OP in the comments: "A part of why I love this article is this great sample questionnaire to determine how fit you are to be making big decisions about the country:
What is your favorite book? (Cannot answer “The Bible.”)
How many languages do you speak? (Let’s be wary of numbers lower than 3.)
What’s your favorite opera? Ballet? (How can we expect arts funding from people who don’t appreciate the arts?)
When did you last use your passport? Where did you go? (If you don’t have a passport, maybe you shouldn’t be anywhere near foreign policy. Ditto if your travels have only ever taken you to Mexico and Canada.)
Who is your favorite political philosopher? Have you read Burke? Paine? (Any good music teacher will tell you, theory first!)
Obviously it's more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal, but imagine if the people making decisions actually appreciated art and travel and culture. It actually sounds like a constituency you'd find in a major European city, with no Billy Bobs in trailer parks to hold us back culturally."
Hmm, I wonder why exactly rural people hate liberals? :thinkin-lenin: Obviously they are just good for nothing disgusting poors. Back to brunch!
What is your favorite book?
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Who is your favorite political philosopher?
Vladimir Lenin
The case they make for people to only make universally binding decisions within their particular competency is a very valid one, after all as Mao put it: "no investigation, no right to speak".
What they very conveniently omit though is WHY "Billy Bob from the trailer park" doesn't speak 3 languages, doesn't go to the opera, is discouraged from reading more than the occasional technical manual and doesn't leisurely traverse the world. The reason being that the exploitative nature of our society NEEDS a broad underclass, is completely dependent on it. For the "cultured" people to partake in high culture this monstrous system relies on the vast swathes of the working class to just keep their head down and grind and anything that distracts them from it, anything that is not conductive to making profits for the affluent, and everything that could potentially get the minds of those masses of workers to wonder why things are the way they are is to be trimmed away. So the ability of the person making the statements above rests directly on keeping Billy Bob in ignorance, in perpetual mute senselessness of existence, akin to cattle.
Contrast this with the actually existing socialist societies of old (and the handful still present) that immediately not only opened access to the arts and all sorts of recreational and scientific endeavours to the emancipated masses but actually encouraged their citizens to educate and enlighten themselves, to broaden their horizons as far as possible.
So yes, it would be lovely for everyone to enjoy all of the above and the main thing wrong with "bourgeois" high art is that it has historically been gatekept, the fruits of human creativity and ingenuity denied to the very same base that makes it all possible in the first place. Under the system the person above is safeguarding it will remain so forever.
This makes a lot of sense to me! I didn't want to type out the same thing twice, so I replied to the comment below yours with a very similar train of thought. Do you remember the name of the Austrian guy?
Do have to also not fetishize folk tradition though, that's how you end up with "proletarian science" and Lysenko and genetics banned as bourgeois.
Yeah, this was also partially my point in the comment above. Communists tend to fetishize "proletarian culture" as opposed to "bourgeois culture" but this smacks for me too much of what Nietzsche aptly called "resentment mentality". What many mean by "proletarian culture" is not so much a culture in the sense of something meticulously cultivated from humble beginnings but rather crumbs from the master's table (just like all the other life's comforts), phrased provocatively an absence of culture even, a deliberate truncation of human potential. The reason for this is because it serves a fundamentally different purpose than so-called high culture. The main purpose of the culture for the masses in bourgeois states is as "the opium of the people", cheap slop to sedate the toiling masses, whereas high culture is an arms race of sorts of "refinement", of how more elaborate you can make things and thus by its very nature to be enjoyed exclusively by the elites.
Previous attempts at moving away from this foul dichotomy in socialist states and statelets produced what can be called a neo-proletarian culture. In the RSFSR an early organisation and movement promoting this (unfortunately disbanded later on, as censorship, a return to conservative views on art and the wish to completely monopolise all the culture making by the party set in) was aptly called Proletcult. The idea was to not only bring the previously stowed away high culture to the masses but more importantly have the proletarian masses actively create new, explicitly "high" culture all by themselves, thus superseding stale bourgeois gating of culture making . Which fitted in very well with the general communist definition of a human (which after the Russian Revolution was called "The New Soviet Man") as an inherently creative being, the creative process being at the very core, the defining feature of what it means to be human. This is why when the Warsaw Pact states were dismantled the people living there, for example, statistically constituted on average the most "well read" population globally. Today this naturally has seen a massive decline as well.
