I had a call with a good friend this morning. He gets most of his news from Tik Tok or left wing alt sources. He's a lib like me. He told me about how Trump was planning to re-enslave black people and put immigrants in mass detention camps. His argument was that all the economic stuff was a cover for the creation of a white christian nationalist ethno-state.
This is a problem. Politically engaged and aware lefties, may of whom were part of Occupy back in the day, have bought into the racial politics bible and won't let it go. Everything centers around race, around Gaza, around systems of power that purposely disenfranchise groups of people because of their religion, sexual identity, or color of their skin.
I grew up in the Deep South. I learned about the Civil War as "the war of northern aggression" this was in the 90's not the 50's. What I learned growing up in a society with lots of race problems is that both political parties put race front and center constantly to avoid having to discuss the fact they were robbing the very poor people of Mississippi totally blind. Corrupt black politicians loved an MLK day parade while the corrupt whites talked about Robert E Lee being a perfect southern gentleman.
We are all being played by the rich and powerful.
It is 2025, I would like the madness to stop now please.
We blame European powers for drawing ethnically diverse states in the Middle East, but consider ethnic diversity a blessing at home. What if it is a curse?
What makes America unique is that it is a creedal nation, not an ethnostate. I think a multi ethnic society can be problematic but I think America is better positioned because of its constitution and business culture to work as the founders intended, a place where the best and brightest come to forge a new birth of freedom. That shit gets me pumped. AMERICA.
I think America has grown into the most powerful nation in the world because of how it works, not in spite of it.
Even if many of the founders had racist or segregationist beliefs they did not write that into any of the founding documents because they believed future generations of Americas would use the freedom they were given to build a superior country to the one they had founded. They were right.
It was a creedal state, I'm not sure it remains so. Far too many people have either rejected the proposition that " All men are created equal" or have never heard of it. Creedalism only works when newcomers buy into the creed. They no longer do, they bring their own creed and stay apart or expect us to accept their creed. We no longer know who we are.
The European powers were right. Tribalism is a plague that makes us weak. The nation-state emerged as the most powerful social innovation precisely because it allowed huge groups of people to trust and collaborate with each other. If we divide ourselves into small ethnic groups instead, we limit our potential for growth. No tribe of any ethnicity could launch a rocket to the moon or split an atom. Keep dividing people into smaller and smaller groups and we will go back to mud huts before long.
No one is playing us, we do it to ourselves. Their enemies are racists, yours are the rich. What's the difference? As long as your ideology requires an enemy to fight, you will always be miserable. We live in the richest, most tolerant society of all time. The only enemy left for us to fight is the greed and fear in our own hearts. No one on the right or left actually wants to eliminate money or power, they just want to be the ones wielding it. Which is why nothing ever seems to change.
In a Democracy, yes, there is an element of the people playing ourselves because we have the ability to choose our leaders to some extent. I'm not proposing some grand theory of politics or philosophy. Those who have the most resources will always prioritize their particular pile of bananas, it has been that way since we came down from the trees.
It's also true that inside every poor man is a greedy rich man waiting to get out. Inside every Etruscan Farmer is a Roman Senator or whatever.
What I would advocate is prioritizing pushback on economic exploitation because that pulls in the widest group of people and has benefits for all. Not pushing back at all is foolish though and you can make gains over time. I think weekends are good, I like holidays, etc...those things all required a fight.
Well said, but populism often fails to create benefits for all. Rent control being a perfect example. There are many economic ideas that I'm sure I would agree with you about. But the progressive's problem with America is not that there are too many poor people, it's that there are too many rich people. The definition of populism is that it tells you that your problems are because of someone else, some rich elite somewhere. Finding the rich elite to take down then becomes the point of the project, rather than lifting people up. Trump (perhaps the rich and powerful you are talking about) may be taking advantage of our fear and anger, but we are the ones who decided to be angry and fearful. We won't end the populist blame-game until we accept our own culpability.
I'm not really a socialist reformer or a true anti capitalist in any sense. I'm more one the abundance agenda side of things. I think we should have less regulation, cheaper housing, progressive taxes, and a VAT. We should fund a robust social safety net to allow people to take more risks and cover healthcare. We should change social security to be more income targeted and likely split it into a mix of government funding and a more sustainable market based system.
I could be persuaded in several different directions depending on the specific policy. I get excited about solutions to solve these long standing economic and social problems. I think DOGE is doing some good things and some really stupid things for instance.
I agree that casting all the blame on one group or class isn't helpful but you have to identify pain points to fix problems.
