Understanding the Great Reversal in the Political Field

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Discussion 1

Why is it so important to critique the left (and the right), at the present moment ?

It is very difficult to discuss political polarities without essentializing them in one way or another, and this is more problematic in this area as we are dealing with evolving movements and definitions. Within that polarity, there are furthermore many subdivisions that make simple assessments difficult. But this is how it is, we cannot avoid to talk about it, as the future of human civilization is greatly impacted by the political choices that proceed from these preferences.

So what is the left ? This is what I believe I know about it: it started with the French Revolution, when the more radical factions of the French Revolutionary movements started sitting on the left of the democratic assemblies and would become radical democrats or radical liberals. Later on, after the many revolutions in Europe in 1848 but especially after the 1870s (rapid rise of unions and labor parties), a new left arose which was no longer an expression of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ but of the labor movement and its representatives, in particular under ‘socialist’ banners. It was always split in different factions, but the linkage to labor and socialist ideas was a primary identifier. This started changing again in 1968, and again in 1989. Slowly but surely, the left became more and more associated with identity movements and their civil rights and cultural liberties concerns, while accommodating more and more with the management of then consumption-oriented neoliberal system. The governmental left started standing for a more friendly management of capitalist crises. In terms of ideological hegemony, the influence of marxism declined steadily and postmodern ideas became dominant in the left academia. But underlying these changes was also an important sociological factor: the left became more and more the parties that represented the urban cognitariat, gradually losing its working class base.

My hypothesis is that 1968 stands for a new social contract. Welfare societies were based on a compromise between labor leaders and the elites, but neoliberalism was based on a compromise between identity political leaderships. This is where the seeds were sown, but at a time where inclusive identity politics were entirely legimate and important, and still part of a egalitarian, inclusive and universal premise (the opposite of what woke identity politics would eventually become).

All these combined factors and tendencies underwent a radical qualitative change around 2015, when the Great Awokening became a public phenomena, sweeping through the Anglo-Saxon institutions, academia and media. These were no longer subtle changes, but amount to a Great Reversal. And note that this is at least the third time it has happened in modern democratic history since 1789.

I will address how we can still distinguish the woke movements from the broader left, but first we must address this great reversal: So the first reversal is around the class issue, with the left now being aligned with the urban cognitariat, and increasingly hostile to working class culture in the so-called ‘culture wars’. My contention is that we have reverted back to a similar situation as in the first half of the 19th cy, where the middle class, the PMC’s, (professional middle classes) is increasingly marked by a divorce with the ‘traditional working class’, and this includes increasingly forms of social racism, as the talk about the ‘deplorables’ (Obama) and ‘unacceptable views’ (Trudeau) exemplify. The hostility of ‘progressives’ against the recent trucker movement is a pivot in this context.

The second reversal is around race. The left was traditionally anti-racist in a sense that could accomodate both the radicals like Malxolm X, and the more moderates like Marin Luther King, while the more racist ideologies like those of the Black Muslims, were out of bounds. The ideal was the egalitarian color-blind society where everyone would be recognized as an equal and based on his merits as a human being, seeing the struggle of minorities as part of a Rainbow Coalition of equals, which included the labor movement. This has been reversed, the woke have adopted explicitly racially essentialist views, desire a society where the surplus is distributed around group membership, and where human dignity is assessed according to an accounting of intersectional points which determine the level of victimhood, which in turn becomes the basis of a new moral hierarchy. To be anti-racist means to actively discriminate and to be in favour of a segregated social logic.

The third reversal is around free speech and democratic pluralism. The historical left in democratic societies (excluding the partisans of totalitarian regimes) was aligned with speech rights, seen as essential for the self-organization of the working classes, and were part of solidly pluralist media landscapes. Today, many of the left are actively engaged in persecutorial cancel campaigns, while left politicians are the driving force between one-sided hate speech legislation, and put pressure on Big Tech, to increase censorship and drive out dissent. The recent organized campaign to destroy Joe Rogan’s capacity to interview dissenting voices is exemplary of this trend, but the number of cancellations number in the thousands. An important driving force is the underlying principle of woke fragility, which believes that dissent endangers the existence of ‘victims’.

We should note that before 1968, all these were the characteristics of important factions of the right wing.

