Subscriber Commentary & Review (#12)
Mid-term elections and the ladies, Turbo America, Elephants on Stilts, HERESY
A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, despite this thread having been pushed back into December. I am most thankful for the continuing support from all of you subscribers, old and new!
I’m particularly touched by the wonderful positive response to last month’s Tolkien-Lewis essay. A surprising number of you wrote me very nice notes to let me know how much it resonated with you. But maybe this shouldn’t have been too surprising – one great benefit of writing here has been learning how so many people share similar feelings about the direction of the world today and just find it difficult to express those feelings in words. So learning from so many of you that reading the essay had helped crystalize something you’d already intuited was especially great to hear.
Some important announcements:
First, many of you have told me that you would love to have audio voiceovers of the essays, as you’d prefer to listen to them. I don’t have the capability to voice those myself right now, so I have now partnered with audyo.ai, a new start-up offering what I think is already a significantly better than average AI text-to-speech experience (in terms of voice tone, pronunciation, pacing, etc.) Yes, I know the Substack app already has an integrated text-to-speech feature, but I don’t think it is as good. Now you’ll be able to choose between options. Moving forward you’ll be able to find red-colored play buttons for full audio versions either near the top of the essay (for free posts), or just below the paywall for subscriber-only essays (so scroll down if you don’t see one at the top). They look like this:
Playback will open in a new tab, as Substack unfortunately limits embed functions. Audio for the Tolkien-Lewis essay is already available for you to check out now, if you’re interested, and I’ll work on adding audio versions to the rest of the archive over time. Let me know what you think, and if you have any problems with it.
Second, you may wonder why I haven’t yet started one of those newfangled Substack Chats like everyone else. It’s because, as you know, I am a confirmed luddite and incorrigible reactionary who hates all forms of change… Or the feature just wasn’t available on the Android version of the Substack app until now. It’s one of the two. Regardless, as you may have already received an automated email about, I’ve just started up a chat for subscribers to give it a try (currently you need the phone app installed). Although I have no experience with it yet, I’m hopeful the chat channel can serve as something of a private forum for more casual discussion among the lovely community that’s gathered together here. We’ll see how it goes.
Now, on to the usual review and commentary of some of the more thought-provoking things I’ve read recently (as these threads have henceforth been retitled to reflect).
Much has happened since I last wrote one of these threads, including the mid-term elections in the USA. I might have to write my own analysis of what I think the results of those elections signaled another time.
In the meantime, the shepherd-sage of Croatia, Niccolo Soldo, whose “Fisted by Foucault” has won most hilarious Substack blog name for like two years running, has written one of the more interesting takes I’ve seen on the elections’ broader meaning for the world. His argument is that, with “the Trump presidency a mere speedbump that is now in the rear view mirror,” the ruling oligarchy of what’s been described elsewhere on The Upheaval as the “Extreme Center” has now firmly demonstrated its ability to leverage institutional power to break apart and fight off populist challenges from both right and left. Overall the big takeaway should thus be that:
The US regime is stable and has shook off internal threats to it with ease, while moving against the two big powers that it wants to cut down to size.
Populism of the left or the right does not serve the empire. This is why you, as a populist, right wing American, should view yourself as a citizen of Rome, living on the Italian peninsula some time in between the rule of Emperors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, unhappy with all of these Levantines washing ashore, transforming the cities stretching from Syracuse on the island of Sicily up to Mediolanum. You are not at the tail end of US Empire, but rather somewhere in the middle (possibly even at its height).
He adds that:
The desire to see yourself at the centre of a tumultuous era, where the end of a regime takes place reflects the psychological condition that I described at the beginning of this essay. It’s no different than the apocalyptic cults surrounding extremist Climate Change activists, or the various “end of the world” sects throughout human history. This is perfectly natural behaviour.
