What Is Going On?
by Joel Hirst (September 2018)
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The Protest, Farley Aguilar, 2015
“A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the wars in medieval Europe (…), which ushered in the era of organized nation-states.” States that existed in Europe but never, not really, in the third world; where in truth maps represent more “(…) the Victorian atlas (…) consist(ing) of a series of coastal trading posts (…) and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, ‘blank’ and ‘unexplored,’” as Robert Kaplan has eloquently written[1]. But, I trekked these areas, to a certain degree, and I captured them for my walls—trophies of a man who ventured off the map to the places hic sunt dracones (where there be dragons).
[2] Hic sunt dracones. Except it failed—the passengers of flight 93 revolted[3]—more of that further on.
But Why Has Liberalism Failed?
—economic Marxism, they called it “21st Century Socialism”[4]–were advanced using cultural Marxism as a vehicle, I admit I have been blind, or if not blind at least sort of myopic. So, laser-focused on understanding plantain communism with its expropriations and its cooperatives and its labor camps and its vertical chicken farms, I fully missed the point when Hugo Chavez regaled the maddened crowds on his seven-hour Sunday TV show, saying “It’s important for everybody to read Antonio Gramsci”[5] and “We are re-examining the ideas of Norberto Ceresole.”[6] Cultural Marxism, with a nativist trend.
But these are not your parent’s commies.
America’s ancient Marxists have been replaced by a younger cadre of cultural Marxists who think more of the blood running through our veins and the pigments of our skins and the terrible tyranny of our private parts than of the class into which we were born.
As the civil and political rights of our Bill of Rights are slowly replaced, as the citizen is replaced in the center of society by the victim, and as our speech is policed by those who only see oppression, our liberalism failed.
Individualism
Our liberalism collapsed, as Patrick Deneen has written, not from the failure of our model, but from its extraordinary success. We are reaching the end result of the ideas distilled to their most elemental and then served to a fast-food culture which no longer contemplates the ideas of society and community and—most importantly—of responsibility. This has come through a corruption of the idea of liberty eagerly, if ignorantly, advanced by our politicians and our entertainment industry and our universities. “Ancient Greek and early Christian political philosophy defined ‘liberty’ as the capacity to cultivate virtue in order to govern one’s self and one’s city with restraint,” Christian Gonzalez writes.[7] Yet, slowly the values of “restraint” and “virtue” have been replaced with “you do you” and “your freedom ends where mine starts.” “Live and let die,” as Guns and Roses (and Paul McCartney and Wings) sing. True liberty is no longer understood as that control of the demons which torment individuals and society, but instead license to do exactly as we please—bereft of any moral and communitarian consequences.
[8]
[9]
On Truth
One of the main enemies of the new faith is objective truth.
The advance of post-modernism has laid aside the rationalism of modernity to be replaced by a subjectivism which knows no truth. This post-modern philosophy is important, for it paves the way for the construction of totalitarian non-truths, such as we are seeing in the world. As Alexandre Koyré wrote,
The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of ‘truth,’ they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class—that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect.[11]
When the question about truth is asked objectively, truth is reflected upon objectively as an object to which the knower relates himself. What is reflected upon is not the relation but that what he relates himself to is the truth, the true. If only that to which he relates himself is the truth, the true, then the subject is in the truth. When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.”[12] .
Why the inconsistencies? The definition of subjectivity is, “taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias.” And a new faith coalesces—intersectionality. As the dictionary describes it, “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” If one’s bias is toward the genes and the glands and the DNA of each sub-set of “victimized” people, juxtaposed against a dominant cultural group identified also by their chromosomes as the villains—white men usually, but that can change—one’s new faith will reflect that. Each faith needs a villain—Iblis, Amon or Chemosh or Satan. The devil in the new faith (as stated above) is western culture.
The greatest oppression, therefore, “trumps” (no pun intended) lesser oppressions as decided by nouveau prophets at public universities, the media, and Hollywood. Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony” is in full flowering.
Legitimacy and the Law
The Control of The State
The Managers
The effect of all this, perhaps unintended (perhaps not), by the cultural Marxists, has been the slow and steady transformation of the nature of the American republic.
Do you recall the slick little campaign trick by the Obama campaign in 2012 called “Life of Julia?” A vision of a life lived under the benefactor state. If you recall, Julia had no parents, no friends, and no family. She was not a member of a community, had no faith nor participated in any clubs or extracurricular activities. She had no great love, no meaningful connections. She was utterly individual, alone. Why be bothered with so great a trouble as all those terrible, complicated entanglements? She had the state. It gave her a job, an education, health care—even caring for her child (Julia was not married).
book entitled the Managerial Revolution.[13] Burnham himself was an aged Marxist who had left the party (as so many did) frustrated by the excesses and brutality of Stalin and the failure of that model to make life better for those under its dominion. This exit did not bring him into capitalism; planners have a deep distrust for the principles of spontaneous order. Instead he saw a new type of society, carefully planned and organized and administered by a benevolent managerial class. “If the temporary workers’ control is replaced by the old control of capitalist owners (as happened in the two revolutionary crises in Germany at the end of, and a few years after, the first world war), then society, after a crisis, has simply returned to its previous capitalist structure. If workers’ control is replaced by the de facto control of the managers backed by a new kind of state, then capitalism, after a transitional crisis, has changed into managerial society.”
