, this outlook took fullest hold a century after Gustave Le Bon’s opus on the subject. The 1. 99. 0s, when Maher came into his TV celebrity, marked the tipping point; contempt for the human race acquired a certain jaded cool, and made a countercultural pose into a mainstream one. Kurt Cobain, now revered for his sensitivity and progressive cultural politics said, “Humans are stupid.
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