I am sad to report to you that the end of the USA is nowhere in sight, the regime has reinforced itself, and it is now back to business as usual.*
*no regime is permanent, and an Act of God/Black Swan event could create the conditions for real change
I would of course strongly disagree with the idea that we’re not “at the centre of a tumultuous era” – I think the evidence that we’re living through an immense technological, cultural, and spiritual crisis are all around us and accelerating by the day. But I nonetheless agree with his assessment that, for the time being at least, the geopolitical situation has solidified, with the American regime and its global position now appearing to be not only relatively stable but potentially entering a period of unprecedented power.
This is exactly what I tried to get at in The World Order Reset back in April. Geopolitically, the fact that Russia, China, and Europe all seem intent on committing national suicide means that for the immediate future there are no longer any “great powers” that remain capable of effectively challenging American global hegemony. Darth Brandon has managed to stumble, Jar Jar Binks style, into almost complete imperial dominance.
Domestically I suspect this geopolitical supremacy will also have a subtle but powerful effect in helping to further prop up the Center, lending it the sheen of historical inevitability and a façade of moral legitimacy (since nothing seems to make right like might). Meanwhile the economic benefits that will increasingly flow disproportionately to the imperial metropole will make dissent appear even more alarmingly unprofitable to the elite.
We are more likely living through a great centralization of power than its collapse. So yes, we’re in something like a peak imperial (and post-republic) phase, not the crumbling end of empire, yet. And in this context perhaps the ideological upheaval now plaguing the West is simply a function of the ruling imperial elite sensing the time has come where they can finally abandon any restraint in using state power to force their favored cult religio-ideological beliefs on the rest of the world, including on their own wayward provincials.
So Niccolo’s Roman analogy would maybe better be adapted to say that we’re simultaneously at some post-Constantinian point, where the Imperial Center has already converted and all the old temples are being systematically strangled, emptied out, and torn down to make way for the new faith. (Niccolo has a great series of posts reviewing Edward Watts marvelous The Final Pagan Generation, so he knows what’s up).
Also give me a break Niccolo: surely we’re past Aurelius and at least well into Commodus?
, “The West: An Elephant On Stilts?” ()In contrast to the above take on stability, in this essay the anonymous (and suitably gloomy) British cultural commentator Morgoth uses the metaphor of Dali’s painting of elephants on stilts to meditate on the fragility of powerful but complex systems like our own (or peak Roman globalization), and how the end is more likely to come from material causes than from ideological-political contest.
Gazing into Dali’s painting it’s difficult not to look at those extraordinarily spindly, vulnerable legs propping up the elephants and not be once again reminded of those pipelines and internet cables which, let us be honest, they do resemble.
In our world elephants cannot walk on stilts, but, we are told, men can get pregnant. People form their entire identities and worldviews based upon algorithmic stimulation being carried through cables under the sea powered by electric power-grids controlled by people whom they want overthrown or killed.
Progress, the idea of progress as an end in and of itself, is here put into perspective. Dali’s elephants are a welcome and much needed antidote to the all pervasive mindset that progress, ideological and technological, is inevitable. To believe it is inevitable is to convince yourself that Dali’s painting is one of permanence and not a snapshot taken a second before the elephants crash into a heap on the ground.
Speaking of progress and imperium, I must now interrupt the thread of positive suggestions because I can’t help but point out one of the nuttiest takes I’ve read in quite some time – one I found so jaw-dropping that it was actually a bit mesmerizing, and I think quite revealing. Behold…
, “The world has progressed beyond the need for Russian power” ()Noah’s argument here begins by asserting that Russia has severely weakened itself by totally bungling its war in Ukraine (I agree). This, he writes, “makes it simply impossible for Russia to serve as a “pole” in a multipolar world order, no matter how much anyone would like it to.” (Here he means the “far right,” “far left,” and “some ‘realists’ in the foreign policy community, like John Mearsheimer” who allegedly want the US to be counter-balanced by Russia.) Then he concludes (emphasis mine):
And that’s OK. The multipolar world will include China, a newly united Europe, and India as poles of power to balance out the U.S. [Editor’s note in passing: lol no]; Russia isn’t needed anymore to keep the system stable.
