Apparently, here's this techno-utopian thing going on in Silicon Valley. Something happened that went from maybe benignly libertarian-left seeming, to all these far-right monarchist technocracists like Mencius Moldbug, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and a whole coterie of permanently online neo-fascists.
They seem to basically believe in their genetic and cultural superiority, being that culture as it may a weirdo ironic nihilism. I've never quite gone to deeply into it, but I felt I've learned about it from the edges. Something in the past two decades erupted as an old-guard blood and soil paleo conservatism began to crawl out from under the depths of neoliberal economic policy and social justice awareness breathed out into the academy and orbiting spheres of cultural creation and left political activism. As Clinton played nice with Gingrich to weaken the welfare state and deregulate, dreaming of a future in which everyone was a PMC, and no one did manual labor. Murphy Brown took swings from Dan Quail and the AIDS crisis faded into a strange sunset. Homosexuality finally spread from the metropolitan ghettos to some level mainstream acceptance. Right wing radio boiled and seethed, as Bush Jr. talked about "compassionate conservatism" and welcoming immigrants. But then 9/11, and the fear it inspired, melted into the impotence of Iraq and Afghanistan, and when the country turned away from a jingoism-rung-hollow, towards Barack Hussein Obama, the Tea Party movement erupted from the great recession like a bare-chested drunken biker and violently puked on America's front lawn, chunks of racist memes and violent rhetoric sopping in an inchoate stew of economic and social displeasure. When the GOP could do no better than Romney/Mc Cain, who trucked no conspiratorial nonsense or overt racism, Trump stepped (escalated) in with his golden shoes of shit and began shucking his confidence games to an audience primed and eager to suckle his hate and dumb machismo. "They hate you and they hate me, so I'll fight for you" were the words they needed to hear. They had become outsiders. It was clear who they had lost the culture war to (Hollyweird and Colleges). And while they were no worse off than the left financially, they were too afraid to go to college anymore because their kids were coming home Woke for the holidays and insulting the family. Their towns were filling with immigrants. You had to press 1 for English. Girls were kissing on TV. They seemed to have two choices: fall back into the safety of the Benedict option of homeschooling and further public retreat with the world fell further into sin; or the more dangerous but glorious Flight 93 option of taking the school boards, courts and capitol building by force. Covid 19 made that choice for them. The shutdowns were cinematic - like something straight out of a movie, a Hollyweird zombie apocalypse. This is what they had all been preparing for: the gays and PMC elites injecting them with gay microchips and harvesting their souls. Trump pulled hard on the truck horn and blasted his nonsensical clown suit flower in everyone's face, standing with his comically long red tie and surrounded by cheeseburgers. Rush Limbaugh peed himself a little in excitement, "He's really doing it!" Michael Anton, of the far-right Claremont institute, analogized the passenger revolt that stormed the cockpit and diverted Flight 93 from hitting the Pentagon as the crucible faced by the GOP in stopping the Democrats from destroying the country with their progressivism. The analogy was a call for vigilante violence: when faced with an existential threat, extreme measures were justified. The bedrock assumption was hyperbolic and conspiratorial, assuming Democratic governance as illegitimate and corrupt, and so justified extrajudicial and authoritarian measures. As John Ganz pointed out in a recent column, historical fascism is best understood as a heterogenous amalgam of various interests, each seeing the same enemy in its sights, but with their own unique fear of victimization: "It’s important to remember that fascism, especially in its original incarnation in Italy, was never a fully coherent ideology. Like the symbol of the fasces itself, it’s a bundle of things bound together, a syncretic and cobbled-together system of politics that encompassed several ideological tendencies. As the Madonna song goes, it brought together the bourgeoisie and the rebel. Mussolini’s party began with avant-garde futurists and radical syndicalists in the cities, but within a couple years attracted the most conservative sections of the bourgeoisie in the countryside. The historian Alexander de Grand calls this intrinsic fragmentation hiding behind consensus “hyphenated fascism”: so, you had conservative-fascism, nationalist-fascism, technocratic-fascism, syndicalist-fascism, Catholic-fascism etc. Each saw in the fascist movement and state the possibility of realizing their own program. This was made possible because of the excessively abstract terms of fascist pronouncements and the political skill and mercurial nature of fascist leaders: it was about being opposed to common enemies like liberalism and Marxism while at the same time “restoring national greatness.” Everybody had their own idea about what that looked like. But all would replace tiresome and frustrating regime of democratic political contestation with the rule of competence, or, what the sociologist of fascism Dylan Riley calls the “a technocratic rejection of politics as such.” In the contemporary US you have the business-cranks