What does this say about the relation about the woke and the ‘left’ in general. One way to look at it is simply to say that the woke are the more radical fraction of the left. In its most radical expression, some opinion polls suggest no more than 8% of the US public agrees with the full gamut of woke opinions. But that would be a severe underestimation of the influence of these ideas on the broader left. My contention would be that if ‘hard wokism’ is a radical and minoritarian faction, only dominant in media and academia, that ‘soft wokism’ is in fact the chaotic attractor of the cognitarian left ‘in general’. So yes, not the whole left is woke, but, substantial parts of the left are contaminated by it to various degrees. Identitarianism, in one form of another, seems to be the ideology of choice.


The facts on the ground are that in the 3 aspects of the Great Reversal, most of the left is on board on all 3:

1) a relative abandonment of working class concerns;

2) a relative acceptance of woke ideology around race

3) a relative hostility to free speech.


Of course there are exceptions. There are still social-populist movements (Sanders) and neo-Marxist groups like Jacobin, and radical politicians like Yanos Varoufakis. But not only are many of them obliged to drift towards wokeness (compare AOC’s speeches today and a few years ago), those that remain steadfast on their association with working class interests, like Sanders or Jacobin, are literally in a situation of blackmail which paralyzes any progress. This was the analysis of Wallerstein apparently and now certainly of Vivek Chibber, the editor in chief of Catalyst, the theoretical magazine associated with Jacobin. He explains very convincingly that whenever the populist grow, as with the Sanders ascendancy in the last primaries, woke coalitions are mobilized to proffer accusations of racism and white supremacy, which effectively killed Sanders in the Georgia primaries.

The principle, demonstrated by various electoral analyses and the work of Eric Kaufmann for example are very clear: wokism and the wokisation of the left affects the cognitariat, what he calls the Anwyere’s,but it does not penetrate the majority of the working population.

Due to these Great Reversals, the first phenomena has been the decade-long drift of the working classes to the right, to national-populist parties and movements, in a new alliance between the people still doing physical work and having working class cultures, and the more territorially linked small businesses.

We are now seeing the second stage. The minorities which are the primary targets of woke reforms against meritocratic selection mechanisms, such as the Asian minority, are seeing an accelerated shift to the right, but even within Latino and African-Americans, we already saw a doubling of the vote. The identification of learning and hard work with white supremacy, in fact targets the middle class ideologies of all groups. Woke may work amongst the academic elites, for whom wokeness means accelerated promotions, but they create resistance in the business-oriented middle classes. Moreover, woke policies around policing and crime are also a huge disaster for the poor, leading to unprecedented crime spikes, which may also end up affecting progressive support amongst the poor. What this means politically is that a really important drift to the Right seems inevitable in the West. How serious or negative would this be ?

Well, let’s look at the Great Reversal in reverse! This is important because the place that was left open by the ‘left’ (i.e. the 3 former principles and positions that it has abandoned), is now increasingly occupied by the Right.

First of all, in terms of speech, most of the anglo-saxon right that I have seen, have accepted all the civil rights advances of Culture War 1.0, and have become defenders of free speech and pluralism. Anyone subjected to cancel culture attempts will tell you that while your best left wing friends send private messages of support (at best), it will be centrists and conservatives that provide effect support. They were the ones defending Bill Maher in Berkeley, and Joe Rogan in Spotify, and the rights of the truckers to protest in Canada. They are now the defenders of media and academic pluralism, which many on the left try to diminish and destroy.

In terms of race and minorities, most of the right I see is fully on board on civil rights issues, while principled in their anti-racism a la Martin Luther King. And as we know from the 2018 Yale study, they are also less racist in their daily life and attitudes. While the woke left has moved to full scale racialism and segregationism, they are now basically were the left used to be in terms of race, say in 2015.

What about working class concerns ? Obviously , most of the right is wedded to capitalism and markets. They are obviously no socialists but I would like to mention a few points:

  • Ideologically, many of the right are actually moving to a critique of neoliberalism, and to a critique of its globalism. This means policies that are in favour of re-industrialization. They are increasingly hostile to Big Tech and its surveillance and censorship.
  • In terms of public health policies, they were much more sensitive to the economic and social concerns of working people.
  • There is a growing group within the right, thinking about more radical reorientations to the working class, and in non-anglo-saxon countries, a revival of solidaristic thinking.

