This is the first part of a long essay I had to write after reading through Kill All Normies. The second part to be posted next is more optimistic. "Radical Conservatism" is not related to political conservatism, it references the idea in theoretical physics that most revolutionary theories come from taking as much of the past established theory as possible and tweaking it radically in usually elegant but minimalist ways. However, it is a play on the words, because my essay is all about the political economy related to the online culture wars and beyond.

Part-1, the Normie Take

It has been educational reading through Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies. But rather than the promotional material focus on the shocking transgressional subculture of the online alt-right and 4chan /b/ cultures, I found the window into the almost more depressing online faux leftism to be far more disconcerting. So I followed up Nagle's work by reading a few of the essays she references, like those of Professor Reed, Thomas Franks, and Mark Fisher among others. (These are not easy texts for me to read because I am a scientist, not a social critic or cultural theorist, and so to read a lot of redundant whining and neurotic hand-wringing and socialist fear and paralysis is for me like walking through intellectual molasses. But, whatever, I persisted, and the journey has so far been quite startling and alarming.) It was also illuminating to brush up my vague knowledge on the origins of the Mont Pelerin Society and modern forms of neoliberalism, and for that Philip Mirowski’s book was pretty good source material (Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste), why not get a dose of even more anxiety-laden mental caffeine! Now I’ve almost got the socialist neophyte intellectual caffeine shakes myself.

These accounts were fascinating to me because they seemed so pessimistic and yet also strangely hopeful. But to find the hope in these lamentations about the disintegration of the political left you need to forget about online culture and look outside your window at the real world.

Despite the fact socioeconomic class is a social construct, it is fairly well-defined if you allow the discrete sets have fuzzy membership, and most people still are class conscious, most people are still working class. You can’t delude yourself for long about what your class or social status is, because it’s your reality. You can drown for hours a day in televised fantasy, dreaming about how you are a capitalist millionaire who just hasn’t made their first million yet, but that doesn’t put bread on your table. So once the mirage of hyperreality recedes and actual reality makes it’s annoying intrusion into your life again (a daily inconvenience it must be said) there is a massive reservoir of (perhaps largely unconscious) support for a resurgent left progressive politics, and it will not take a lot to crystallize and organize this nascent left. Reed (Without Justice For All: The New Liberalism And Our Retreat From Racial Equality) is correct in thinking a politically robust and well organized left is currently hard to see, most certainly lacks true cross-cultural solidarity (the liberal left and the worker left are badly disconnected), and is desperately needed. But the conservative right have a much tougher problem because most people are not naturally inclined to support right wing neoliberalism, the fact right wing neoliberalism (mainly in the form of neoclassical economics) has such widespread support is that people virtually know no other alternative, thanks to the decades of right wing rhetoric and propaganda, which came initially out of red scare mentality, but soon became one with sanctimonious christian conservatism (Thatcher and Reagan) and then almost incomprehensible in it’s stupidity and strategic blundering became adopted by the secular left in the form of Clintonite and Blairite “third way” centrism and class consciousness betrayal. The conservative right have no great organizational problem because they have known their cause is not popular and so have spent over half a century building up organizational bedrock from which they can launch (mainly neoliberal) propaganda. It is so well organized (it is hard to make good organization invisible), that the astute left have caught on and most in the left now recognise neoliberal think tanks and mainstream news media for what it is --- essentially a right wing take-over of the sphere of life which really matters, namely economics and mass media and entertainment. And yeah, much as a scientist hates to admit it, pop culture entertainment is phreakin’ critical, it is what so many ordinary people feed on. The entertainment side of culture has (perhaps unwittingly) served to dull and numb most people’s minds by overdosing them with liberal mores and cloaking away the real social threats which sit squarely in the economic sphere. The conservative right will be content to lose the culture war in liberal identity politics if they can just skive off with all the cash and live in their luxurious gated communities while laughing at the effete de-powered but culturally free liberal left.

In fact, these times we live in are the practical apex of right wing conservatism. They have it all now. They have massive wealth, they have their constantly fawning and whining support from the impoverished racist “base” and they have a new breed of young transgressives online in the alt-lite and alt-right communities who give punk rock like status to transgressions that trample upon old christian-conservative sensibilities while promoting exactly the generationally independent far right economic free market anarchy that guarantees the wealthy will get wealthier. The conservatives have their cake and are eating it, while having a hilarious time laughing at the absurdist propaganda their InfoWars and Trumpist Fox News diet followers are spreading. It is perfect for them. They have the attacks and insults from the left and from centrist mainstream media that they feed off and crave, all the while they also have the millions in rentier capitalist funds they are sucking up from the working class like a vengeance. Times are fantastic for the conservative right now. Don’t let their constant whining and conspiracy theory fueling fool you. These are high and glorious times for conservatives. Pity the conservative who is not able to enjoy it all right now. It will never be more glorious for conservatism. To appreciate this you have to realise they love being the victim in the culture wars. Culture wars do not hurt their bottom line, so they are just laughing at the rest of you “libtards” who think you are sniping accurately and damaging them.

It is true that capitalism has generated more millionaires over a few short decades than any other system in history has over hundreds of years. So for conservatism things are phreakin fantastic right now. But I’ve got news for those folks. Capitalism was not the primary cause of the rise of the millionaire class. Modern society has produced millioniares from two seemingly interlocked but actually disconnected reasons. One is thanks to capitalism for certain, which is the financial system and vampire banking and rentier economic activity (soaking up debt payments from the poor to feed the rich). But the other half of the millionaire class equation is science and technology. Most people (even socialists) seem to think our great nineteenth and twentieth century advances in science have been due to capitalism. After all, it has all taken place within a capitalist economy hasn’t it? But putting aside the false logic of that question (capitalism has also amplified the worst in humanity), I have some news for all you cultural studies and conservative business class morons.