opposed to taxes and regulations, the religious-cranks wanting Christian Theocracy, the race-cranks opposed to multiculturalism, the sex-cranks advocating patriarchy and heteronormativity, and the techno-cranks, convinced of their own superiority in guaranteeing economic and cultural excellence through a regime of top-down technocratic governance. But the one central, reactionary throughline in all these groups is their deep sense of existential threat to traditional hierarchies of power that they see as essential to sustaining their own particular freedom - that is (whether consciously or not) their own position of comfort. The supremacy of the White Christian Heterosexual Male is seen as required for human flourishing. Each group comes at this from their own idiosyncratic angle, arguing from economic, social, religious or historical evidence that inevitably reaches back to better times, the before-woke. The common feeling is one of personal resentment, a feeling of an identity that has been excluded from its rightful place of superiority. The thinking is Manichean and zero-sum. A cosmopolitan pluralism in which all groups share power is dismissed as contrary to the Natural Order in which hierarchy is unavoidable. A loss of status for the traditionally dominant group can only lead to it subservience. No matter how loud the naive rhetoric of DEI claims otherwise, not only is pluralism impossible, but its proponents know it - even if only at the unconscious level - and are thus driven by a mendacious lust for power. This all may smack of projection, but it's a logical outcome of a coherent worldview. The reactionary mind, motivated by its own lust to safeguard its comfort by maintaining power over other groups, assumes attempts at equality as attempts at replacement. If true freedom is only ever held by wielding power over others, then it is all a game of dominance. The trick then is in determining which group, which set of values and norms is best. This is where the reactionary turns to history - albeit always a carefully curated perspective designed to emphasize the natural supremacy of their particular group. This historical reading is fundamentally tautological: since dominance is part of the natural order, evidence of a group's dominance is evidence of their right to dominate. Just as the animal kingdom has a natural energy pyramid, so do does the society of man. The idea of a man sharing power with a woman, a white man sharing power with a black man, a heterosexual with a homosexual, a Christian with a Muslim, an owner with his workers, etc. is akin to lion sharing the savannah with a gazelle. Traditional centrist conservatism has always made a sort of deal on this point. It will concede pluralism and equality as morally correct, just as long as traditional structures are left unassailed. The leap it makes to bridge these seemingly contradictory premises is to assume that every individual has the power within them to transcend the degradations of these structures, either by assimilating to the dominant group, or by accepting a second-class status as a sort of freedom in its own right, owing to the beneficence of the dominant. A worker can start his own business and be his own boss, or he can stay within his rank and enjoy the privileges bestowed upon him by the flourishing of a subsequently growing economy. A woman can enjoy the privileges of bestowed by a flourishing patriarchal society. A homosexual can still go to church and get to heaven by suppressing their urges. People of color and immigrants can learn to speak English correctly and otherwise act white. If all of that sounds like a raw deal, well, conservatism was never about your feelings. If it sounds dishonest and incoherent, well, a thriving ideology is never required to be coherent. Magical thinking can be a powerful tool to avoid contradictions, especially if the promise is nothing less than absolute safety and comfort. To look more deeply at the incompatibilities in this line of thinking, to critically deconstruct and analyze social science and data on actual safety and comfort - things like the availability of human rights, access to power, economic mobility or equity, rates of suicide and despair in populations oppressed by traditional hierarchies - is to confront discomfort and loss of status among the dominant. This is why conservatism has always been appealing to those whose status is threatened by progressive ideology. The gauzy thinking of centrist conservatism took a big hit in recent decades. The election of the first black president, the legalization of gay marriage, the consecutives failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish functioning democracies despite over a trillion dollars spent, and the psychic toll taken by American military prowess appearing flaccid, and more recently the nationwide BLM protesting against police brutality and the literal shutting down of American cities in Covid Lockdowns at the behest of eggheads, all reported on by a mainstream media which gave neither sufficient justification nor succor to the wounded pride and deep existential angst of conservative paranoia. In this vacuum, conspiracies festered and frothed. An entirely alternate reality took form in right wing media and think tanks such as Fox News, Breitbart and the Claremont institute. The old centrism was untenable, ineffective as it was in stopping the march of what an increasingly warped world view perceived as enemies on all sides. So, fascism - maybe ugly but necessary. In Silicon Valley, what has been seen as the best