Bad Douthat

Yes, this Ross Douthat analysis of the Ottawa blockade as a new kind of "class warfare" is really bad.   He starts:

A great and mostly unknown prophet of our time is Michael Young, whose book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” published way back in 1958, both coined the term in its title and predicted, in its fictional vision of the 21st century, meritocracy’s unhappy destination: not the serene rule of the deserving and talented, but a society where a ruling class selected for intelligence but defined by arrogance and insularity faces a roiling populism whose grievances shift but whose anger at the new class order is a constant.

This year it’s Canada’s turn to live inside Young’s somewhat dystopian scenario, set in the 2030s but here ahead of schedule....

And throws in:

This last division was not precisely anticipated in Young’s book, writing as he did before the true rise of the computer, but it has ended up being a key expression of the meritocracy-populist divide. To quote the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals” — meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.

This completely ignores the role of the digital in promoting conspiracy and crank science amongst the "Practicals" - which is surely the key dynamic driving the anti-mandate motives.  

He finally does get around to acknowledging this in the second last paragraph....

And the conflicts are also more complex, inevitably, than any binary can capture: The resilience of reality creates fissures inside the meritocracy (as lately between parents and educational bureaucrats, say), while the populist side has its own virtual dream palaces (the world of QAnon and related conspiracies is not exactly a practical dimension).

...but I reckon with inadequate acknowledgement that this makes a mockery of his whole earlier analysis.   

And then this pathetic last paragraph:

Still, once you recognize the divisions that Young prophesied, you see them in some form all over, as a novel class war that constantly raises the old question: Which side are you on?

I guess it's too much for Douthat to just come out on the side of those who live in scientific reality and don't see everything through the Right wing culture war perspective.