My aim here is not to idealize the situation, but rather to alert you on the direction of the trend. While the left is moving away from working class concerns, significant factions of the right are moving in that direction. My prediction is that if some politician or group does this well, this could really create a potential long term hegemony. All this being said, overwhelming majorities of right wing expression is still largely unconcerned with social issues, and is, like the left, focused on societal issues.

However, there is one deep and over-riding weakness which makes the current right problematic. And that is the ecological issue. Of all what I have seen, it seems most of them do not take climate change seriously, nor resource constraints; there is a deep nostalgia for the middle class lifestyle, and perhaps a belief that if they could just get rid of the crazies, all would be well again. This is of course, a deep and dangerous illusion.

This is why I permit myself to say that if the woke left today stands for the spiritual annihilation of mankind, the right as it stands today may well stand for its physical annihilation.

For the commoners and cosmo-localists amongst us, what this means is there is no ‘perfect’ politics for this transition.

But I would say this:

  • Wokeness, with its racial ideology and segregationism, is incompatible with the free association of persons around common projects, regardless of their immutable characteristics
  • Free speech and free thinking is an absolute necessity for finding new systemic solutions
  • Ecological transformations and policies are essential for our physical survival
  • Redistributionist social efforts are essential for our social survival


Discussion 2

"Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion. The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case."

WHAT IF THE CULTURE WAR IS ALSO A SPIRITUAL WAR ?

if there is anything that unite the various strands of the new right and of wokism, it's the notion that culture precedes politics, i.e. that the political is a expression of prior cultural changes and convictions. This is why both coalescences engage in Gramscian cultural war strategies and tactics, and this is what makes the cultural war, not a sideshow, but the core struggle of our age. Pure empirically, as demonstrated in the studies of Eric Kaufmann, Matthew Goodwin and others, people today 'vote', electorally, with their dollars and with their feet, as members of a cultural class. This is why the working class votes for national-populist forces, as they feel more in common with the small business owners that give them employment, as they share an orientation to material physical production, which anchors them in the 'real', and they feel alienated from the woke-progressive urban intellectuals which attempt to dictate to them how they should live and think. This is what contemporary western politics is about, period.


But beyond that cultural conflict, a LOT more is going on, and we could say that the cultural war IS a spiritual war. The essence of the conflict is the following:

one side, driven by the national-populist reaction but attracting more and more people from the former social left ,as they are purged from the mainstream institutions, has a pluralist vision of the 'Western heritage'. It recognizes that it is a complex heritage, that may have had many flaws, but also contains many achievements, and civilizational advances that are worth protecting. For example, it is the only civilization, ever, which abolished slavery. Despite all the differences in analysis about what the flaws and achievements are, all factions agree that universalism and egalitarianism (even if just in law as equal subjects), pluralism and free speech must be preserved. The enduring advantage of this coalition is that it does not existentially threaten any group. Conflict exists, but there is no desire to eliminate differentiation.

The other side has decided there are no redeeming features in the Enligtenment project, that the Western heritage is essentially evil, and that is evil is attached to the biological markers of the dominant group as a indelible feature. For this side, evil has to be eliminated, and free speech and pluralism are mere propagandistic tactics to dissimulate oppression. This side, both internally and externally, wants to eliminate dissent, and is nothing less than an existential threat for all those that do not come to these conclusions.

This is why the cultural war is also a spiritual war, a war of values in which the very existence of a spiritual tradition, that of the post-secular West, is at stake. A tradition in which both believers and non-believers can co-exist, and that accepts this differentiation. And so this is why we can have conversations such as this one below, where atheists and members of religious communities, can have conversations because they are both existentially threatened, and have to find commonalities to be able to engage in the common defense, across their differences.


CONTRIBUTION 2: IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A POST-RIGHT AND A POST-LEFT ?