…
The world has simply progressed beyond the need for Russian power, and the faster all the remaining fence-sitters wake up to that fact, the better. Putin’s Russia should be treated as a dangerous, nuclear-armed, dysfunctional rogue state. The goal should be to contain it, and contain the damage from the chaos it causes, rather than to appease it by offering it some facsimile of the great-power respect we showed the old USSR.
I nearly choked on my vodka when I read that. The sheer audacity of the subconscious beliefs contained in the worldview that is revealed by these lines is pretty stunning. And I suspect this is not the worldview of Noah Smith alone these days. As far as I can tell, it seems to basically go like this:
(1) The geopolitical system is not something that emerges organically, in an effectively evolutionary manner, but something that is determined by the decisions of a grand, top-down plan, like a big machine.
(2) Nations don’t all compete with each other to maximize their power and position out of their own self-interest and need for security, but each have specific roles that they are supposed to play within the system.
(3) A “balance of power” is not a phenomenon that naturally occurs when multiple countries of roughly equal power face off against each other (each trying to maximize its own security), producing a uncomfortable stalemate, but a situation that is agreed to be necessary (by someone) and arranged to maximize the stability and function of the world system.
(4) Power is not built up, seized, or maintained by force, but granted as a function of the role a state is assigned to play in the system (i.e. its global responsibility).
(5) Russia was never itself important or worthy of respect as a “great power” because of the really existing material reality of its power, such as its nuclear arsenal, but only because it was allowed power and importance due to the role it was given to play in keeping the world order’s “balance of power” stable.
(6) The world machine can be improved, because (like all of existence) it is headed in one direction, towards some bright future – that is, it is subject to Historical Progress.
(7) Now that Russia is out of step with Historical Progress it can no longer fulfill its old assigned role, so it doesn’t need to be important or respected or maybe even exist. Indeed it doesn’t need to be, shouldn’t be, powerful; so it must not be, cannot be… “The world has simply progressed beyond the need for Russian power.”
Amazing. I don’t think one could find a better example of what I’ve begun to think of as America’s “post-modern” foreign policy approach, in which it is believed that narrative creates reality instead of the other way around. But I guess that’s what you get to do as long as you’re still a hyperpower (at least until the nukes go off).
Ok back to the good stuff...
, “Why are women more Left-wing now?” ()Returning to the US mid-term congressional elections, perhaps the most interesting single takeaway from a deeper dive into the nation-wide electoral data might be this fact:
Married men voted for Republicans by a margin of 20 points.
Unmarried men voted Republican by 7 points.
Married women voted Republican by 14 points.
Unmarried women broke for Democrats by 37 points.
It’s now clear that the Democrats (and I suspect left-wing parties across the developed West more broadly) have a very specific new core party base: single women. And in these elections mobilizing that base was probably enough to swing the elections in favor of Democrats.
The political gender gap is now a chasm – but, fascinatingly, apparently only among the unmarried. This raises many questions. For one thing: what direction does the causation in this correlation flow? Does marriage make women suddenly vote more conservative, or are women who vote more conservative the ones who tend to get married? Is this just a function of age? I don’t know. It also re-raises the question of how much of the “Woke” ideological revolution we’re experiencing now is explainable simply as a function of young women seizing unprecedented power and enforcing their cultural preferences on the rest of society.
Ed West has written an especially interesting piece on this broader phenomenon:
[T]he divide is now so great that, as Conor Fitzgerald suggested, the culture war might effectively be described as a battle of the sexes. Women show greater levels of support for BLM, Fitzgerald pointed out; they are far more supportive of transgender rights than men are, and have a consistently more liberal approach to asylum seekers. They are also far more likely to consider climate change a serious problem, and more likely to believe that Covid restrictions were a good idea. Women are also more likely to vote for Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the US.
