Endtimes Confidential

I can't decide whether I reject the mantle of "guru" for myself because I reject the authority of anyone, including myself, as part and parcel of my philosophy, or rather, because I somehow understand on a fundamental level that I personally have no business instructing anyone on anything.  Faced with the current global pickle, I want to think of a way out.  But who am I to say what to do?  This is why it amazes me that so many people out there have so much to say about it unreservedly.

On the matter of progress, it’s a well established principle that we’re not good enough to actually have anything nice.  The more logical it is,  the better it sounds for us, the less likely we’re ever going to get it.  The more sane and desirable it is, the more likely a right wing think tank has already worked out the talking points to murk up the waters around it with the result that regular people are going to actively (or at least passively but effectively) work against making it happen. "They're going to take away your right to have whatever damn health insurance your boss wants to give you!"  "They want a healthy environment even if it spells death for American business!"  "They want to change the rules and abort the life terms of the supreme court justices your president picked as was his constitutional right!!1"  "They want your senator to have less of a voice than some socialist from Vermont!1"  "They don't want you to be rich because you're white!1".  We should prepare for this kind of attack, but we ain’t prepared to prepare.  This is what they do basically.  The left doesn’t really have anything comparable in terms of effective tactics.  Our standards get in the way.

Somehow this reminds me of the end of a recent interview of Alex Hochuli (Aufhebunga Bunga podcaster and Zero Books co-author of The End of the End of History which has informed a lot of my thinking since I read it last summer) by Emma Vigeland on Majority Report a while back.  It was a good conversation, and it gave me warm and toasty feelings to see two of my worlds colliding so agreeably for such an extended chat-- like an opening for a rapprochement between warring sides of my own personality-- but there were inklings of a clash of paradigms only in the last 5 minutes or so.  Hochuli had a kind of provocative closing statement, provoked himself a tad by an opening Vigeland attempted to make for Hochuli’s take on the Jimmy Dore / Tucker Carlson / Glenn Greenwald axis of dissent.  Hochuli didn’t rise to the bait but instead urged those on the left to be open to rebellion, revolution, dissent taking unexpected forms.  His basic premise, in his words, “The good news for the left is that things are even worse than you think they are.” The end is near for liberalism, and as such there are frantic attempts to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and  the left should be careful to land on the right side of those attempts if they sincerely want to see change for the better. 

Another thing he said at one point was something Glenn Greenwald said to Ben Burgis about the culture wars in an interview of the latter by the former at the beginning of the summer: The left won that war.  As the youngsters say: Yeah, no. I don’t believe that for a minute.  To me the culture war is a never-ending war over nothing that is designed to have no winner.  Deciding who is the arbiter of victory in the culture war is a deadly battle in itself.  In addition, Hochuli said the right is weak.  He made clear he was talking not about say the Koch bros, et al, but about the movement among real people.  It’s smaller in number, doesn’t have a lot of firepower.  I think that’s a distinction without a difference.  That side is winning—the aims of that side are being met-- by force it seems to me.  It seems to me that when the right is actually owning the left, it gives cover to those who want the glamour of the left without the commitment, hence the Kochs pass themselves off as anarchists rather than the neoliberals they truly are and thank goodness one of them is dead.  But I think in short, Hochuli's point is, it is not how it seems to you, silly person.

Sounds great, but I have qualms about the thesis.  The part of the right that gets things done is strong.  Meanwhile, the splintered left wins disparate battles which it rallies to when the right threatens to suppress something, but on the whole, the whole war is seemingly impossible for it to win, because while it was dicking with knobs here and there to put out fires set by the right’s agents of chaos, the grownups on the right seized the engine.  (And actually all those little legal battles the left won are now threatened by virtue of being legal.)

It’s also worth remembering that the mission of the right of course is not to capture the engine, but to re-capture it, to spray it for cockroaches.  To them it’s not winning history, really, it’s trying to put a stop to it.

The left won the culture wars.  The right is weak.  Therefore the left is strong?  I do think Hochuli thinks it’s stronger than I think it is.  While I don’t believe what replaces neoliberalism is necessarily going to be an improvement, Hochuli seems to be saying stay open.  Stay loose.  Whatever is coming is going to come with opportunities so let it come.  He really thinks neoliberalism is on its very last legs, and that what comes after will be better.  

He could just be wrong, of course.  

If you want to know what I think.  I think the planet or at least the species is on its last legs, but neoliberalism, which is why, is going down with it.  I too could be wrong.  I could just be depressed.  But could that be why I’m depressed?