Despite what many people think, the concepts of left and right refuse to die, and one of the reasons is that political life will always contain polarities. It is just that these polarities evolve and change. I've spoken at length about the Great Reversal in politics, indicating that the left and right have changed places over at least 3 dimensions, i.e. class, equality, and free speech. The relation of traditional liberal progressives to wokism is very similar to the relation of German conservatives with fascism, i.e. the former dominant factions believe they are fanatical allies they can use as shock troops, while maintaining control, but in both cases, the cuckoo proved stronger than the parents, and just as German conservatism was destroyed by the fascist upstarts, the 'left' is eaten up from the inside. But saying that left and right persist, is therefore also acknowledging that this apparent continuity co-exists with fundamental changes. So most of us will already be familiar with post-liberalism, conservatives that fundamentally reject the premises of the liberal world order; and the left has had similar anti-liberal traditions. But I haven't heard much yet about post-conservatism and the post-right. The following is a very interesting dialog on the subgroup within the evolving anti-liberal and anti-left movements. These are cultural conservatives, mindful of conserving vital social institutions, but they are also pro-labor and anti-imperial.


EDITORIAL: WHY CULTURE WAR 3.0 WILL WIPE OUT THE LEFT

I want to address directly here why the progressive forces are not understanding the stakes of the culture war, and why this means historical defeat for the emancipatory tradition that started with the French Revolution.

My key argument is the following: most of the left thinks it is fighting culture war 2.0 and it fails to see the cuckoo that took over its own nest. Because of this blindness in seeing the cuckoo, it is defenseless against those that see the cuckoo. In other words, while every political group and tendency has blinders (each perspective creates its own shadow), a political group that is completely blind to reality and how it affects the majority of the people, is bound to be on the losing side of any political battle.

Let’s first look at the reality of Culture War 2.0. Let’s simplify the reality a bit, by looking at the situation in the 1950’s just before the outbreak of the cultural (and social) revolution that was 1968, and focusing on the situation in the ‘West’.

World War II had ended with a social compromise between capital and labor, creating the conditions for a new kind of consumer society, which was accompanied by a cultural ideal, that of a stable nuclear family, preferably living in green-leafed suburbs. That society had made great strides in terms of social and political rights and conditions, but was still a very normative society; it is largely against this normativity that the post-1968 movements arose, first demanding more rights for women, for the protection of the environment, civil rights for racial minorities as in the U.S., etc … Once these basic civil rights were established, obtaining equality under the law, the fight shifted to lifestyle freedoms and the rights of ‘sexual’ minorities, such as gay rights, trans rights, etc … In this struggle, the right embraced tradition and the defense of the pre-existing norms, while the left fought for the extension of rights for these minorities. Broadly speaking, this was a fight for the broadening of norms, for more diversity, and it was accompanied by the struggle for free speech, media pluralism, etc … of which the left was the champion, against a right that was seen, rightly at the time, as opposed to these new norms.

This fight was won symbolically with the big win for gay marriage. This ultimate victory took place in the midst of important changes in the political balance of power. Power had shifted in the meantime to the capital-labor coalitions, to ‘identity coalitions’, i.e. the left became a identity left, a coalition of lifestyle and identity groups; sociologically, the electoral basis of the left shifted from the working class, to the urban cognitariat, and the mainstream left fully embraced neoliberalism, while the formerly radical left became social-democratic at best. The culturally conservative working classes, who bore the brunt of neoliberal de-industrialization which cost them their jobs and the massive immigraion that depressed their wages (the neoliberal free movement of capital was matched by a nearly free movement of people, fleeing their devastated economies). During that same time, the number of white people that objected to inter-racial marriage fell from overwhelming majorities to barely 10%, with studies even showing right-wing conservatives to be less racist in their attitudes and behavior than white liberals, being infected with what Black liberationists called ‘the racism of low expectations’. (https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-present-themselves-as-less-competent-in-interactions-with-african-americans ). The working classes started voting in their majorities or near-majorities for conservative parties, a trend which culminated in Brexit and the Trump victory in 2016. We should also not forget the huge impact of 2008, which started the biggest drop in black wealth in the 20th cy, driven not just by the financial crisis itself but by the political response of the Obama administration who chose the side of the financial class, embracing a neo-Keynesian to save them from bankruptcy ( https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality ). It should also be noted that by this time, most of the right had embraced the civil rights reforms and realities, embracing them as their own, which is logical for conservatives, as they tend to defend what is already established, against ‘change’.

My analysis is that this is what broke down the older ‘identity coalition’ on the left, i.e. the alliance between neoliberal left parties with the ‘inclusivity’ oriented minority movements, which had dominated until that time. This alliance had achieved affirmative action, all kinds of quota-based reforms, the ‘Title IX’ legislation, and generalized DIE (diversity and inclusion oriented) infrastructures in academic, government and corporate institutions. However, it is my contention that the social effects of 2008, which broke the hope of advancement in a ‘growth economy’, led to the breakdown of that Culture 2.0 alliance.