Most significantly, however, ‘women are more likely to support speech restrictions and Hate Crime laws, to believe the range of things considered hate crimes should be expanded, and to believe that current laws do not permit hate speech.’
It’s true to say that the debate over free speech, a core culture war point of conflict, is ‘gendered’, as people in academia like to say. Indeed the growing intolerance within academia is clearly linked to the rising proportion of women both as teachers and students.
What explains the political difference is not entirely clear. One popular explanation is an “empathy gap,” but as Ed points out: “Studies also show that conservative women have the same levels of empathy as liberal women, and likewise caring for the vulnerable ‘has no significant relationship with partisanship after accounting for gender differences’. They just show their empathy and tenderness in other ways, presumably much more towards children.”
Instead:
The trend might also be to do with agreeability, one of two big five big personality traits in which women differ significantly in average scores (the other being neuroticism). Being more agreeable, women tend to be better attuned to social norms, caring for other people’s feelings while men are less sociable on average, which is why they are more likely to support stigmatised political parties than women and generally hold more transgressive views. Similarly, men are less concerned about violating moral norms, which in the 21st century tends to mean taboos against racism, sexism, homophobia or merely noticing patterns.
Back in the 1950s conservatism was the social norm, and women were more likely to be conservative, while today progressivism is the social norm. The people attending BLM protests in 2020 weren’t making subversive or rebellious political points, they were repeating society’s most central moral belief, one supported by every single institution in the country, including all major corporations. They wore the clothes of rebellion, just as medieval kings wore the imagery of crucified criminals, but they were merely demanding that society enforces its moral rules more fiercely.
Unfortunately for the right and classical liberals everywhere, the gender gap also means we can probably already know where the culture is headed:
What should perhaps worry us is that, historically, belief systems with a big gender skew in favour of women tend to be successful. The early Church was very heavily female; Methodism in its early days had a 3:2 gender ratio, having obvious attractions to women, namely its campaigns against drunkenness and vice; the same is true of Protestantism in Brazil, which will soon become the largest religion. In all these belief systems men tend to be ‘secondary converts’; that is, they join up to please a spouse, a trend that can be seen across the western world today where educated men outwardly adopt the progressive views of girlfriends.
Lord, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from simps.
, “Blasphemy is dead. Long live blasphemy” ()Speaking of religions, Mary Harrington – who also wrote an excellent piece for UnHerd on the gender gap, the key role of the AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberals), and the risks to women themselves, titled “A sex war is coming” – notes in a sharp little essay at her Substack that:
The European court has overturned the prison sentence handed down to a feminist who interrupted a Catholic Mass at the Madeleine church in Paris, topless, and simulated “aborting” Jesus before urinating on the steps of the altar.
Hurrah for free speech and the marketplace of ideas? For some decades now, those most committed to the “marketplace of ideas” have celebrated the idea that we can enjoy a free speech right to say offensive things about religious faiths.
Not so fast! If you haven’t noticed yet, in reality there’s just a new and different official state religion in power these days:
You may scoff. But if something looks a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And when a movement with an instantly recognisable symbol, a distinctive metaphysics (identity precedes biology, all desire must be celebrated) and a calendar of feast days celebrated by governments, corporations, universities, and public bodies acquires the ability to punish those who deface its symbols, the only possible thing you can call it is an emerging faith - one with a tightening grip on institutional power across the West.
For while European courts will uphold a protester’s right to piss on a Christian altar, there have been numerous cases of British police visiting individuals who express gender-critical views. Graffiti on a Bristol rainbow crossing prompted a hate crime investigation. In America, meanwhile, Atlanta police felt so strongly about the defacing of a rainbow-painted street intersection they sent a SWAT team to arrest the man they suspected of defacing it.
