It's not a revolution, it's a reactionary putsch
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The once and future kings strike back
I don’t completely agree with the author of this essay; cowardness and the presence in corporate boardrooms of the products of the Frankfurt School of indoctrination account for part of what we’re seeing, but he’s certainly right that the establishment: media, educators, politicians of both parties, is furious that they’ve lost their hold over the chumps and want that power back. Witness the “Lincoln Project”, the very definition of the GOP: it’s endorsed Biden and is now running attack ads against four Republican senators (including Susan Collins, for cripe’s sake, the very model of a milquetoast Republican of the old school).
Here are excerpts from the essay:
America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalization were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options.
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But when national institutions bow (or kneel) to the street fighters’ demands, it should tell us that something else is going on. We aren’t dealing with a Maoist or Marxist revolt, even if some protagonists spout hard-leftish rhetoric. Rather, what’s playing out is a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class — academe, media, large corporations, ‘experts’, Big Tech — against the nationalist revolution launched in 2016. The supposed insurgents and the elites are marching in the streets together, taking the knee together.
They do not seek a radically new arrangement, but a return to the pre-Trump, pre-Brexit status quo ante which was working out very well for them. It was, of course, working out less well for the working class of all races, who bore the brunt of their preferred policy mix: open borders, free trade without limits, an aggressive cultural liberalism that corroded tradition and community, technocratic ‘global governance’ that neutered democracy and politics as such.
Conservatives generally don’t tend to pay much attention to class analysis. But in this case, it does help to explain what’s going on. And it helps to illuminate the true nature of social movements that pose as, and can get mistaken for, revolutionary leftism.
Does anyone seriously believe the American establishment — Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the trustees of Ivy League universities, the major sports leagues, even Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake — would sign on to a movement that genuinely threatened its material interests? And yet these and many other firms and institutions are falling over themselves to express solidarity with the ‘uprising’, ….
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The goal isn’t to rectify concrete economic injustices: massive inequalities in wealth, health and job security. The goal is precisely the opposite: to mitigate, to defer, to smooth over, to mask these substantive disagreements, and instead have battles on procedural mechanisms for upholding manners.
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“Bullworth” was on to this all the way back in 1998
