woke imperium

The Postmodern Right Is The Next Wokeism

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

One of the things that initially surprised me after I wrote Woke Imperium, was that so many more left wing people wanted to engage affirmatively with it than right wing people. A big part of it was because it was they who had first seen their causes taken over by the easily manipulatable moral panic-types. The easiest people to drive to support needlessly aggressive policies around the world are human rights activists, after all. But another element of it, I think, was that many right wing people read it and correctly had their warning bells go off. I compared The Great Awokening to the Reformation to start, particularly the Puritan experience in early American and 17th Century British history (an analogy I am quite fond of), declared it to be a direct successor of the Reagan-Bush Jr Era Moral Majority, and implied that such moralistic impetuses to sell imperial expansion would likely evolve into a post-woke and possibly even anti-woke sequel.

Regular readers of this site know I have been a constant critic of postmodernist social justice since the start and long before it became the cool thing to do. This even predates the blog itself, dating back at least to Kony 2012 if not even before, with my teenage undergraduate disdain for what is incorrectly called ‘critical theory’ and elaborate and obfuscatory language used to ’empower’ (make the writer sound smarter than they are) that did anything but. They will also know that none of this collective cultural insanity of the past decade plus has ever once tempted me to become conservative or to throw my left-populist economic views under the bus. In fact one of my persistent critiques of wokery was that the longer it went on the more obnoxious the inevitable right wing backlash to it would be. People with a progressive/whiggish view of history seem incapable of understanding that all things come in cycles rather than ascend some linear path.

The desire to become a moral majority is hardwired into American culture, be it left, right, or center. And all present in effect the same danger. The triumph of slave morality in the service of the suppression of dissent. The sterilization of public space to avoid psychological discomfort. The fear, quivering in the shadows, that ones own faction does not have a monopoly on ethics. ‘Just Be a Good Person,’ can be easily swapped out for ‘Just Be a Normal Person,’ etc.

One can simply disavow moralism, adopt an amoral power-based view of the world that reflects polycentric reality, and be done with such fears entirely, but I digress.

Currently, I am busy with other longer-term projects, but I am also on the side paying attention to certain trends with the assumption that I will in the future be writing another examination of moralism in the service of neconservatism. This time, I suspect, it will be about the right. We have also seen a discussion, if one can call it that, online of what the ‘Woke Right’ is. Usually and laughably this entails a conservative old guard lashing out at younger conservatives who take a dim view of Israel and are increasingly interested in class politics. This is some opposite-world territory, as it comes from the faction attached to a sentimental and identity/grievance politics based world view where the U.S.-Israel security arrangement is viewed as a positive and even necessary feature of global stability. This is also a faction that believes that identity (in the form of Christianity, ‘based-ness’ or whatever) is more important than class and logistics. That is quite literally a copy/paste of left-wokeisms priorities, if for ostensibly different purposes. It is the Republican Boomer establishment that is actually the Woke Right here. The difference now is that the evangelical phase of the 80s-2000s was so loathed and backfired so badly once it went down with the Bush Ship that it will be quite some time, if ever, that Jimmy Reptile and all his friends are back in the driver’s seat.

This leads me to begin (without yet coming to firm conclusions) to speculate as to what exactly the right-wokeness will be. I can tell you this much, it will be a compromised merger of multiple trend, as no single one of the following has anything remotely approximating popular or institutional support. The goal of the right-moralists will be to create what they will inevitably and pretentiously refer to as a ‘Hegelian Synthesis’ out of a variety of these trends. They will most likely fail to establish this as official policy, but they will absolutely create a kind of virtue-signaling side economy of Crusader Pepe profile pic approved ‘alternative’ media that people are expected to show deference to if they want to be in the club.

The Catholic Convert Inquisition

For many Millennials and Zoomers, and especially that most cursed demographic of those between the two, converting to Catholicism is all the rage. All hipsters become Catholic, after all. That need to moralize while also being part of a community is creating a seething underbelly of young fogies ready to RETVRN to before Vatican II. Seemingly utterly oblivious to the contradictions of joining a ‘universal church’ that is meant to spread across all the cultures of the Earth while simultaneously railing against globalism is a self-contradictory position, but it is no different from the woke left’s fantasies that one day they would take power (Ha!) and replace the bad rapacious capitalist American Empire with Socialism’s True Children.

This cannot become a dominant faction on its own because the majority of Catholics (i.e. not recent converts) do not share any of the bizarre fixations this new group has and largely sees them as an unwelcome imposition.