It is at this moment that Culture 3.0 became the new dominant factor, and it is crucially important to understand the great reversal that took place in its wake. Remember the two factors I just mentioned:

  • The left moved from being based on the working classes to being based on the urban cognitariat, and on being ‘coalitions of minorities’
  • The left moved from being civil rights defenders to being the movement most in favor of deplatforming, cancellations, online censorship, etc ..
*The second shift is of course very much linked to the characteristics of Culture War 3.0.


So what has changed.

In short, Culture 2.0 was a movement for inclusion and diversity, a multi-perspectival effort to broaden the basis of a consensus. Advancement was seen in win-win contexts, seeing diversity as a plus that did not diminish but augment the quality of life of everyone.

Culture 3.0 is entirely a win-lose game.

  • It claims that advances for minorities necessarily must mean the majorities must give up their ‘privileges’.
  • It claims that we must center the marginalized, which ipso facto means decentering the majorities, i..e. It is not a democratic demand
  • It claims that the minority norms must become the majority norms, and that the majority norms are negative
  • It claims that any self-declared identity must be recognized by force and that non-recognition means harm and endangerment; it characterizes such dissent as hate speech and introduced massive censorship both online and offline
  • It authoritatively changes language practices, erasing women and gendered language for example, introducing Orwellian Newspeak as the norm of public discourse
  • It creates racial and other hierarchies in a intersectional matrix, with universal victimhood requiring a universal scapegoat, creating a purity spiral of ever greater fragmentation
  • It aims for universal group allocation of public and private funds, based on identity markers
  • It aims for the purity of the separate groups, for group segregation in public life and fights against cultural mixing


As I argued previously, any meta-crisis and transition period creates a double possibility: a new framing that embraces more differentiation, or an undifferentiation to create a more simple system with less complexity. This was the role of the Christian Church after the fall of the Roman Empire, which closed Roman pluralism (before becoming a rich civilization of its own 5 centuries later); it was the failed attempt of the Puritans, which led to the higher complexity and unity of the democratic nation-state; and this undifferentiation and hostility to diversity of thought is clearly the aim of the Culture 3.0 forces.

Culture 3.0 is a supremacist and authoritarian movement (sometimes literally so as with those claiming melatonin makes some races superior to others, or women morally superior to men, etc..), aiming to suppress societal variety and free speech, and advocating a new sexual order that is a blend of video gam fantasies of self-declared avatars, augmented by transhuman technologies. Culture 3.0 is anti-diversity and anti-inclusion, its aim is to replace a hated but largely imagined hierarchy, by another hierarchy of counter-norms, nothing more, nothing less.

This is of course what the majority of the ‘left’ fails to see. We can see a great variety of responses, but none of them has a bearing on the new reality. A first reaction is denial, and the naive conviction that nothing has changed, and that they are still fighting the good fight of Culture War 2.0 against an evil and oppressive cultural right. The second reaction is a full embrace. What is missing is a left that is taking a principled egalitarian and universalist stance against the new forces of darkness.

Now, I am not denying that there is still a healthy ‘social’ left out there, actively engaged in countering the degeneration of the neoliberal left into woke authoritarianism, neo-racism and neo-segregationist. For example, the people behind Jacobin magazine, the Matt Taibi’s, Glenn Greenwald’s of this world. The Sanders movement, in its best days. But as Vivek Chibber notes, they are in a blackmail situation, whenever they rear their head, the neoliberal leadership mobilizes its racial troops, against the whiteness of Sanders, and their movements implode. In the meantime, left movements gradually lose their egalitarian principles due to the sociological realities of the cognitive classes’ woke orientation.

This has severe class implications. Essentially, there are now two parties, the party that wants to sacrifice the nation to the empire, and sacrifice the working class for financial profit; and the party that wants to sacrifice the empire to the nation, the coalition of territorial business and working class people that wants to return to a protective nation. The Nowhere Coalition against the Anywhere Coalition. A state-centric model against a market-centric model. The conservative anti-woke coalition can be aligned to free market libertarian ideologies, in which cases it weakens itself (Trump losing after initiating a billionaire-friendly tax reform, leaving his working class supporters in the cold), or it can have a solidaristic model, in which case the coalition gets systematically re-elected, as in Poland and Hungary.