I think both Left and right are realizing that the left/right distinction has become a bit of a red herring, a fake disagreement to keep us entertained. The ideologies that people are really motivated by tend to be ethnic ones.
This post, like many others, buys into the idea that what became "woke" movements defanged the economically-aligned left wing movements that had previously existed. That's nonsense. Movements like the anti-capitalist marches of the late 1990s and the Occupy movement were tiny, insignificant and mostly regarded as laughing stocks at the time. They were certainly not regarded as threats to the capitalist order. It was only really with Sanders' first campaign that an economically focused left revived. Even that was initially widely mocked as anachronistic. As at 2009, economically-focused socialism was extremely dead. The Obama left came long before the Sanders/DSA stuff gained any significant ground, and helped to shepherd it in / normalise it. All of this stuff is retrospective projection.
Yes, there has not been a real left in the US since the 30s, arguably. This article is about how populist energy that seeks to change the status quo is often subverted, sublimated and neutralized with the electoral system and cultural concessions. It's meant to be a broad look, not a deep dive. But I understand your criticism. Cheers.
Here is a link to a Hilary campaign speech. She says she will break up the banks if she has to but, she says, would that really end racism and sexism and anti-lgbt sentiment, hell no! It’s so apposite to your essay.
I'd be interested in reading this argument, about how the left was different in the 30s? Have you already written or read something? If not, maybe an idea for the future.
This article demonstrates why I have never had much respect for the "heterodox" movement; like wokeness, it had no idea what it actually wanted, only what it was against, and yoked together mutual enemies (disaffected leftists and reactionaries) in much the same way wokeness yoked together labor and management. Reactionaries were never our friends; they never wanted what we want. "Anti-", be it "anti-wokeness", "anti-racism", "anti-fascism", "anti-capitalism", or any other anti-, is not a politics, it is a cop-out, a punt, an attempt to achieve political ends without political means. "I'm agin' it", by itself, will not actually defeat the thing you don't like you, nor bring you together with any allies worthy of the title. And thus disaffected leftists who fell for "heterodoxy" helped elect an idiot nihilist who will try to implement whatever damn fool thing any of the Big Tech vampires, jumped-up gas station owners, and religious whackos (and in the case of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, actual fascists) he has surrounded himself with told him last. The only saving graces are that he is too stupid and too lazy to follow through on anything, and too cynical to be the fascist the media claim him to be. This is not better than Copmala! This is worse!
To put it another way, no one will care much by 2028 about how hypocritical, dishonest, and contradictory liberals are. Warts and all, it was a lot better than the venal techbro/MAGA dystopia the current administration is ushering in. It's an absolute crock that we're forced to pick between these two options, but let's not kid ourselves about what's going on. My pet belief is that the whole anti-woke grift will age like milk. It's already flogging a dead horse in 2024, anyone who doesn't see the writing on the wall and keeps jumping on the corpse of SJWs from here on out does so at his or her peril.
You hear all this talk about a "vibe shift," but to my mind the vibe shift happened years ago that and the cracks are already starting to form in the foundation of the current vibe. My gut sense is that four years of Trump will be so shitty no one will be able to remember much else, and Americans have extremely short memories to begin with. This isn't some naive claim how we're heading for genuine left wing change, just that the culture changes on a dime and that the inauguration of Trump was likely the peak of "anti-woke" or "heterodoxy."
Yes, it's already aging poorly and I doubt conservatives will be able to pull out of their lib hatred and create a lasting coalition. Trumpism post-Trump will likely deflate and break off into factions. Not seeing any signs to the contrary right now.
Yes, talk about being in top of the wheel and then ground down in the cogs. I’m all for dismantling the left ideology industrial complex that has seized the state, I loved when he put paid to the tired Palestinian statehood sentiment, I’m crushed and devastated about Ukraine, I was thrilled with Vance’s speech at the Munich conference in regards to free speech, I was crushed earlier by his threatening speech on AI (which is a dystopian nightmare anyway you look at it). I’m sure he’s going to cause a worldwide depression. Sometimes it’s Prester John, sometimes it’s Genghis Khan indeed.
Much of this I agree with. But I think the assertion that there were only meaningless cultural/presentational differences between the two parties in 2024 is just totally untrue. Would a President Kamala Harris be seeking to wipe $2trn off the federal budget?
I agree that 2024 was a rejection of the status quo. I think you have to do severe mental gymnastics to convince yourself that it was a rejection of "neoliberalism".
Great essay. I like to say that Trump is a cancer, that may or may not destroy the United States as we’ve know it, but you can’t be mad at a tumor growing in your lungs if you’ve had a 3-pack-a-day smoking habit since the ‘80s.
Having said that, I think it’s significantly more difficult to organize people around class than it is to do it around something readily perceivable (like race, dialect, etc.).
Agree completely about the hollow victory feeling. I used to find solace and solidarity bashing the stupid woke bs in my blue state with my conservative neighbor, but now her childlike faith in Trump is too irritating. All I can do is channel Bette Davis: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."
I marvel at how clearly you are able to articulate what I have been knowing for years but dare not mention lest they call me an idiot. This is so good.
It's hard to say how this will turn out, but it seems increasingly unlikely that we can vote our way out of this mess, and there's no going back to the 90s.
Btw, the origin of the Prester John legend seems to be Toghrul/Tooril Khan of the Keraite tribe in Mongolia, rather than Chinggis, although it's not hard to see how the greatest of khans would get conflated into it.
Interesting perspective I quite liked this essay and think the historic and mythological references quite interesting. Hopefully we're seeing the seeds planted of a new, more hopeful era as the past 15 years has been a hard 15 years economically and culturally.
I was pleasantly surprised when Trump pardoned the J6 protestors (as he promised he would) which signaled ro me he was serious about things. But now he’s like a man on a mission. They tried to blow his head open multiple times, that changes a person.
Using tariff threats to break mexico and canada’s knees.
They just blew up USAID for fucks sake. If you told me Trump’s people would do that back in 2018 I’d say you were a moron. But here we are.
If that and his other efforts to kill the managerial blob end up being real Trumps entering GOAT territory, beyond even just US presidents.
I’ve gotten way more than I expected already and its been two weeks.
While I’m wary about the technocrats, seeing vivek get dumped down the toilet after the h1b spat on twitter restored my confidence.
I had a call with a good friend this morning. He gets most of his news from Tik Tok or left wing alt sources. He's a lib like me. He told me about how Trump was planning to re-enslave black people and put immigrants in mass detention camps. His argument was that all the economic stuff was a cover for the creation of a white christian nationalist ethno-state.
This is a problem. Politically engaged and aware lefties, may of whom were part of Occupy back in the day, have bought into the racial politics bible and won't let it go. Everything centers around race, around Gaza, around systems of power that purposely disenfranchise groups of people because of their religion, sexual identity, or color of their skin.
I grew up in the Deep South. I learned about the Civil War as "the war of northern aggression" this was in the 90's not the 50's. What I learned growing up in a society with lots of race problems is that both political parties put race front and center constantly to avoid having to discuss the fact they were robbing the very poor people of Mississippi totally blind. Corrupt black politicians loved an MLK day parade while the corrupt whites talked about Robert E Lee being a perfect southern gentleman.
We are all being played by the rich and powerful.
It is 2025, I would like the madness to stop now please.
We blame European powers for drawing ethnically diverse states in the Middle East, but consider ethnic diversity a blessing at home. What if it is a curse?
What makes America unique is that it is a creedal nation, not an ethnostate. I think a multi ethnic society can be problematic but I think America is better positioned because of its constitution and business culture to work as the founders intended, a place where the best and brightest come to forge a new birth of freedom. That shit gets me pumped. AMERICA.
America is a creedal nation is a Jewish idea. The founders and pre 20th century Americans thought of it as White and Anglo Saxon.
I think America has grown into the most powerful nation in the world because of how it works, not in spite of it.
Even if many of the founders had racist or segregationist beliefs they did not write that into any of the founding documents because they believed future generations of Americas would use the freedom they were given to build a superior country to the one they had founded. They were right.
The Founders believed we were a Western nation informed by a Christian ethic.
It was a creedal state, I'm not sure it remains so. Far too many people have either rejected the proposition that " All men are created equal" or have never heard of it. Creedalism only works when newcomers buy into the creed. They no longer do, they bring their own creed and stay apart or expect us to accept their creed. We no longer know who we are.
The European powers were right. Tribalism is a plague that makes us weak. The nation-state emerged as the most powerful social innovation precisely because it allowed huge groups of people to trust and collaborate with each other. If we divide ourselves into small ethnic groups instead, we limit our potential for growth. No tribe of any ethnicity could launch a rocket to the moon or split an atom. Keep dividing people into smaller and smaller groups and we will go back to mud huts before long.
No one is playing us, we do it to ourselves. Their enemies are racists, yours are the rich. What's the difference? As long as your ideology requires an enemy to fight, you will always be miserable. We live in the richest, most tolerant society of all time. The only enemy left for us to fight is the greed and fear in our own hearts. No one on the right or left actually wants to eliminate money or power, they just want to be the ones wielding it. Which is why nothing ever seems to change.
In a Democracy, yes, there is an element of the people playing ourselves because we have the ability to choose our leaders to some extent. I'm not proposing some grand theory of politics or philosophy. Those who have the most resources will always prioritize their particular pile of bananas, it has been that way since we came down from the trees.
It's also true that inside every poor man is a greedy rich man waiting to get out. Inside every Etruscan Farmer is a Roman Senator or whatever.
What I would advocate is prioritizing pushback on economic exploitation because that pulls in the widest group of people and has benefits for all. Not pushing back at all is foolish though and you can make gains over time. I think weekends are good, I like holidays, etc...those things all required a fight.
Well said, but populism often fails to create benefits for all. Rent control being a perfect example. There are many economic ideas that I'm sure I would agree with you about. But the progressive's problem with America is not that there are too many poor people, it's that there are too many rich people. The definition of populism is that it tells you that your problems are because of someone else, some rich elite somewhere. Finding the rich elite to take down then becomes the point of the project, rather than lifting people up. Trump (perhaps the rich and powerful you are talking about) may be taking advantage of our fear and anger, but we are the ones who decided to be angry and fearful. We won't end the populist blame-game until we accept our own culpability.
I'm not really a socialist reformer or a true anti capitalist in any sense. I'm more one the abundance agenda side of things. I think we should have less regulation, cheaper housing, progressive taxes, and a VAT. We should fund a robust social safety net to allow people to take more risks and cover healthcare. We should change social security to be more income targeted and likely split it into a mix of government funding and a more sustainable market based system.
I could be persuaded in several different directions depending on the specific policy. I get excited about solutions to solve these long standing economic and social problems. I think DOGE is doing some good things and some really stupid things for instance.
I agree that casting all the blame on one group or class isn't helpful but you have to identify pain points to fix problems.
Banger.
Thanks 🙏. Wasn't sure about publishing this one so I appreciate it.
Ditto. On fire. Every line.
I think both Left and right are realizing that the left/right distinction has become a bit of a red herring, a fake disagreement to keep us entertained. The ideologies that people are really motivated by tend to be ethnic ones.
This post, like many others, buys into the idea that what became "woke" movements defanged the economically-aligned left wing movements that had previously existed. That's nonsense. Movements like the anti-capitalist marches of the late 1990s and the Occupy movement were tiny, insignificant and mostly regarded as laughing stocks at the time. They were certainly not regarded as threats to the capitalist order. It was only really with Sanders' first campaign that an economically focused left revived. Even that was initially widely mocked as anachronistic. As at 2009, economically-focused socialism was extremely dead. The Obama left came long before the Sanders/DSA stuff gained any significant ground, and helped to shepherd it in / normalise it. All of this stuff is retrospective projection.
Yes, there has not been a real left in the US since the 30s, arguably. This article is about how populist energy that seeks to change the status quo is often subverted, sublimated and neutralized with the electoral system and cultural concessions. It's meant to be a broad look, not a deep dive. But I understand your criticism. Cheers.
It wasn't really meant as criticism.
Here is a link to a Hilary campaign speech. She says she will break up the banks if she has to but, she says, would that really end racism and sexism and anti-lgbt sentiment, hell no! It’s so apposite to your essay.
https://substack.com/@bazdaily/note/c-94476615?utm_source=notes-share-action
I'd be interested in reading this argument, about how the left was different in the 30s? Have you already written or read something? If not, maybe an idea for the future.
This article demonstrates why I have never had much respect for the "heterodox" movement; like wokeness, it had no idea what it actually wanted, only what it was against, and yoked together mutual enemies (disaffected leftists and reactionaries) in much the same way wokeness yoked together labor and management. Reactionaries were never our friends; they never wanted what we want. "Anti-", be it "anti-wokeness", "anti-racism", "anti-fascism", "anti-capitalism", or any other anti-, is not a politics, it is a cop-out, a punt, an attempt to achieve political ends without political means. "I'm agin' it", by itself, will not actually defeat the thing you don't like you, nor bring you together with any allies worthy of the title. And thus disaffected leftists who fell for "heterodoxy" helped elect an idiot nihilist who will try to implement whatever damn fool thing any of the Big Tech vampires, jumped-up gas station owners, and religious whackos (and in the case of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, actual fascists) he has surrounded himself with told him last. The only saving graces are that he is too stupid and too lazy to follow through on anything, and too cynical to be the fascist the media claim him to be. This is not better than Copmala! This is worse!
To put it another way, no one will care much by 2028 about how hypocritical, dishonest, and contradictory liberals are. Warts and all, it was a lot better than the venal techbro/MAGA dystopia the current administration is ushering in. It's an absolute crock that we're forced to pick between these two options, but let's not kid ourselves about what's going on. My pet belief is that the whole anti-woke grift will age like milk. It's already flogging a dead horse in 2024, anyone who doesn't see the writing on the wall and keeps jumping on the corpse of SJWs from here on out does so at his or her peril.
You hear all this talk about a "vibe shift," but to my mind the vibe shift happened years ago that and the cracks are already starting to form in the foundation of the current vibe. My gut sense is that four years of Trump will be so shitty no one will be able to remember much else, and Americans have extremely short memories to begin with. This isn't some naive claim how we're heading for genuine left wing change, just that the culture changes on a dime and that the inauguration of Trump was likely the peak of "anti-woke" or "heterodoxy."
Yes, it's already aging poorly and I doubt conservatives will be able to pull out of their lib hatred and create a lasting coalition. Trumpism post-Trump will likely deflate and break off into factions. Not seeing any signs to the contrary right now.
Yes, talk about being in top of the wheel and then ground down in the cogs. I’m all for dismantling the left ideology industrial complex that has seized the state, I loved when he put paid to the tired Palestinian statehood sentiment, I’m crushed and devastated about Ukraine, I was thrilled with Vance’s speech at the Munich conference in regards to free speech, I was crushed earlier by his threatening speech on AI (which is a dystopian nightmare anyway you look at it). I’m sure he’s going to cause a worldwide depression. Sometimes it’s Prester John, sometimes it’s Genghis Khan indeed.
Preach brother.
Much of this I agree with. But I think the assertion that there were only meaningless cultural/presentational differences between the two parties in 2024 is just totally untrue. Would a President Kamala Harris be seeking to wipe $2trn off the federal budget?
I agree that 2024 was a rejection of the status quo. I think you have to do severe mental gymnastics to convince yourself that it was a rejection of "neoliberalism".
Perfect. Literally my train of thought on about everything.
Great essay. I like to say that Trump is a cancer, that may or may not destroy the United States as we’ve know it, but you can’t be mad at a tumor growing in your lungs if you’ve had a 3-pack-a-day smoking habit since the ‘80s.
Having said that, I think it’s significantly more difficult to organize people around class than it is to do it around something readily perceivable (like race, dialect, etc.).
It’s kind of a nightmare :-/
Agree completely about the hollow victory feeling. I used to find solace and solidarity bashing the stupid woke bs in my blue state with my conservative neighbor, but now her childlike faith in Trump is too irritating. All I can do is channel Bette Davis: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."
Good write-up dude
Thank you Laggy, I genuinely appreciate the support and feedback 🙏
Here for it. Your brain does what mine simply does not.
I marvel at how clearly you are able to articulate what I have been knowing for years but dare not mention lest they call me an idiot. This is so good.
It's hard to say how this will turn out, but it seems increasingly unlikely that we can vote our way out of this mess, and there's no going back to the 90s.
Btw, the origin of the Prester John legend seems to be Toghrul/Tooril Khan of the Keraite tribe in Mongolia, rather than Chinggis, although it's not hard to see how the greatest of khans would get conflated into it.
I identify entirely with your paragraph about what you mean by "heterodox". The label I use for this (and hence myself) is: "populist liberal".
Interesting perspective I quite liked this essay and think the historic and mythological references quite interesting. Hopefully we're seeing the seeds planted of a new, more hopeful era as the past 15 years has been a hard 15 years economically and culturally.
Thank you for writing this. 🙏
I was pleasantly surprised when Trump pardoned the J6 protestors (as he promised he would) which signaled ro me he was serious about things. But now he’s like a man on a mission. They tried to blow his head open multiple times, that changes a person.
Using tariff threats to break mexico and canada’s knees.
They just blew up USAID for fucks sake. If you told me Trump’s people would do that back in 2018 I’d say you were a moron. But here we are.
If that and his other efforts to kill the managerial blob end up being real Trumps entering GOAT territory, beyond even just US presidents.
I’ve gotten way more than I expected already and its been two weeks.
While I’m wary about the technocrats, seeing vivek get dumped down the toilet after the h1b spat on twitter restored my confidence.