Up, Down, and Out of Their Element

To avoid the messy internecine squabbles, the Never Trump crowd is using the class battle instead of left v. right. But at the end of the day they will revert to form

Man, I love a good reframe. I really do. You spend enough time staring at a bowling lane and you start to understand that how you set up the shot matters more than the shot itself.

So there’s this thing going around — maybe you’ve seen it — where the serious thinkers are telling us that left versus right is the wrong axis entirely. What matters, they say, is up versus down. Not liberal versus conservative. Working people versus the people who profit from the working people. The dudes with the calluses versus the dudes with the boats.

And look — this isn’t new, man. The Occupy people were on this. Bernie’s been on this for decades. The Wobblies were on this before my old man was born. “They’re robbing you blind” is left populism. “They think they’re better than you” is right populism. Both are up-versus-down. They just disagree about who “up” is.

But here’s what’s interesting. And Walter, man, Walter actually helped me think through this at the alley last Tuesday, between his extended remarks on the proper application of the Marquess of Queensberry rules to fantasy football disputes —

The Never Trump crowd has discovered the up-versus-down frame. And they are very into it right now.

Which, hm.

These are people whose policy priors — free trade, light regulation, fiscal restraint, being extremely chill about where wealth accumulates — are not exactly the worldview of the guy working two jobs in Bangor, Maine. But if you swap out “left versus right” for “up versus down,” you get to be against the elites without actually committing to anything that would inconvenience the elites. You get to say “the system is rigged” without specifying what a less-rigged system would actually look like in terms of tax policy or labor law or healthcare.

Graham Platner, man. Guy’s an oyster farmer. Got endorsed by Bernie. Beat a two-term governor — a genuinely respectable two-term governor — by thirty-four points in the polls. The Never Trump types are rooting for him because he’s running against a Trump enabler.

But if Platner wins and starts actually governing like Bernie’s oyster farmer — pushing Medicare for All, going after corporate power, making life difficult for the donor class — the Never Trumpers are going to rediscover their concerns about the radical left faster than Walter reaches for his piece when somebody steps over the line.

The up-versus-down frame is real, man. I believe in it. The line that matters is who works and who takes. But when David Brooks starts talking about up versus down, I want to know who he thinks is “up.”

Because I’ve seen the Big Lebowski’s study. I’ve seen a man surrounded by the trappings of wealth and achievement who turns out to have invented every last bit of it. The Pasadena mansion, the self-made mythology, the bootstrap sermon — all of it Maude’s money, man. All of it fabricated.

The bums lost, Mr. Lebowski? The bums lost?

Sir, you are the bum. You’re just in a better suit.

Keep your eye on who’s using the up-versus-down frame and what they specifically want to do about it. The frame is not the policy. And the rug is not the room.