…
Sacred values become institutionalised as sacred when true believers pull out all the stops to make that happen. And we’re back in an age of true believers. The phrase ‘post-liberal’ usually refers to an amiable, tweedy, vaguely Catholic-adjacent longing for a future of greater civic cohesion, underwritten by soft social conservatism; but the real post-liberal age is already here. And it’s not the tweedy vision. It’s a new era of schismatic, dogmatic, heretic-punishing religious war.
In actually existing post-liberalism, your worldview will be granted as much space as you’re willing to fight for, and no more. Blasphemy is dead; long live blasphemy. Plan accordingly.
Alana Newhouse, “Brokenism” (Tablet)
Tablet’s Alana Newhouse, who penned one of the best essays of 2021 (“Everything is Broken”), has written a follow up piece arguing that “The real debate today isn’t between the left and right. It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew.”
On one side are the “status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled.” While:
On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest… Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.
It’s well worth reading in full. Also relevant and worthwhile: Alana’s essay from back in April about the moral call to resistance, titled “The Jews Who Didn’t Leave Egypt”:
, “Don's Weekly Listen: Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist ‘Rayok’” ()A new and decadent power center has been built, made up of the federal government and a constellation of corporations and nonprofits that operate as connected wings of the same sprawling complex. The people who control the key platforms and networks are aggregating power to themselves at the expense of everyone else. These people and the institutions they dominate are not interested in social justice, or any other kind of justice, except to the extent that they can be used as shields. They festoon their corporate headquarters with slogans about women’s rights, Black rights, and trans rights while hoovering up millions of jobs and billions of dollars that once belonged to small- and medium-sized American businesses and shipping it all to China. Through their networks of foundations and NGOs, they have emptied out America’s free press and turned most of it into a quasi-governmental political propaganda apparatus that is remarkably empty of meaningful information about how power works in America and why the quality of so many people’s lives keeps getting worse… Different people have different words for this new monolithic reality, but everyone who isn’t either naive or craven knows that it exists.
Speaking of sloganeering regimes that make everyone’s lives worse, The Podium’s maestro has published a great post highlighting Dmitri Shostakovich, a Soviet composer who “perpetually courted danger by trying to satisfy both his own artistic conscience and the Party. All while keeping a secret musical journal of his hatred for his artistic overlords, of course.”
The result was a secret cantata that ruthlessly mocked the CCCP and their overwhelming need to control and corrupt all artistic expression by turning it into crude propaganda. Titled Anti-Formalist Rayok, the cantata was eventually released and performed after his death, first in the USA in 1989 and then in Russia itself (with Yeltsin in the audience!)
It’s really a riot to watch, since somehow it’s still relatable today.
Read Don’s primer for more background on the lyrics.
Ok, if I write any more my Overly-Lengthy Authors Anonymous sponsor will yell at me. But there is still a lot of good stuff to note… so here’s a lightning round to close out this edition:
Shout-out to The Center for Strategic Translation, an important new outfit set up to translate key CCP and other documents. Like this interesting Chinese take on identity politics and populism, for example. Director Tanner Greer explains “Why We Need the Center for Strategic Translation” in Palladium.
Brazil has frozen the bank accounts of at least three dozen protestors, following the oozing spread of the Canadian Model pioneered by global liberal human rights champion Justin Trudeau.
Meanwhile: “Dutch government bill proposes monitoring all transactions over 100 Euros” – You know, that would be a lot easier to enforce with CBDCs, just saying!
Toby Young, “Oxford County Councillors to Introduce Trial Climate Lockdown in 2024” (The Daily Sceptic) – “Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming… Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.” Wait, wasn’t this use of lockdowns labeled a deranged conspiracy theory like a year ago? One more for the jar I guess.
Ross Douthat, “Notes on the Condition of Liberalism” (NYT) – “The condition of liberal-democratic society right now is… not great.”
David Brooks, “The Rising Tide of Global Sadness” (NYT) – Wait, how did David Brooks make it onto a suggested reading list? Oh well, the fascinating stats he presents here are pretty telling. It’s American-style nihilism for everyone now, baby!
