I believe that we are heading fast into the creation of something unique in human history: a global anti-culture, entirely unmoored from reality itself, and at war with it. It is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western history, it has since become universal. It manifests at present as a hybrid of two of the most successful products of modernity: capitalist economics and leftist politics. The hybrid is not as strange as it might seem: the modern project, whether infused with the theories of ‘left’ or ‘right’, whether presented by Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, is ultimately the project of liberating humanity from the chains of both nature and culture.
In a way, there is – or once was – a kind of nobility in this project, this attempt at breaking the bounds, soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis which I wrote about here some weeks ago: a utopian attempt to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. But ideal societies have a nasty habit of turning into mirrors of the things they set out to replace. Liberatory ambition can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalised liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil, the empire of technique.
I’ve been reading a lot of Kingsnorth this year—his book of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, is brilliant (albeit a bit dark) and I interviewed him for The European Conservative. He’s one of the most fascinating writers around, and I highly recommend his recent work grappling with the collapse of culture.
***
Speaking of Substack, the always-scintillating Andrew Sullivan has a searing indictment of the Democratic Left’s war on parents titled “The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents.” An excerpt:
And if the culture war is fought explicitly on the terms laid out by the Kendi left and the Youngkin right, and the culture war is what determines political outcomes, then the GOP will always win. Most Americans, black and white, simply don’t share the critique of America as essentially a force for oppression, or want its constitution and laws and free enterprise “dismantled” in order to enforced racial “equity.” They understand the evil of racism, they know how shameful the past has been, but they’re still down with Youngkin’s Obama-‘08 impression over McAuliffe’s condescending denials and the left’s increasingly hysterical race extremism.
Continuing our tour of Substack, Abigail Shrier (author of Irreversible Damage) has an interview with Senator Tom Cotton on the Virginia election results, in which Cotton explains why he believes the GOP has become the party of women as the Left is driven crazy by gender ideology et al. It’s very much worth the read (and I think re-emphasizes why Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee in 2024.)
***
On that point, Philip Klein has a good piece at National Review explaining why Trump could screw up GOP chances if he runs in 2024 (Ben Shapiro has made similar comments.) Or, as Grant Addison put it:
If Trump doesn’t get kicked off Twitter, Youngkin probably doesn’t win in Virginia. Not being forced to answer daily questions about whatever thing Trump went off on that day is going to be such an electoral boon to GOP candidates in the midterms.
That’s bang-on, I think. The Left has gone nuts, and the next elections need to be about that, not Trump’s take on Alec Baldwin’s latest troubles or whatever.
The DNC will quietly have Big Tech reinstate Trump’s Twitter account for precisely that reason.