EDIT: there is something mitigating this to an extent though even today (though with the looming ecological and thus societal collapse no one knows for how long), namely the democratisation of art making through more ubiquitously accessible technology. It's easier than ever before to compose music, paint, shoot films, code video games, write prose and poetry and publish it online, watch and present to the whole world dazzling choreography, etc.
Also: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/biden-moderate-democrats-republicans-conservative-study-john-kasich-aoc-a9699431.html
"Men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'"
Trumpist trailer trash that’s been destroying our democracy for the past four years.
Let's save our democracy by uh, disenfranchising people who aren't like me?
I fucking hate the "adults in the room" rhetoric from neoliberals
I swear users on that sub feel more alien to me than chuds
How is anyone surprised that ‘fuck these guys’ is a viable policy platform?
It is fun when these guys act all frustrated when people fucking hate them or even just don't agree with them politically.
What’s your favorite opera? Ballet? (How can we expect arts funding from people who don’t appreciate the arts?)
Love to limit whose able to do a politics on if you live in one of a handful of places with an active opera and ballet scene.
I went to one opera because it was about jazz and I didn't like it very much. Too much opera, not enough jazz.
What an incredibly narrow and small-minded definition of what "the arts" is.
... and as defined by an incredibly narrow segment of the population at that. This whole thing is just "access to politics should be based on taste."
and that taste must be very rich middle class women's taste
Opera was originally entertainment for the proles because they were generally open to the public. It became too popular and the bourgeoisie got their fingers in it like they do everything.
But yes I love how "European high art" translates to arts funding. Historically when public arts funding was at it's highest during the New Deal, it went to Death of a Saleman and other proletarian art.
I dunno. There's a contingency of "muh western civilization" chuds who are also really into Frasier Crane cosplay.
THOMAS PAINE WOULD'VE HATED YOU.
The man died penniless, and hated by the rest of the founding fathers, because he fought against slavery, and opposed the Bourgeois government formed after the American Revolutions success.
Its funny they put him on the same plane as Burke, when Burke spent years slandering Paine for writing positively about the French Revolution.
Also, the only theory Neolibs read is the Economist and Econ 101 textbooks, it's like how no Neoclassical Economist has actually read Adam Smith
Paine was one of the only based posters. Posted about the American Revolution, then went to France and posted about the French Revolution, moved to England and pissed off the king of England enough through posting that he had to flee to France where he was elected to government despite not speaking French, then for a finale posted so hard that he pissed off Robespierre and had to go back to where he started in America.
fucking hate the "any good music teacher will tell you, theory first!" i'm a music theory nerd, and love to overanalyze shit as i listen. but my favorite drummer doesn't read sheet music. majority of non-western music doesn't have "theory" to look at. plus, a lot of what you're taught in music theory classes is some bullshit written by one guy two centuries ago, and even my music history teacher likes discussing how we base our theory on his writings and not more modern thought. just fuck off please
"Any good music teacher will tell you, theory first!"
Fuck no. I'm working on being a music educator and this is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want to do. Theory is an abstraction of the sound we make from our instruments. Once you have a child familiar with that sound and the ways to make it, THEN you introduce the explanatory bullshit as to why it works. There's so many great artists out there who have never read a lick of music in their life, because it's an ABSTRACTION of the sound you hear. Goddamn the other stuff is horrible too, but this shit is so near and dear to me. (also how do i end a quote on this shit I can't figure it out)
Note how the question isn't "what's your favourite string quartet", or violin sonata, or even symphony - no, it's high society's first-choice musical genre to attend for representation purposes. But yeah, I'm sure it's just about art.
Yeah, just like the billionaire ghouls buying up paintings do it just as an investment and occasionally for bragging rights and couldn't care less about the art itself. Which is why the art world is chock full of intellectually incestuous fart sniffing.
Real version:
What is your favorite book? (Besides "Infinite Jest")
How many languages do you speak? (Cannot answer Esperanto)
What's your favorite opera? Ballet? (Will answer La Boehme)
When did you last use your passport? (Cannot answer European semester abroad)
Who is your favorite political philosopher? (Will name solely Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, other intro to political thought course philosophers with incompatible views they do not understand the context of incoherently )