Over the last fifty years (or more, probably since the Wilsonian period) the United States has been drifting from its agrarian, Jeffersonian roots to become more and more an oligopoly, oligarchy, and political duopoly. Miriam-Webster defines oligarchy as “government by the few”, while a duopoly is “a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service (in this case two political parties)” and an oligopoly which is “the concentration ratio measures the market share of the largest firms.” As Julius Krein wrote,
Whereas in entrepreneurial capitalism the owners are the managers, in managerialism the owners rely upon the technical expertise of the managers and over time cede to the managers effective control of the economy. The most obvious illustration of this trend is the gradual withdrawal of the large bourgeois owners from active business management, to the point where the major corporations are nominally owned by passive shareholders but actually controlled by technically trained and credentialed professionals who own a trivial percentage of stock.[14]
This has caused society to be cut into three distinct pieces. Unlike the popular movements which decry “The 1%” or the “99%”—in actuality there are three distinct segments. First the 0.1%. Matthew Stewart writes,
It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century. According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America’s wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you’re looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you’ll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone.[15]
But who are the 9.9%? Stewart continues,
So what kind of characters are we, the 9.9 percent? We are mostly not like those flamboyant political manipulators from the 0.1 percent. We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact, we’re so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we’re “middle class” (…) One of the hazards of life in the 9.9 percent is that our necks get stuck in the upward position. We gaze upon the 0.1 percent with a mixture of awe, envy, and eagerness to obey. As a consequence, we are missing the other big story of our time. We have left the 90 percent in the dust—and we’ve been quietly tossing down roadblocks behind us to make sure that they never catch up.
The 9.9% are the managers, credentialed from the right schools and with the right friends and living in the right zip codes.
[16], “Any positive order reached spontaneously through the interactions of individuals and groups is either impossible or inefficient. Positive order must be intentionally produced through expert managerial technique. In fact, this is the way all organizational goods are realized. In a managerial society all enjoy the fruits of greater efficiency, creativity, and productivity as society’s opportunities for advancement are more effectively distributed. No human capital will go to waste.”
That is the new social contract which is emerging in America and is already well advanced in Europe.
The only trouble, of course, is that the world order they are desperate to preserve is failing. And we have come full circle.
Where Has This Led?
What to do, then, if the plan to build a permanent majority is aborted? Upon what would I rest my comfort—if I too were left alone? Upon that ancient idea of legitimacy. It must be, it has to be, it cannot be other but that this King of the Deplorables is illegitimate. He stole it. The Russians, the FBI, the popular vote, the server, Wikileaks. Whatever the next pitstop on the rolling road of desperation. Impeachment—that ultimate prize, the crucible of illegitimacy—that is the desire. It was all a mistake, it was a coup—it was . . . Treason.
The World?
[1] “The Coming Anarchy”, The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan, February 1994 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
[2] “The Urban Archipelago” Seattle Stranger, Editorial Board, November 2004 https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-archipelago/Content?oid=19813
[3] “The Flight 93 election” Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus, September 2016 http://claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/
[4] “The Bolivarian Revolution and Socialism of the 21st century”, In Defense of Marxism, August 2005, https://www.marxist.com/chavez-socialism-21century110805.htm
[6] “Caudillo, Ejercito y Pueblo: La Venezuela de Hugo Chavez,” Ediciones Sieghels, Norberto Ceresole, Agosto 2015
[7] “Why Liberalism Failed: Book Review”, National Review, Christian Gonzalez, June 2018 https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/book-review-why-liberalism-failed-patrick-deneen/
[8] “Why Liberalism Failed”, Yale University Press, Patrick Deneen, February 2018
[9] Ibid.
[10] “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://www.iep.utm.edu/frankfur/
[11] “Réflexions sur le mensonge”, Allia Publishing, Alexandre Koyre, May 1998
[12] “Becoming a Self”, Purdue University Press, Merold Westphal, September 1996
[13] “The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World”, Praeger Press, James Burnham, April 1972
[14] Julius Krein “James Burnham’s Managerial Elite”, American Affairs Journal, Julius Krein, February 2017 https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/02/james-burnhams-managerial-elite/
[15] “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy”, The Atlantic, by Matthew Steward, June 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
[16] “Diversity: A Managerial Ideology”, Quillette, by Darel E. Paul, February 2018 http://quillette.com/2018/02/19/diversity-managerial-ideology/
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I, Charles, From the Camps. He was a Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas and an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has a Masters from Brandeis University. He tweets @joelhirst and his public facebook is @JoelDHirst
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