By Brian Cabana
(CONVERSEER) – It is a common occurrence for a regular person to be flipping through radio channels, eventually to come across the style of radio presentation known as “NPR voice” — a soft-spoken, breathy, quietly pompous mode of vocal performance suggestive of an intimate conversation among a small circle of elites. The question immediately arises: Who could possibly find this manner of presentation appealing, and why?
The answer lies in understanding NPR as the distilled essence of sociological, ideological, and dispositional liberalism. NPR voice is part of the complex of behaviours exhibited by liberalism at its point of cultural and intellectual heat-death. Understanding its appeal thus requires an examination of this cultural disposition.
Liberalism is one strain of a complex of Enlightenment ideologies that arose out of the sociological tumult of early modernity, as the prevailing aristocratic and clerical authorities of the Late Medieval Period faced the twin onslaughts of the scientific and commercial revolutions. These revolutions heralded the ascendancy of new technical, financial, and industrial power centres that upended the social order and reformed it in their own image. These novel modes of social organisation accordingly shifted the prevailing power structures, as the relations between master and slave, journeyman and apprentice, king and vassal, lord and serf had given way to an entirely different configuration of power relations between employer and employee, mayor and town councilman, representative and lobbyist.
Ultimately, the ideologies of the Enlightenment are best understood as projects to justify, formalize, and crystallize the novel power relations of the modern era so as to transfigure these ascendant power dynamics into properly grounded arrangements of social authority — to incorporate these arrangements into state structures geared toward universally sanctioned social ends, so as to turn socially contentious compliance with asserted power into broad social consent to legitimate authority.
The close entanglement between the Enlightenment and the commercial and scientific revolutions resulted in its key protagonists emphasising “scientific rationality” and contract ethics in their efforts to legitimise — as well as to shape — the new order, while those same protagonists worked to weaken the old order by attacking patrimonial and religious authority. Defenders of the emergent capitalist order extolled the free interactions of the marketplace as generating an impersonal and impartial means of social organisation not subject to the whims of personal authoritarian figures. Rather, the winners and losers of the market would be decided by the collective choice of free-market actors asserting their preferences. Similarly, proponents of scientific management touted the objectivity and universalism of scientific law as providing another impartial, impersonal source of authority. One could legitimately ground law and policy on the universal realities gleaned by science rather than on the arbitrary dictates of rulers.
The thread connecting all of these Enlightenment movements is the effort to discredit patrimonial authority — grounded upon religion, relational affinity, and fealty to tradition — as arbitrary and autocratic. The various Enlightenment movements aimed to displace the personal, autocratic modes of authority that had grounded the fading Late Medieval order and install in their place a regime of impersonal, rationally grounded authority structures that would legitimise the ascendant powers of capital and “scientific” state management.
Strange to say, this fact lies at the heart of the liberal’s affinity for NPR voice. The breezing monotone functions to obscure personal agency. The monotonous, anodyne drone that characterises NPR voice serves to convey the illusion that the words the listener hears are “spoken” by a disembodied Spirit of Disinterested Rationality, unleavened by any preference, agenda, perspective, or personality. If “The Science” could speak, it would do so in NPR voice.
This dynamic underlies another otherwise inscrutable trait of liberal discourse. Liberals are continually hysterical about the threat of “authoritarianism” emanating from the Trump administration, when Trump in fact has not demonstrated any more authoritarian tendencies than have his predecessors. Meanwhile, these same liberals were eager to embrace the truly unprecedented regime of COVID authoritarianism, the institution of censorship bureaus under DHS, the proliferation of a politically correct etiquette police, and the weaponisation of the legal system against their political adversaries. By every measure, liberals demonstrate a vastly higher degree of authoritarianism — plainly understood — than does the right.
Yet liberals themselves do not regard any of the aforementioned measures as authoritarian at all. They exhibit a level of blindness that goes beyond anything that can be explained by mere partisan bias, in that they do not perceive measures like those referenced above as authoritarian. In contrast, when more immoderate right-wing figures, such as Curtis Yarvin, call for authoritarian post-constitutional measures, they at least understand what they are doing.
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As with most every other liberal paradox, the resolution lies in liberals’ rationalistic conception of authority. The mask and vaccine mandates were not authoritarian because these policies were purportedly born of scientific, rational deliberation, which validated the exercise of authority. Federal censorship bodies, election nullification, the frenzy of legal and judicial persecution — all of these measures were undertaken by accredited scientific or professional organizations and associations. They do not represent the arbitrary opinions of particular people; rather, they represent the considered verdicts of The Science, The Judges, The Intelligence Community, The Expert Classes. These are the vehicles that process and transmit the disembodied, disinterested dictates of Reason per se. As such, their conclusions are controlling, their injunctions binding, regardless of how intrusive, how radical, how alien they are to constitutional governance as commonly understood.
Trump, on the other hand, presents to liberals as an agent of actual, personal authority. He has the temerity to reject the consensus views of qualified experts. He peddles ludicrous conspiracy theories that experts and committees can become self-interested political actors rather than vessels of disembodied expertise, reason, and virtue. His actions thus represent not the Platonic dictates of Universal Reason, but the particular preferences of particular political constituencies. This means his actions are inherently authoritarian, regardless of whether they are legal, even conventional, under the plain language of the Constitution and the historical precedent of the office.
The framers of the Constitution did not hold to the present-day liberal delusion that there could exist such a thing as a purely impersonal, rational, and scientific locus of authority. They understood that politics is an arena for the settlement of social conflicts, wherein the victors enact their particular vision of the political. Although republican institutions imposed limits upon executive authority, within those limits, the Executive held a considerable degree of autonomous authority. The present-day liberal’s fixation on a purely impersonal political authority, enacting only scientific facts and universal principles, is not just alien to American political tradition; it is hostile to the spirit of democratic governance in any normal sense of the term.
As Sam Harris plainly verbalised, the modern liberal’s conception of good governance would be in principle devoid of electoral input; government would be operated by classes of credentialed experts exercising rationally grounded — hence, justified — authority, with politicians serving as husks and figureheads. Given these proclivities, it should be unsurprising that this faction found its ideal political executives in the persons of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Source: American Thinker
