“It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.”
- Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a liberal. A John Dewey sort of liberal. The sort of liberal that, well, liberals used to be.
Hailing from the UK, it meant the only political home I had was of negligible electoral relevance throughout my lifetime. Those liberal values were to be found in both other main political parties as well, but they were in short supply. I never found Conservatism appealing, and I have rather radical views on inherited cultural institutions, which I think have evolved to control people and deny them agency. In this regard you can put me down with Judith Butler. No one is a fiercer social critic and deconstructionist than I. But at the same time, I have a deep repugnance for collectivism as a political strategy. Logically, it should be the case of any post-modernist. Intersectionality is just a fancy word for a rights-based approach to a voluntaristic social identity.
As I have gotten older, I have refined my political self-description to centre-left libertarian. I am not naive enough to believe we can do without social institutions, but I think we should retain maximum autonomy at the level of individuals and communities. It is not a question of delegating centralized state power downwards, but of governing by exception. Such centralized state power does not exist in the first place, unless it is granted freely and consent is maintained. There is always room for a reset. Anarchist and communautarian thought has a lot to teach us, but we also need to manage the global commons. I’m with Richard Rorty on that.
Above all, we need to recognize the injustice of inherited wealth, in the widest sense. I am no extreme fetishist of private wealth. I think we have ample evidence that the Coase theorem does not apply and that global and national inequalities are extremely damaging to economic efficiency, pulling us far away from the Pareto production frontier. Whilst billionaires fritter their money away on vanity projects with no public accountability, talented people have no access to capital or to the labor market. I agree with the Austrian school that we have intervened in markets in ways which have been remarkably value-destructive, and we very much continue to do so. It’s a disease, which could well be rushing towards a brutal awakening as certain governments have shown themselves willing even to undermine trust in national currencies. This notwithstanding, we cannot kick back and ignore the problem of capital formation, or of social equity, which has huge costs not only to the economy but also to the fabric of democracy. As John Dewey was all too well aware.
Were I an American, I think its politics would always have bemused me. The only guy over there I liked before 2016 was Bernie Sanders. I’m a Cornel West kind of guy. I think if you want to understand the US, you have to read Howard Zinn. The entire history of the country from its foundation has been a story of how to absorb change without ever really changing anything. It has been remarkably successful. The New England Protestant plutocracy is still as much in charge today as it was in the time of Sam Adams. Its values haven’t changed much, or at least they didn’t through say the 1970s. I think this value-based community - white of course and militantly homogenizing - now starts to slip away from its ideological moorings and become more nakedly tribal. Perhaps they sense a day of reckoning.
In any case, after the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump represented to me the end of the world. I certainly didn’t care for Hillary Clinton. Not at all. But I assumed she came with a more balanced set of reasonable policy advisors. Trump was a loud mouth, interested - I thought - only in his own ego, and anyway with no skills to get anything done. Many of his appointees were similarly flawed figures, like Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, or Jeff Sessions. The early Trump years seemed like a period of great danger, as he jetted off on ridiculous missions to talk about nothing with Kim Jong Un and tore up the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris accords. I had no understanding really of where the Trump phenomenon came from - it wasn’t the Republican party I was used to. The only thing that was clear was that he was drawing a lot of support from working-class white populations, including those sympathetic to Bernie and unrepresented by the Democrat establishment.
I naively assumed that the stinging defeat would cause the Democrat strategists to sit down and figure out a message to get these lost voters back on board. Reach out and heal the divisions. All this ought to prove to you, I guess, is my extreme unfamiliarity with US politics.
Certainly, attacking Trump must have been a tempting theme. It clearly was for CNN, who have lost 90% of their viewership since he left office. But it was immature and it contributed to marginalising an electorate which was never allowed to exist in all its complexity and variety. If Trump was an idiot, so was everyone who voted for him. This may have been cathartic but it didn’t help to win back any voters or heal the country.
I don’t now think that Trump was or is an idiot. It’s clear to me that the picture has to be considerably nuanced. He talked about a lot of themes that I was just not alert to, but see much more clearly now - China, the failures of global institutions, bias in the media and on the part of Big Tech, even, it now seems, incipient communist-like behavior on the left, which at the time rang in my ears like McCarthyist hysteria. Still, I very much, deeply hope that Trump will not be the next Republican Presidential candidate. I hope he will have the grace and wisdom to stand down himself (yes I know, not properties generally associated with him). Trump is a divisive character and does not have the stature of a leader. There are many better candidates. But if he were the candidate, standing against any Bidenite candidate, and if I were American, I would definitely vote for him - as I would have in 2020.
I do not pretend to quite understand why the neo-corporatists - as I now term the Democrat establishment wing - so overwhelmingly fell in with the Covid narrative, and unrestrained fanciful speculation on this topic is very much not my cup of tea. But of course there are some elements in the Zeitgeist of the latter 2010s which foreshadowed this, particularly climate alarmism, which always shocked me because it was obvious that its negativity would only dull people to any need to take action which might collectively be accorded. It is shared dreams that change the world - not fear. The pursuit of increasingly arcane causes by the so-called liberals also suggested to me a strange inability to focus on the essential. Not that I am at all hostile to such causes, but the political prominence which they attained and the hypoxic bouts of self-shaming associated with them seemed like some strange sadomasochistic ritual. When Foucault insisted on the importance of confession in Western culture, I thought it was a little bit his own fetish. On the contrary, it has come to seem like for a section of society even the privacy of the confessional is not enough. Their sins have to be constantly paraded by they themselves on national television and in the political arena.
So what happened to Deweyan pragmatism? I guess it has largely become, for the moment anyway, the purview of the right. As the neo-corporatists lost interest in building a more just society, presumably because it would have inconveniently involved admitting the justice claims of some elements in society who were not quite becoming in polite society, so thinkers on the right came to see the progressive social agenda which Dewey understood to underpin democracy as rather a matter of already established social norms and therefore ripe for conservative re-appropriation. This for instance seems to be the sense of the extraordinarily prophetic final work of Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites.
Simultaneously, a major shift was going on in the world of work, as David Graeber has documented. The importance of this cannot be sufficiently stressed, though it has scarcely been noted. It has undone the association between the working classes and Marxist political strategy. The neo-corporatist left has lost all interest in the working classes (admittedly in the US, it was only ever an association of convenience, or even purely rhetorical, but elsewhere it was quite real). The problem of class consciousness could only become greater over time as the relationship between labor and the product of labor grew increasingly tenuous. Ultimately, we have seen a bifurcation of the working classes between a diminishing cohort of traditional occupations relying on labor and a larger group, now spanning much of the middle class as well, of persons whose economic occupation is to a greater or lesser extent a “bullshit job”. The neo-corporatists now have as their core constituency this class of persons who are self-consciously unproductive (one could almost say they have paradoxically achieved a form of class consciousness), and deeply insecure for this very reason. These corporate peons clearly play some kind of role within the overall economic ecology - Graeber never succeeded in deciphering this puzzle - but not a role of such a sort that it empowers them to threaten to withdraw anything of value if their rights are under attack. They are therefore entirely infeodated to corporate power. They have no strategy of struggle other than through the system.
The outcome of the continued development of these historical forces is not one any of us can call. Personally I think it is underdetermined. However, if there is a vehicle for an alternative collective political destiny, what might it be? In what ways must conservatism change to embrace the new historical context, and what signs can we already see of this happening?
The Trump phenomenon provides us with some clues, but we need to take a step back. Although it seemed at the time (to blinkered liberals like me) to spring from nowhere, in fact a lot of this has been hiding in plain sight. It has just struggled to find a language, it has been actively misportrayed in the media, and only the absurdities of Covid have forced many of us into a re-examination. Mostly, it has taken the form of nationalist populism, which has been growing in Europe since the 1980s, long before Steve Bannon harnessed and reframed it for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. In the UK, in fact, this has been a significant political phenomenon for much longer, doubtless ever since the UK has been a self-aware political community (as the doctrine of Splendid Isolation makes clear). In many European countries, the alternative right has been the main critic of Covid restrictions, and whilst often embarrassing, sometimes they have been quite lucid. It seems like the political space of opportunity which has opened up to them is also changing their appeal and political positioning. In countries with an alternative left, it has also sometimes been surprisingly republican and articulate. In countries without these political forces, factions within the traditional parties that are more aligned with right or left populism have provided whatever political opposition there was.
I am most certainly not a Conservative. I squirm when I hear their nonsense about abortion, not only because I disagree with them, but especially because I view it as absurd culture-war posturing (just as bad as wokeism) that could hardly be less relevant to the challenges we face as a species; a complete distraction. I detest every manifestation of patriarchy, I am a deconstructionist of gender and traditional sex roles, I am for liberal drug laws and decent gun control, I am even opposed to laws favoring monogamy and in favor of universal basic income. I couldn’t disagree more strongly with Lasch’s characterization of liberal-left culture as narcissistic. Perhaps it has become narcissistic, but I am not willing to accord him that degree of prophetic power. I think the last thing we need, also because it has zero hope of ever happening, is some kind of back to the future religious revival. I believe that, even if it is a rocky road, the rejection of patriarchal religion will eventually provide a new model of society.
And yet. I am very impressed by the way that many in the faith community have found their voices in the current crisis. Many on my side of spirituality have also - actually I think it is almost universal - but this is still invisible, even in the heterodox media. But I have really learnt to value decent common sense and kind, community-based values. Even if philosophically I think there is no future in this and that we must change, it is still warm, real and grounded. Yes, we should all re-examine our privilege. But it has become so painfully obvious that all those who espouse these ideals at the political level today do so entirely opportunistically, and are amongst the worst offenders against the ideals that they preach. Much in the woke agenda is simply neo-colonial. Neo-corporatism is all wrong, it is highly dangerous, and it needs an Augean cleansing; nothing of it is to be rescued at all; its self-righteous advocates need to awaken to the vacuity of their empty lives and find some real causes to fight for, but above all, find themselves. It is all empty show and it is very, very sad.
In the final analysis, politics is a dynamic process in which trends in one direction set in motion trends in another. This is so dramatic at the moment that it can reshape institutions in ways we cannot predict, or perhaps even imagine. The past shapes the future but it does not determine it, and given the rapidly shifting sands of culture, conservatives are often far less conservative than they actually realize. There is no doubt that everyone who values democracy, freedom and the enlightened rule of law must unite at this point in time to oppose neo-corporatism. But we can also, I think, find common ground that we had forgotten - and learn to celebrate it.
"It is shared dreams that change the world - not fear."
So true! To that end, I think you may enjoy this one. :)
https://themariachiyears.substack.com/p/coleys-toxins-how-the-most-effective?s=w