The Devil Wears Cerulean: Marcuse, Meryl Streep, Hayek and Anne Hathaway

I recently watched the classic 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt. Though I had seen it a few times before, it struck me how incredibly astute the “cerulean sweater” scene is and how it illustrates an underappreciated concept in politics better than anything else I have seen. 

Where do political beliefs originate? Of course, a considerable portion of political impulses are related to personal psychology. Research has emphasized that personality heavily influences people’s feelings about broad political beliefs and leadership styles, for example. Personality can also be related to types of social proclivities. But where do articulated (to various degrees) policy prescriptions and trends come from? As I’ve argued, policy positions do not really map onto left vs. right or political parties very cleanly. While not entirely mutually exclusive with Andrew Breitbart’s saying that “politics is downstream of culture,” we often ignore how much politics comes from the top down from intellectuals.

Recently, a Students for Liberty article discussed the intellectual history of some illiberal beliefs that are very much in vogue. The essay attributes today’s current political climate to various intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse, especially the ideas contained in Repressive Tolerance. The article, which I believe has now been removed, sparked some controversy on social media. For those who are unfamiliar, Marcuse argues that in a liberal society, there exists a theme of tolerance. He says that while this idea of tolerance is claimed to be neutral, in reality, it protects systems of oppression and therefore, it is necessary to proactively resist regressive ideas. 

Among other things, a point of contention some had with the article was the incredulity that Marcuse or other intellectuals have any real connection to the recent social movements that have gained momentum in the past few years. Critics argue that the angry voices on social media are not reading Marcuse or engaging with political philosophy in any real way, even passively. In their view, there is no nexus between Marcuse’s ideas and current political events and similarities are coincidental.

Whether or not Marcuse’s writings have indeed had that much impact on today’s politics is a question for another day. Still, the implication that past intellectuals are not steering present politics is likely wrong. Sure, most aren’t reading political theory X or any of the political theorists of old, but the concept of ideas transferring through osmosis is painfully unsung and likely explains some of how the gaps are filled. 

Going back to the movie, Meryl Streep plays Miranda, a character inspired by the real-life legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour. She hires an out-of-place graduate named Andy, played by Anne Hathaway, who is not only ignorant about fashion but also scoffs at fashion being low-brow. Miranda chastises her, pointing out how Andy probably thinks she just randomly chose to wear her blue sweater. Miranda explained that her sweater was not simply “blue,” it was “cerulean,” and that her clothing that day was not organic. She goes through the genealogy of the sweater and how deliberate decisions made by Oscar de la Renta and Yves Saint Laurent stylists are why she is wearing that sweater today.

The scene is a cinematic masterpiece.

This is how political ideas can move, too. Political trends are not random or accidental. People absorb ideas through osmosis, through YouTube, influencers, or news bites and peers. People get things from memes, both in the Richard Dawkins sense and in the social media sense. A pundit on TV might mention a phrase or theory, propose an argument, and it sticks. That phrase comes from thinkers upstream, but most folks get it secondhand, filtered through someone charismatic or relatable.  

This has sped up with modern communication, too. Your friend shares a video, your coworker quotes it, and suddenly, you’re using these phrases without even knowing their source. In Miranda’s world, the designer’s choice was not random; it was deliberate. The same applies to political ideas. When people use the term “cancel culture,” they probably don’t know that French social philosopher Michel Foucault essentially developed the idea in his analysis of discourse power dynamics, while Oliver Wendal Holmes Jr. suggested that discourse existed in something of a marketplace of ideas. They might not know that the concept of “systematic racism” comes from American legal scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, that the “decline of the West” fears largely comes from early 20th century German thinker Oswald Spengler, much of modern environmental policy is inspired by Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, and that universal basic income has roots in Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice all the way back in the 1790s, later refined by Milton Friedman in the 1960s and later piloted in Stockton, California in the 2010s. These are just a few things that have entered the popular zeitgeist (zeitgeist is itself an idea that mostly comes from Goethe, filtered through G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy). 

Perhaps interestingly enough, Anne Hathaway’s character’s disdain for fashion and “consumer culture” has its own intellectual history, ironically including Marcuse as well as other Frankfurt School scholars like Adorno and Horkheimer. All three criticized fashion and shopping in various ways, primarily by arguing that the culture was a manipulative engine that made people desire and purchase things they did not need (in a Freudian and Marxist sort of way).

In his essay The Intellectuals and Socialism, Hayek emphasizes that this is how socialism spread, too. He writes, 

In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible. This is no doubt true of the power of intellectuals to make their peculiar opinions of the moment influence decisions, of the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.

In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. 

… 

The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest. Whether we merely wish to foresee or attempt to influence the course of events, it is a factor of much greater importance than is generally understood. What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles.

Ultimately, this is also why good think tanks matter and the mission is critical. Political ideas, like the cerulean sweater, rarely emerge spontaneously ex nihilo. Ideas and policies are cultivated by institutions that specialize in shaping them.