Woke causes the left to lose any legitimacy amongst the culturally conservative working classes, making their social promises unheard.

This means nothing less than the end of the emancipatory movement that took root in 1789, and the many iterations of the left. The only thing that could stop that is a radical stance against woke racialism and segregationism, which is itself fraught with political danger as there is a definite wokification amongst the new generations of educated youth, who are increasingly subject to woke curricula starting in kindergarten.

However, class tensions, i.e. structurally differential interests between people without access to capital and people with access to capital (even if we diversify our understanding of what that capital may be), will never disappear in any differentiated society. It will find other ways of expressing itself. But meanwhile, civilization is in the absolute danger of regression, and that is not just a metaphysical problem but affects daily lives.


The reason Culture War 3.0 is exploding and evolving to the benefit of the right is the following:

  • Woke authoritarianism and its win-lose games of ideological oppression means cultural conservatives (which is now everyone opposed to racial hierarchisation and segregation) feel they no longer have a place in the civilizational order, it radicalizes them
  • Parents see their children increasingly exposed to radical sexualized agendas driven by the more extreme ideological minorities, at earlier and earlier ages

Parents see their children under danger of being under pressure for sexual changes, with school administrations allied with teachers to hide these measures from the parents

  • Working class people see more hope in re-industralization and protectionism, accompanied with solidaristic measures for citizens, than in a continuation of the neoliberal agenda, and don’t see the new woke left as allies but as enemies
  • Civil libertarians see the left supporting oppressive measures
  • Middle class minorities see their culture of hard work and seeking merit endangered by the equity movement, which is particularly harmful for ‘Confucian’ groups such as Asians; there are increasing signs that middle class minorities are moving away from a wokified left, in the interest of their children

The woke left cannot win, it is sociologically impossible. An alliance between the 1%, even with the full support of the woke state and woke capital, allied with the ideological cartels of the 20% strong cognitive urban elite, is not numerically able to obtain full hegemony outside of the institutions it controls. Think about the Catholic Church and its hegemony in the 16th century! Furthermore, all its policy measures under the name of equity, undermine any strength a nation has by systematically undermining merit and expertise and punishing society’s most hard-working and disciplined members.

The implosion of the left under the conditions of Culture War 3.0 leaves a gaping hole. While many on the right might now be in favor of localization of the economy, for more civil liberties and for protections of the mores of the majority, it has little to say about the grave ecological dangers and ‘real’ social justice. Those on the right that do have a sense of social justice, may do well, but they are still generally not in any way concerned with ecological issues, leaving the planet exposed to further rapid deterioration.

Personally, given the lack of any integral alternative, I believe now is the time for trans-partisan dialogue. If none of the forces representing the political polarities of industrial society is up to the task of a social and ecological transition that defends the right to differentiation (which is now maximum under the logic of the internet and its distribution effects), it means we must create it.

Of course, I believe that the commons is a large part of the answer, and so a dialogue around the commons, with all political forces across the spectrum, seems to me to be a priority. We can no longer entrust the fate of the Commons Reformation, to a left that is losing its principles to the neo-racialist and neo-segregationist Cuckoo that has taken over its mantle.


Comparison

DETAILING THE GREAT REVERSAL IN POLITICS: HOW THE LEFT BECAME THE NEW RIGHT AND VICE VERSA

I've done a little exercise in trying to determine more precisely the momentous political changes represented by the identitarian shift of the cognitive class in the WEIRD countries (not affecting everyone, but affecting those that have successfully aimed to create a new hegemony for their ideological cartel). The social left before 2015 >< the identitarian Reversal after 2015

    • AREA ONE: INSTALL GROUP SEGREGATION IN SOCIAL LIFE

BEFORE: Egalitarian universalist, everybody should be treated the same way, and there should be investment in developmental infrastructures to give everyone the same chance to develop as individuals

<> AFTER: Divide the spoils according to group membership, weaken or abolish meritocratic selection, install active discrimination based on biological markers


    • AREA TWO: ABOLISHING PROTECTIONS ON THE BASIS OF BIOLOGICAL SEX

BEFORE: Support women’s rights, their safety, and protective spaces for sexual minorities; via shelters, locker rooms, sanitary equipment, etc..

