I Support the Current Thing
It's not about left and right. It's the system and its foot soldiers, and the rest of us.
In my previous article I presented five key issues on which the popular positions of the political left and right appear to have switched places in the past ten years – war, corporations, censorship, vaccines, and the working class. Throughout this piece I hinted that there is more than meets the eye to this apparent phenomenon, and that I would explore this in a follow up article. Let us now examine what is really going on. To do this we must return to the year 2012.
The 2000s was a different world – the Wild West days of the internet in which online censorship and cancel culture did not exist. Social media was still in its infancy, with content moderation and algorithms still largely unheard of.
Millions flocked to the new ‘public squares’ of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to speak their minds and for the first time in history, the playing field was levelled – everyone with an internet connection had the opportunity to reach a global audience. It was a great cacophony of ideas, arguments, comedy, and cringe. It was in fact as close to a true democratic conversation as the world has ever come.
Then Occupy Wall Street happened. Â Â
Beginning in September 2011 in in Zuccotti Park, in New York City's financial district, this protest gave rise to the wider Occupy movement in the United States and other countries. Its grievances were simple – outrage over economic inequality, greed, corruption, and the influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector which had just received the biggest taxpayer bailout in history for its wilful malfeasance in precipitating the US Housing Bubble and subsequent Global Financial Crisis.
Up until then the political divide in the West was much as it had been for most of the Twentieth Century, with conservatives on the right of the spectrum in favour of smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes, and personal responsibility; and liberals on the left pushing for more welfare, and greater government intervention in the workings of the state to smooth out social inequalities.
#Occupy changed all that.
Thanks to the newly forged digital town square, people were able to coalesce around popular ideas on a scale never before seen, and in doing this they discovered something – that regardless of their nominal designation of ‘left’ or ‘right’, they had more in common with one another than they did with the elite 1% at the top of society.
Thus emerged the clarion call ‘We are the 99%’ and, united in anger at the big banks, the gap between left and right was bridged, and a broad populist consensus emerged. The people had finally realised who their true enemy was.
This terrified the establishment.
We can surmise this by the reaction of the establishment, the evidence of which can be seen in the work of PhD student Zach Goldberg of The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. In 2019 Goldberg used LexisNexis to track the usage of certain political phraseology and the results were jaw dropping.
Wanting to better understand the precipitous rise of wokeness that has fuelled the Culture War of the 2010s and early 2020s, Goldberg measured the longitudinal media usage of terms like diversity and inclusion, whiteness, critical race theory, unconscious bias, white privilege, and systemic racism.
He found that all these terms, and many more like them, skyrocketed in usage from 2012.
So, what are we looking at here? Simply put, it is a sudden and exponential rise in the number of news articles published by the corporate-owned media that discuss the notion of our societies being inherently white supremacist. Furthermore, the sudden explosion of this type of content came directly on the heels of the greatest ever uprising of regular working people against the global elite.
One could shrug this off as a coincidence if so inclined, but coincidences of this magnitude are rare. As per Occam’s Razor, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions in this case is the manifestly observable cause and effect scenario – that is: a global uprising against corrupt corporate power occurred throughout late 2011 and 2012; then by 2013 all the media outlets owned by these corporations had dramatically scaled up their discussion of race politics in order to change the public conversation.
To prefer the coincidence hypothesis is to make the enormous assumption that the above charts simply depict a ubiquitous, spontaneous anomaly.
The more likely explanation is that this was a coordinated response – much like the sudden media pivot in February 2022 from Covid hysteria to the war in Ukraine, just as the global anti-lockdown/anti-vaccine-mandate protests became too big for even the corporate media to ignore.
And what was the ultimate effect of this sudden hyperfocus on race? The Occupy movement fell apart, riven internally by the very same identity politics that had suddenly saturated the internet and news media – Tim Pool who was on the ground at the time has spoken at length about this. The old left-right dichotomy was reactivated within a new and more visceral context – wokeness. The working and middle classes turned their gaze from Wall Street and began squabbling with one another, and the Neoliberal World Order marched on.
Faced for the first time ever with mass condemnation from both left and right, and with nowhere to turn, the establishment had defaulted to the only available tactic – the tried-and-true divide and conquer.
Anyone who remembers the sudden hysteria around systemic racism and white privilege that emerged seemingly out of nowhere circa 2012-2014, and who has subsequently studied Goldberg’s charts, would be hard pressed not to conclude that this cultural shift was the result of deliberate media manipulation – that the corporate superstructure used its news media assets to inflame racial tensions and, assisted hugely by the algorithmic promotion of police brutality videos, stoked the fires of a new, artificial left-right divide that focused not on class, but on skin colour.
Naturally other factors must be noted in explaining the astronomical proliferation of the racism narrative – most crucially the profit-driven promotion of rage-based clickbait by social media algorithms, and the sudden ubiquity of camera phones. But this does not explain the rampant spread of the discourse through traditional top-down institutions such as news media, academia, Hollywood, and even corporate HR departments.
At the very least one must concede that a key factor amongst several in the emergence of the hyper-polarising issue of white privilege and racism in the past decade is the connivance of big corporations with an interest in deflecting public anger away from themselves.
If one accepts this then it becomes immediately clear that it is not a case of the political left and right having swapped places, but that the establishment has redefined what ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean. It is in fact that the establishment has hijacked the left for its own purposes, and rebranded itself as benign, liberal, caring and kind.
There have been hints of this global corporate rebrand in the wind for decades. Corporations have always clumsily attempted to humanise themselves – the advertising and PR industries have been occupied with this challenge since their inception. But it always fell just short of convincing… until the arrival of social media which allowed corporate marketing and communications teams to interact with customers in real time, in an informal environment. I was working in a corporate marcomms team in 2012 and clearly remember this sea change.
Faced as it was with public condemnation in the wake of the GFC, the corporate superstructure realised the game was up. Ruthless neo-conservatism had turned people off war, and glib neoliberal talking points were no longer cutting the mustard with regular folk. The system needed a new guise. It could not move to the right, so it went the other way. This image recently shared by Elon Musk is a simple, yet apt depiction.
By fostering a new firebrand form of social awareness in woke progressivism, the establishment stealthily redefined what it meant to be ‘liberal’ or ‘on the left’. No longer was it about workers’ rights, social welfare, and sensible regulation – the new left was a dogmatic, identitarian cadre, intently focused on the intersectional oppression matrix, or what many have described as cultural Marxism. This intricate theoretical structure of privilege and persecution now serves to pit all strata of society against one another, and in this we can behold, perfectly executed, the triumph of the machine over its minions, and the manifest fruits of the divide and conquer doctrine.
Naturally, in redefining the left, the right is also redefined by default. As shown above, as the Overton Window moves to the left, those who were once in the centre, now find themselves on the right. And those who were once nominally conservative must now accept their new designation as far right extremists.
Such a groundswell of polarisation within a culture inevitably presents all groups and individuals not already part of the vanguard with a stark choice: Follow the drifting cultural consensus or be part of the out-group. Herein lies the reasoning behind the establishment’s dramatic lurch to the left: The left are the good guys.
It is in fact such an obvious strategy that it’s a wonder they didn’t try it sooner. This is not to say it hasn’t been well utilised throughout history though. Indeed, every bloodcurdling socialist regime of the last hundred years from Lenin to Xi has branded itself as the kind, caring friend of the common man. One could argue it is even the norm, and that the liberal democratic West simply hadn’t gotten around to it until now.
Perhaps our political and industrial leaders had no need for this type of saccharine PR before. Indeed, the great figures of Western culture have all resembled this archetypal capitalist as depicted in the form of John Galt and Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is the beauty of a well functional capitalist system – it does what it says on the box. You don’t need to pretend to be everyone’s best buddy or kindly maternal aunt, because your society is one of personal responsibility (albeit tempered with a modest safety net) and when the self-actualised individual observes pragmatism and straight talk from his leaders, he sees only a macro reflection of his own inner dialog. Yet when a society is constructed upon a matrix of oppression, a victim mentality abounds – and in this scenario it is well for the rulers to present themselves as benevolent saviours, the good guys.
This is why our ruling elites have rebranded themselves as leftists. Most people under the age of sixty in the West have been fed a steady diet of feel-good stories about the liberal left for their entire lives. The genesis of this narrative is a fascinating subject in itself, and one that warrants an in-depth discussion which may well point to the possibility that the current political-corporate rebrand we are witnessing has in fact been in the works for much longer than a decade.
But it is manifestly true that the popular memory of the West holds ‘the left’, or at the very least the purveyors of liberal thought, as the kind ones; the caring; the fair, the humane. The good guys. This message has been roundly reinforced over the past eighty years by the depiction of the Third Reich as the epitome of all evil – and not without good cause – but most strikingly as a right-wing aberration, despite the numerous linkages between National Socialism and traditional left-wing philosophy. It is also worth noting the stark difference in historical treatment between the Nazis and the communist regimes of the Twentieth Century – with both Stalin and Mao having each outstripped Hitler in terms of body count. Â
Put simply, we’ve been conditioned to think of ‘the left’, whatever that may mean, as the good guys. So when our politicians, news media, TV and movies all began talking about white privilege and systemic racism while couching it in the context of caring left-wing politics, a large section of society simply went along with it.
The far-left, already occupying this space, was automatically co-opted; the nominal left was pulled along largely intact for fear of tribal ostracization, and those who tried to speak out, people like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool were shunned and labelled ‘far-right’. Centrists also found themselves having to face an arbitrary recategorization, and many took the path of least resistance and moved into the new left, adopting its talking points and mascots. Even many erstwhile conservatives embraced this strange new ideology.
Those remaining have watched in bemusement as the new left has adopted the positions of the old right: pro war; pro corporate power; pro censorship; pro medical mandates; and scorn for the working class. We who remain have been referred to as the ‘politically homeless’ – I always saw myself as a liberal until recently when I felt I had no option but to admit to being ‘right-wing’ – and then I did this political compass test and found that indeed, I have not changed, it is the macro narrative that has changed.
The ‘liberal left’ has been hijacked by the ruling elite, and its meaning and nuances perverted for their own nefarious ends. Yet it is not difficult to see why so many have been hoodwinked by this sleight of hand – the new left does bear remarkable similarities to the old left. Most notably, the good old tenet of fairness is still front and centre. Fighting racism – it doesn’t get more noble than that, and it’s not surprising that someone who wasn’t paying very close attention would unthinkingly go along with this narrative. It’s close enough to the old one to go unnoticed.
Are you against racism?
Why yes of course I am!
Well then – you’re on the left with us.
But this is not the old narrative, at least not in the Western sense. This is a power relationship between the elite and the people much more resembling the communist regimes of the Soviet Union or China. It is a relationship inherently built on fear – the omnipresent threat of existential danger, offset by the promise of a unilateral provision of safety, and those who consent to this relationship are bound by its basic dynamic.
This is why a once anti war left has become supportive of fomenting a conflict with Russia – Russia is a threat to freedom and democracy – so we must fight them.
This is why a once anti-corporate left has become enamoured with Facebook, Nike, Apple and Starbucks – these companies oppose racism, and racism is bad, so they are good.
This is why a once free-speech-loving left has become the bastion of censorship – free speech allows dangerous ideas to spread, so it must be controlled.
This is why the ‘left’ now picks and chooses what constitutes bodily autonomy – viruses are nasty, so vaccines should be compulsory (but killing babies is ok)
And this is why the once pro-working-class left now looks down its nose at the great unwashed – these people are ill-educated and therefore should not be allowed an opinion.
This is the language of fear and compliance. But as we have seen it is not actually the language of the left. Nor is it the language of the post-Bush-era right. Despite outward appearances, these factions have not switched places, but rather, a great mass of people, formally of the left, right, and centre, have been co-opted by a new language. And they speak it with one voice, one bleak, automaton hive mind.
It is the language of the machine.