Anti-Woke Media Kulturkampf

Because wokeness was so obnoxious and invasive, and embraced by so many corporate and government actors, it made a very easy target. An entire right wing griftosphere arose where some of the dumbest midwits on this planet were able to make bank embodying the principle that a stopped clock can be right twice a day. They infest social media and youtube, giving the most superficial and warmed over takes possible and whining that they are somehow an opressed class because the establishment that once courted them hates them now. Even as our Silicon Douche overlords pivot away into courting the right, they will still trot out this talking point for a year or two to come.

This cannot become a dominant faction because they are utterly dependent on those they criticize to even exist. As wokeness continuous to decline back into its pre-Tumblr migration status as a holding tank for mentally ill shut-ins and losers, all of its cultural cache and any pretense of punching up against the establishment is gone. Big tech kissed the ring. The era of the coding pronouns-in-email gendergoblin is over, the new era of the neofeudal techno-popes has arrived. Thus, in time, the anti-woke will be seen as the woke content creators are, tools of an establishment and dupes of fashionable trend chasing.

Israel

While Israel is hemorrhaging support across the public’s ideological spectrum, the fact that left wingers mostly come out hard for Palestine means that the reflexively anti-woke knee-jerkers often have to double down into a Boomer-style love of Israel and performative philosemetism. North Atlantic Jewish communities become a kind of pet cause of such people in the way that (a monodimentional image of) African-Americans became The Elect of the left. Censorship and cancelling have been perfected by AIPAC-aligned actors in a way the cultural left could only dream of achieving anywhere outside of Reddit and Bluesky.

This cannot become a dominant faction because the younger people are, the less infatuated they tend to be this foreign state whose interests, we are constantly told, must be placed before our own. But the bipartisan support for treating this strip of land in the Levant as sacrosanct is strong enough that The Olds will hang on as long as possible, and make their funding contingent on continuing such policies.

Zoomer Moral Panic

I have talked about this one before so I will keep it brief. If there is one thing Gen Z loves, its setting up arbitrary guard rails to creative expression, public policy debate, and cultural output. When their brood mother, Tipper Gore, shat them out her foetid womb she began to suckle them from the Teet of Cancellation, whispering in their ear all the while that to be made psychologically uncomfortable was literal violence and stochastic terrorism. This attitude is not simply a left-wing and female coded affect, as it is in the (equally cringe but for different reasons) Millennial generation, but pretty standard across the ideological and gender spectrum of Gen Z.

This cannot become the dominant faction because Zoomers are a smaller and poorer generation than any other. They won’t be buying their way to the heights of lobbying without help. But they are pulling from a long and recurring American tradition here, so they will find help if they seek it.

…

I believe the key to predicting the longer-term trends of the Right Wing Turn will be found in a merger point between the above factors. It is too early in this process for precise soothsaying, but for now I will venture this: the common point that all of the above factors share is moral sanctimony and virtue signaling in service not of social justice and equity as we are so used to these days, but for a nostalgic dream-cosmos of ‘normality’, which truly meets the definition of Nostalgia For an Age That Never Existed. It is an attempt to force a type of cultural conformity which has given up actually appealing to the masses but rather seeks to dictate the terms of public expression in the vain and ultimately doomed hope that politics is downstream of culture, rather than the opposite. It will appear to succeed for a few years as the hangover of the Woke Dark Age still lingers and we all settle our scores with the cancelers of yesteryear, but will inevitably inspire rebellion and became an equally poorly dating experiment as the one it sought to replace.

In this way I view it as The Hays Code 2.0. When Will H. Hays took on the job to ‘clean up’ film for the sake of 1920s WASP America he saw himself as fixing a problem that was existential. He succeeded to an immense degree, with interracial couples and foreign cultural practices heavily censored, and even married couples being forced to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds. Jokes about the clergy were haram, as was fictional violence towards children. One could state that film in this era still had some bangers, and it did. But compared the experimental breakouts of the early 20s and the true golden age of cinema (so far as I am concerned) in the 70s and 80s, its pretty weak stuff on the whole. Most of the best films from the Hays Era came from outside of America for a reason.

Despite this apparent success, in the end, Hays was directing all his energies towards a non-issue while the totally unrelated structural forces of the economy were barreling towards an unprecedented collapse. So too will the right wing culture warriors of today ignore environmental devastation, rising inequality, and the dangers of elite overproduction in order to score some cheap points and easy clicks. The future they are building is one of spectacle and distraction, not of serious policy. A set of priorities that unites all culture warriors in a poststructuralist consensus moderated through clickbait Catholicism. The modern right may be in denial about this, but it is every bit as postmodern as the post 1968 left became. And therefore every bit the useful idiot of establishment tastemakers, surveillance advocates, and warmongers.