of us came to be seen as possibly the worst of us - contributing as it seemed to be to ever-extreme wealth inequality, the datification and algorhythmic exploitation of society through social media, and an increasingly uneasy realization that the internet future was making us more dependent and thus less free. What's more it seemed to be providing a seed bed for our darkest social impulses. The bigotry that centrist conservatism had always been able to hand-wave away was being pushed back against in terse online exchanges fed by monetization. The incoherence between the valorization of hierarchy and promise of equality was being tested. Reactionaries, unable to square the circle, chose hierarchy and began to give up on equality. Because equality was only ever given lip-service, they had no real understanding of what it meant - especially in relation to the lived experience of non-dominant groups. For decades, conservatives had adopted "colorblindness" and a superficial understanding that bigotry was wrong - despite their policies always seeming to promote its deleterious effects. Not interested in understanding what it was, where it came from, or what perpetuates it, they were ill-equipped to answer those who pointed to bigotry's existence. They spent their time denying, downplaying, or misdirecting - anything to acknowledge the fact that it lived in the very ideological vacuum they had created between hierarchy and equality. White, male, heterosexual, Christian supremacy leads inexorably to bigotry. To acknowledge its continued existence was to acknowledge the incoherence core to their ideology. The flight 93 position meant they had to go on the attack. Pointing out bigotry was met with rhetorical violence: a bad-faith mendacity in which defeating one's opponent meant you could use any tools at your disposal, as long as the threat to your identity was neutralized. You were in fact the bigot, and furthermore were unpatriotically opposed to free speech. Your science and academic studies were corrupt, your policies merely those of a deep-state, globalist agenda. Truth was no longer possible, and words no longer had meaning. Every critique could be dismissed as merely part of a Marxist Woke agenda. Just as the passengers couldn't stop the terrorism through negotiation, and instead had to storm the cockpit and crash the plane, Trump was in his rights to call for mass deportations, flight restrictions from Muslim countries, pushing radical judges through congress, and the storming of the capital to overturn his electoral defeat. The legal consequences for Trumps repeatedly flagrant disregard for the rule of law were seen as more evidence of political persecution. Having stepped outside of democratic norms, it is only logical to begin to ponder what might be put in its place. To the reactionary traditionalist, the obvious answer is Monarchy. There is much to appreciate in how hierarchical structures were maintained by kings, especially if one is more interested in order than equality and the rights of man. If you squint just right, a benevolent vision can be seen. As Moldbug himself writes, reading the racist apologist for imperialism, James Froude: "Froude describes a Tudor society which is completely ordered—which consists, from top to bottom, king to knave, of these relationships of mutual obligation. They are relationships of family, of feudalism, of guild traditions such as apprenticeship, of the Church, of political patronage, of commercial patronage and monopoly, and of course of law and government. It was impossible to live a normal human life outside this tapestry, and nor is it at all clear why anyone would have wanted to." Misfits, screwups and parasites constantly fell out of the fabric, the era being after all primitive, and every arm of government was charged with eradicating this human bilge. If Tudor England, or any European sovereign of the era, had tolerated vagrants, beggars and the idle, it would have been inundated with a mountain of them in a second. As it was, it seems there were quite a few. The difficulty of operating in these primitive conditions demanded a social fabric at which the 21st century can only stare in amazement, like a general contractor contemplating a cathedral. And these people, indeed, built cathedrals. They were not libertarian cathedrals." Dominant thus hierarchy may not be pretty, but it works. The same cannot be said for democracy, which Moldbug and post-centrist conservative fascists have deluded themselves into believing through multitudinous fever-readings of current end historical events, always with an eye to the protection of their own self-assumed supremacy and legitimate privilege, is cancerous. Moldbug again: "the true spirit of democracy is anarchy, dissolution of hierarchical authority. To the radical, this flame, if not snuffed out, cannot be withstood. To the reactionary, the cancer will either kill the patient or be eradicated. To both, no stable compromise is possible or desirable." In their high Silicon Towers, IQs checked at the elevator doors, a vision of post-democratic society is beginning to take shape, and it is enticing. Shamed and shunned, this is their chance to storm the captain's chair. But in this telling, not only will the barbarian (probably low-IQ) terrorists be vanquished, and national disaster averted, but these insurgents know how to fly the plane. Upwards they will pull the yoke, into the golden clouds of benevolent rule, order once again restored to its rightful, natural position.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |