Wokism: New Age or End of an Era?
you decide
The great question of the moment for us died-in-the-wool white supremacists and armed insurrectionists is this, dear FBI.
Is the current culture war / wokeism / march through the institutions the beginning of a new super-political age, a political revolution like Lenin’s or Mao’s? Or is it the beginning of the end, the end of the Age of the Educated?
My faith is the latter. I believe that the current Reign of Woke is an existential signal that the religion of justice-through-politics has failed. When a political movement has failed it does not just pack up its troubles in the old kit bag. It stages a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, featuring big time blood-letting. Then it’s over.
There is a simple reason why political revolutions operate on the basis of a faith in political “change.” But “change” means a fight, a transformation of the current order. Politics is about fighting the enemy; it reduces the human condition to a fight to the death.
In fact that’s not how human life and human society work.
Actually, it’s not how any animal species works. Ever noticed? Your lions and tigers and bears and your wolves and your coyotes don’t eat each other. They have hierarchies to stave off the war of all against all within the species. These meat eaters kill and eat animals of another species.
Thus human society tends to be a hierarchy with some king or sovereign or president at the top. No fighting except when the chaps next door decide to snip off a few of our sovereign’s good rich acres.
But in our age of the educated ruling class, the great sages have decided that the meaning of “life, the universe, everything” is Change. And by Change they usually mean a new gubmint program, funded out of taxes on “the rich.”.
I think that they are wrong: fundamentally, drastically wrong. I think that the only thing that should be funded by government and its taxes is defense against enemies, foreign and domestic
Notice the use of “enemies.” Here is what the political world means by that.
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.”
Far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin: “There is no politics without an enemy.”
Far-left dictator Mao ZeDong: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”
Óscar R. Benavides, president of Peru: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Do you see how the philosophy of Óscar Benavides provides the intellectual basis for the entire welfare state? Give everything to the supporters of my party, because “change.” Sicc the FBI on the politicians of the other party, because the law.
Now, the problem with democracy is that it stages elections every few years in which the partisans of each party are encouraged to think of the supporters of the other party as enemies. We all do it.
Our current President Joe Biden is a master of this sort of thing.
LA Times: “Biden warns that 'ultra MAGA' Republicans will lead the U.S. down a 'path to chaos'.”
NY Post: “President Biden declared himself free of any blame should the country default on its debt, shifting the responsibility on “MAGA Republicans” and claiming they have derailed negotiations.”
I think that the faith of the educated class in politics is the cause of all the bloody revolutions of the last 200 years, and also the bloody world wars of the last century. Your mileage may vary.
And I believe that the current norm for the economically advanced countries to have government spending at 35 to 50 percent of GDP is a new form of slavery.
Because all government spending is what Francis Fukuyama calls “clientelism,” where the voters are the “clients” of the party in power.
Of course, it is the conceit of the US Progessive movement that rational government by educated bureaucrats would solve the problem of the “spoils system” that had preceded it.
But in fact, of course, the current ruling class runs a spoils system that makes the old 19th century version look like a walk in the park. We used to sneer at the “military industrial complex” that fed on Pentagon defense spending. But now we have an education industrial complex, an NGO industrial complex, and now humorists are starting to talk about a “homeless industrial complex.”
The point is that all government spending ends up as a slush fund, a spoils system for government supporters. And the chief beneficiaries today are the equivalent of the Progressive Era reformers that believed they could take the “for my friends, everything” temptation out of politics by calling it “reform” and “change” and “fundamental transformation.”
Now I believe in the idea of lefty Jürgen Habermas. As I wrote back in 2013:
Jürgen Habermas accepts the systems of Enlightenment and their domination as a fact about our world. But he takes the concept of Lebenswelt developed by Husserl, or lifeworld, as an opposing possibility. Whereas domination is coded into the very definition of reason, the intersubjective lifeworld offers a possibility of discourse rather than domination, interchange rather than injunction, emancipation rather than subordination.
Don’t expect your average wokey to have a clue what that is all about.
Because if we are talking about discourse rather than domination, we cannot have a government with a willing FBI at its side; we cannot have elections where the Dems are offering new programs and the Repubs are offering tax cuts.
My feeling is that the current wokey frenzy is really telling us that the politics-with-everything faith of the last 500 years is reaching its sell-by date.
But our lefty friends are not going to give up with out a fight. Against the enemy.