As for when the Hays Wokes and their Postmodern Right turn their glowing eyes towards actual hard policy- especially foreign policy? This may well be a topic for something more serious, professional, and substantial in the future. I certainly have some ideas. If you come across any especially interesting examples, feel free to send them my way. I am starting a collection. I suspect that ‘defending Christendom from the Muslamic Hordes’ will be a big part of it.

Those who are easily scandalized, regardless of their ideology, are the easiest to manipulate and build consensus around. What could be of more use for an increasingly neofeudal society than to keep neighbors at each others throats rather than teaming up against their lords? The more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same.

A ‘Progressive Foreign Policy’ is Nostalgia for a Bygone Era

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

Unipolarity — The world being primarily beholden to the whims of a singular power, is long since over. The question now seems to be how the last holdouts against recognizing the obvious fact of multipolarity in the D.C. political establishment are coping. 

In a recent Foreign Affairs piece by Megan A. Stewart, Jonathan B. Petkun, and Mara R. Revkin, we are offered one potential vision of what a progressive foreign policy vision for the future might look like. Someone who was a former Bernie Sanders supporter with past ties to the progressive movement, but who is also firmly in the realism and restraint camp, like I am, can read this piece with interest but in doing so detect major points of objection with the authors. Namely, that their thesis presupposes American domestic priorities can be successfully evangelized abroad, that multipolarity will allow this values-based posture without backlash, and assuming the progressivism of today is a radical break with the unipolar hubris of yesteryear.

The primary purpose of the “The Progressive Case for American Power: Retrenchment Would Do More Harm Than Good” is to advocate against retrenchment and for a robust grand strategy force posture abroad by the United States, albeit with enough reforms to be in line with progressive values and correct for past excesses. 

To make this case, the authors begin the piece by acknowledging the undeniable reality that over two decades of the War of Terror policies have been a disaster for the United States and the world at large, and that U.S. policy has often been fueled by a chauvinism that can alienate other countries. 

Despite these excesses, however, the authors contend that the backlash to them risks over-corrections, which would include creating dangerous conditions where the United States withdrawing from the world enough to make power vacuums that will be filled by rival countries with hostile values. 

There are correct observations in the piece. For instance, the authors are rightly skeptical of a type of “anti-hegemonism” that fuels a certain section of anti-Americanism on the left which replaces the positive vision of American exceptionalism with a negative one, and in so doing loses sight of all the other morally ambiguous great power actors with agency of their own at large in the world today. They are also correct to imply that a country that completely gutted its investment in defense investments would lose its deterrent power. 

The problem is that these relatively practical observations are then wielded to make a series of contradictory points in favor of an interventionism that performatively breaks with the mistakes of the past while fundamentally repeating unipolarity’s key philosophical and strategic errors.

 To quote: “Proponents of both progressivism and deep engagement want Washington to work with allies through multilateral institutions such as the U.N. But progressives go further, championing significant changes to these institutions, with an eye to making them more equitable rather than necessarily U.S.-led.” Some of these ideas, such as expanding the Security Council to include nations like Brazil and India, have merit, but a diversification of the Council is as likely to lead to a diversification of values as it is a convergence around contemporary North Atlantic progressivism.

The authors themselves correctly state that the U.S. “does not operate in a vacuum”, however. Acknowledging the reality of multipolarity and the growing capability of rival powers means an attempt by Washington to play global culture-maker abroad will inevitably see backlash and possibly even a diplomatic counterattack by its rivals. Russia seems to be attempting already to set it up as a kind of counter-culture warrior to American conceptions of international human rights. It is no longer the 1950s and the United States is no longer half of the world’s economic and industrial output. 

The idea that such institutions under these conditions will always be a net benefit for progressive causes is an assumption that the U.S. share of global power will always be favorable, as there is no other power with broadly similar values who carries anywhere near as much weight on the world stage. It also assumes that there will never be a time where other powers are innovative and the U.S. is reactionary.

The authors then move on an argument that states that the U.S. should oppose imperialism in general and from revisionist powers in particular, rightly stating that anti-imperialism “is a pillar of leftist and progressive thought.”. Drawing from the past experience of progressive opposition to the old European empires of old, the Foreign Affairs piece interestingly connects these stances to the present. “Retrenchment cannot resolve this tension between, on one hand, opposing war and, on the other, defending egalitarianism and resisting imperialism.” But the tension appears to me to be that of the authors themselves, who conflate resistance to Russian goals in Ukraine with some entirely unrelated conflicts where the invasive power may be the United States itself.

“A similar tension arises in Syria policy. Some progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Becca Balint, have joined isolationist Republicans in calling on Washington to bring home the 900 U.S. troops still deployed in Syria. These troops work alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominantly Kurdish alliance of rebel groups opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, helping combat the remnants of the Islamic State, or ISIS. The SDF was a crucial ally in the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS; it governs parts of northeast Syria as a de facto state with a constitution-like charter that reflects a commitment to democracy, human rights, and gender equality.”