Ed West Returns in, “The strange death of liberal Sweden” (Wrong Side of History) – “Sweden has in recent years seen a striking decline in levels of trust, from 77% among those over 50 to just 53% for the under-30s. That’s the biggest drop of any country.” I wonder how that happened?
Jon Askonas, “Why Conservatism Failed” (Compact) – “A technological society can have no traditions.”
Rhyd Wildermuth, “Identity is How Capitalism Intends to Perpetuate Itself” (From the Forests of Arduinna) – “Identity politics allows Anglo-American neoliberalism to recreate itself throughout the rest of the world.”
Matthew Rose, “Leo Strauss and the Closed Society” (First Things) – A really great read. But I disagree with his/Strauss’ conclusion that the primary danger to the “open society” comes from people who long for Nietzschean danger and struggle. What most people today actually want is just the freedom to live a normal life again. The first competent Caesar who can genuinely offer them that will probably garner much undying loyalty, “liberal democracy” be damned.
Geoffrey Cain, “How China Got Our Kids Hooked on ‘Digital Fentanyl’” (Common Sense) – “TikTok is a national security threat.” Agreed, but there’s probably no need to blame China for this one. I mean really, we did this to ourselves… otherwise the monstrosity of TikTok would have already been banned regardless of any links to China.
Andrew Orlowski, “How Big Tech took over the Democrats” (Spiked) – “That the Democratic Party now takes its cues from the tech elite has created a broader political problem.”
Jordan Schachtel, “The True Believer: how Sam Bankman-Fried's worldview facilitated the creation and destruction of a crypto Ponzi empire” (The Dossier) – “Through effective altruism, the ends justify the means.” True, though it’s not quite clear whether SBF was really a true believer or just exploiting elites’ addiction to moral virtue signaling. But then maybe that’s all Effective Altruism ever was…
Wokal Distance, “Wokeness has no stopping point.” (Keep your Wokal_distance) – “There are two reasons that wokeness has no brakes and no stopping point...”
Rod Dreher, “Wokeness Is The Acid Dissolving Christianity” (TAC) – “If you compromise with it, you will ultimately abandon the faith.”
Dungeons & Dragons: remember when it was so counter-cultural parents assumed it was a demonic cult? Well these days its new “inclusion-review process” now “mandates that every word, illustration, and map must be reviewed by multiple outside cultural consultants prior to publication.” Because remember kids: wokeness has no stopping point, and Cthulhu only swims left… But by the way, if anyone wants to start a hit business today, all you have to do is de-wokeify a classic cultural product and sell it over again.
Stone Age Herbalist, “The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous” (UnHerd) – What comes next after the New Faith has finished dissolving the sciences and we enter a new dark age? Apparently an underground amateur “Republic of Letters” network, again, like during the 17th century. That’s actually kind of heartening.
Well, that’s more than enough for now, despite having barely scratched at everything that’s gone on over the last month or two. So here’s a pre-emptive Merry Christmas, and I’ll see you all in the chat!
I can't find the exact Lewis (maybe it was Chesterton) quote, but I remember reading in one of their books sometime back that we often love the idea of something without actually loving the something itself. We love the idea of the neighbor more than our actual neighbor. In so doing we can champion causes and feel good in thinking that championing or holding the moral opinion is the same as actually doing the moral thing. It would appear these single women (and to an extent single men) in lack of having something tangible to love, i.e., a spouse and children, try to fill the void that only arduous love can fill with the self-satisfactory and easily attained championing of what they perceive to be righteous causes. Without the boundaries which necessarily form from experience with arduous and real and selfless love, the causes these single women champion necessarily devolve into abstraction and grotesquery.
I don't think this negates the power of these types of women... one need look no further than all that was wrought by the spinster women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hell hath no fury like a Yankee spinster.
“Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development” -Eric Hoffer in The True Believer