>< AFTER: No more protective spaces, shelters, toilets, sport teams; now open to biological males who feel they have a female identity, but have all the attributes that used to be attributed to the male sex, including a small but active minority of (serial) offenders; abolishing of a specific female identity and the sex rights that belong to it; no more safe spaces for gays and lesbians; and massive conversion therapy that eliminates a huge number of homosexual identities children exposed, at the earliest possible age, in both the private and public school system, to the new hegemonic ideology, as expressed in sexual and racial identities


    • AREA THREE: BODILY INTEGRITY OF MINORS

BEFORE: Opposition to conversion therapy and active sexual mutilation;

>< AFTER: support for conversion (affirmative care, it is illegal to give objective advice and invite towards self-reflexivity); and active mutilation of minors, often without the knowledge of parents, which can be prosecuted for opposing the processes initiated by activist school boards and medical institutions


    • AREA FOUR : CLASS ORIENTATION

BEFORE: support of popular and working class demands; critique of big corporations (big tech and pharma);

>< AFTER: disdain for the ‘deplorables’, seen as the enemy and source of evil; active discrimination of the poor and vulnerable depending on their biological markers; privileging of the richer sectors of the population based on biological markers rather than on objective need; (e.g. Vermont and NY vaccine/health discriminations; Biden's pandemic aid policy to disfavor white male ownership; Kamala Harris intentions for tornado aid; basic income for trans people only in San Francisco; homeless aid for racial minorities only in Oakland, etc..) ' Policies that support the monopolies of Big Tech and Big Pharma (Covid, Surveillance)


    • AREA FIVE: FREE SPEECH ISSUES

BEFORE: support for free speech and diversity of opinion; support for critical multiperspectival education; diversity of perspectives seen as enriching

>< AFTER: opposition to free speech and ideological diversity on campus and in schools; promotion of specific one-sided ideologies in sex education, racial history; demand for ideological adherence to orthodox dogmas; dissent seen as dangerous ' Integration of surveillance through merger of government, political parties, and social media platforms (cfr the Twitter Files disclosures), specially directed against 'populist' dissent, interpreted as the 'fascism of the deplorables'


IN CONCLUSION

Until 2015, there was a egalitarian left tradition that saw itself as allied to the working class, in favour of free speech, and inclusion of minorities; it evolved from being a minority issued from the cultural and political revolutions of 1968, as well as the legacy of the labor movement. It was represented and embodied in a class of organic intellectuals, i.e. educated middle class people who operated on behalf of popular demands It faced a conservative establishment intent on maintaining an earlier social consensus It gradually earned victories, and started to dominate media and academia As they obtained cultural power, it morphed from a creative minority into a dominant minority, and its values changed towards the activist expansion of its value system in all institutions, to a maintenance and extension of the established hegemony; faced with a 'crisis of elite overproduction', the cognitive class massively switched its allegiance to the 1%, and the category of organic intellectuals linked to popular movements essentially vanished The old 'right wing' conservative elite, gradually lost power, but also adapted to the cultural values of the left (civil rights, racial and gender equality, free speech rights and pluralism); at the same time, because of 'physicalist' proximity in 'real production' of material products, a rapprochement was created between the physical proletariat and business owners, both victims of neoliberal disintegration; The ruling class split between the 'party that wants to preserve empire at the cost of the nation', the current ruling coalition, allied to the identitarian cognitive class; and the 'party that wants to preserve the nation against a decaying empire', the populist alliance of the physical working class and more locally rooted business owners When 'identitarianism' became the hegemonic cartel, they morphed to a defense of their ideological monopolies, moving to authoritarian methods, while the old elite was forced to defend the old civil rights, necessary to their own expression, and being conservative, were moved to conserve the old civil rights and egalitarian consensus that was formerly the position of the classic left. The new right, i.e. the transformed cognitive left, supports a authoritarian societal model of controlled communication, under global multistakeholder alliances, and a undermining of national sovereignty, with a Ottoman style social model based on the 'dhimmittude', as determined by group membership related to biological markers. The 'new left', i.e. the old right, stresses the old consensus of equality before the law, meritocracy for everyone, free speech, bodily integrity, the recognition of biological science, the protection of women and sexual minorities.

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