By the author’s own logic, any intervention in the Syrian Civil War should be seen as an unmitigated disaster. U.S. support for various rebel movements disproportionately benefited jihadist networks with eliminationist goals towards many minority groups in the country. As Jake Sullivan himself once put it, “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” The fact that one of the largest and most expensive arm and equip programs in CIA history ended up with a covert invasion of a sovereign nation which resulted in parts of the country being ruled by Islamist rebels to this day is hardly absolved by the existence of a Kurdish political experiment elsewhere. U.S. forces in the east of the country, meanwhile, are used as target practice by Iranian militias. A bit of realism here would go a long way, with the understanding that as a land-locked faction surrounded by larger and inevitably hostile societies, the Kurds would at best represent a left- equivalent to the U.S.-Israeli security relationship. To keep such a deployment would be an unsustainable and perpetual security commitment that would poison U.S. relations throughout the region and eventually invite the possibility for another embarrassing failure.

To bolster this focus on long discredited Samantha Power-style humanitarianism, the authors list other past interventions that they believe the foreign policy could have made better through intervention. “There have also been countless humanitarian crises, such as Rwanda in 1994, in Srebrenica in 1995, and in Sri Lanka in 2009, in which the United States failed to intervene- and where even a modest military intervention would likely have reduced suffering without exacerbating violence.” These examples are interesting, as both Rwanda and Sri Lanka are far more peaceful and stable today than they were at the times of these proposed interventions, and in the case of Bosnia, foreign involvement in the conflict did eventually happen and seems to have frozen it into a perpetual tinderbox that could reignite at any time. Just as strong a case could be made that intervention has a negative consequence on such civil wars as letting them play out. It is at best a mixed record.

There is an economic element to critique with the argument as well. The authors state that “Retrenchment from global markets, such as withdrawing from trade agreements or international economic institutions, can likewise create vacuums for bad actors to exploit.” The concern by many progressives here is not simply that TPP offered few protections for domestic labor and would be a giveaway to massive corporations (though it was that, too), but that such trade deals themselves often disadvantage smaller nations and leave them more vulnerable to multinational corporations. Smaller nations require economic sovereignty as much as territorial sovereignty in order to best secure self-governance. Once again, the progressive bona-fides of multinational institutions cannot be assumed to be perpetual, and if progressives seek to differentiate themselves from their more centrist rivals, they must keep in mind this danger.

Additionally, progressive spending priorities innately clash with the inevitably ballooning defense budget under an interventionist agenda. Both a desire to see greater social spending at home combined with the necessary funds to defend the commitments proposed by the authors would likely be an unsustainable debt burden in the long run.

Historically, nations do not develop along a linear path. A variety of governing arrangements and development models pepper the record, and the assumptions of liberal interventionists, ironically, often end up replicating the very Victorian empires the authors rightly condemn. The British imperialists saw themselves as a force of progress and civilization, uplifting all of mankind with a universal model. They left us with a disproportionate share of the world’s intractable conflict zones as their legacy. The mainstream position in the foreign policy community today, be it left, right, or center, seems to be to advocate for the United States to be the unintentional successor to this values-centric world view, now wearing the cloak of liberation. But only a sober calculation of interest can suffice in a dangerous and polycentric world where the rightness of one’s cause is subjective, and power is split between nations with divergent interests and experiences.

Progressives have an unfortunate tendency to ignore that many causes once viewed as progressive in the past either were rejected upon further scrutiny or merged with other worldviews to create unrecognizable coalitions which would come to be thought of as divergent from their original intentions. This would almost certainly be the fate of a ‘progressive foreign policy’ under present day conditions. The rhetoric of international liberation would inevitably become assimilated onto similar policies– such as the Iraq and Libya wars– that the authors oppose. Policymakers living today are no more the protagonists of history than any other group of the past, and so must be aware of the dangerous waters their ideological predecessors have often entered.

Using one’s domestic political views as a framework for a foreign policy grand strategy, be those values progressive or anything else, always risks running up against the fact that there is no international sovereign to appeal to like there is in domestic politics. Multipolar systems are not just divisions of power blocs, they are also divisions for a multiplicity of values and systems to which claims to universal morality can no longer apply. Projects of world transformation are the luxuries of hegemony and the faster these schemes are dropped the easier it will become to increase the efficacy of diplomacy and retain resources for causes where they are well and truly needed. If progressives become the champion of an interventionist garrison state they will find it more difficult to practice a beneficial civil society at home and seek a modus vivendi with other powers abroad.