Scientists do not really work for profit!

You know what motivates a real scientist? It’s the beauty and thrill of scientific discovery and learning you dolts! Sure, plenty of scientists do not think about this, and plenty are driven to their labs or offices because they want to earn a ton of money, but that’s not the deep motive behind the scientific profession. Working for money is a facade in the science profession, and you could actually squeeze a whole lot more productivity (thinking in standard homo economicus terms) out of scientists if you simply clothed and feed them and entertained them cheaply according to their wishes and simply gave them greater freedom and autonomy and entirely removed all hint or suggestion of any need to work for money. Scientists hate being distracted by funding, grant proposals and wages. A smart capitalist would just remove all those shackles, make money a total non-issue, and let those mad scientists go to work on whatever the hell they love, policed by their own community ethics and peer review standards. So yeah, the success of science has been despite capitalism, not because of capitalism. If you doubt this, just recall the evil empire Soviet Union. Their science often surpassed the capitalist West despite the appalling human rights conditions. But they did that without driving their scientists like slaves. The threat of gulags was never a motive for Soviet scientists to “behave”. Soviet science was quite brilliant because they treated scientists like their crown jewels. What the Soviets did not achieve was the massive scientific output that the West managed. And that was for the same structural reasons that the Soviet economy was so impoverished. To generate massive scientific output you do need material resources, pen & paper is not enough. But just look at what Soviet science managed with mostly just pen & paper. It was quite impressive. Even to this day, the scholastic traditions in Soviet mathematics training are still responsible for producing some of the best mathematicians in the world, disproportionate to their population size. The reason is because what deeply motivates scientists is not monetary profit but rather the love of science. Strange isn’t it?

Conservatives can achieve no greater victory than they have at present because no one outside their orbit will ever convert to mean-spirited conservatism unless by submersion in their culture. And that is becoming ever more a strictly incestual family pattern. It no longer easily spreads virally throughout educated society. Progressive causes, environmental activism, anti-war sentiment and democratic socialism are far more humane and appealing to any open-minded caring person. The reason this is becoming a one-way cultural rachet is because at no time before in history has it been conceivable that human civilization might actually be capable of rising above internecine warfare and sectarian prejudice. But such magnificent promise in the best of humanity is now not only conceivable but empirically is coming to pass. So conservatism has lost it’s appeal of necessary fear and concern about security and family integrity. And as Steven Pinker has documented well enough (himself no great champion of the proletariat, and arguably a heartless neoliberal whore) the world has been on a centuries (perhaps several millenia) long trajectory of ever greater peace and diminishing violence, and so the social production of more caring human beings is a veritable global insurgence against Victorian-headed conservatism and communist fear-mongering.

A notable exception to this cultural rachet is the young (typically male) libertarian archetype. This subculture is, however, so arrogant and yet spiritually illiterate that going forward they will have virtually zero political power. The conservative establishment can use a lot of the libertarian sentiment to harness votes from this younger demographic, but it is not a huge problem for the working class left. I do not want to dismiss geeky libertarians too much, there are some aspects of their philosophy which I 100% subscribe to, such as the free (libre) open source software movement. But if you delve deeply into the free software movement you are bound to find the Church of Emacs and St. IGNUcius --- the alter-ego of one Richard Stallman. Stallman almost single-handedly started the free software movement with an epic legendary hack writing the first GNU compilers. Stallman's politics are quite firmly restricted to freedom in computing rather than any other politics, but if you carefully read his philosophy it is not libertarian. He correctly identifies the deep flaws and immorality of libetarianism and I think it is fair to describe Stallman as a social democrat. The idea of software freedom is far more about sharing and democracy rather than free market liberalism. In fact, from what I can gather from Stallman's vision, there should be a community of free (libre) software developers, not a market. So I do not think the Millennial generation of libertarians are real players in the culture wars, and they are largely a disconcerting tool of modern conservatism.

But will the conservative golden era last?

The flaws of over-indulgence and excess are always unstable, and such joy and luxuriating in victimhood culturally, while enjoying massive power economically, is, I think, unsustainable. The Emperors and aristrocrats who whine about how unappreciated their atrocities are invite too much rebellion to remain in power for long (read “oligarchs” and their “welfare for the rich”). Not that I can foresee how it will all collapse. I just think a couple of very general “facts” are pertinent here:

• The conservative right have pretty much exhausted the extent to which they can become better organized and thrust forward a coherent propaganda in pursuit of neoliberal economics agendas. They are so well organized and cohesive it is going to be hard to be even more organized. And their propaganda is slowly being seen for what it is, empirically false and academically discredited distortions and simplifications of child-like naive economic thought (the type of thinking where government treasuries are likened to a family bank account). So this is like a “peak conservative” moment in history. The peak might have been 2007 in retrospect, but I do not claim a crystal ball in these historical matters. The eventual peak might just as well end up being 2020 or later, it’s hard to say, it depends on how strong the reactionary forces really are, are they now limited to eroding seats in neoliberal governments and online forums and WSJ, NYT and WAPO pages, or do they still have some life outside of government chambers and print and digisphere?
• The working left have only one direction to go, they can hardly be more disorganized and politically impotent than the Clinton and Obama years have made them. Clinton, Blair, Obama, then Clinton again, practically sealed the fate of organized solidarity in the left. So the only possible change in trajectory for the working class left open is upwards. You do feel a saner political left is going to eventually blossom and rise up, because there virtually is nowhere else to go.

The problems for the short term are perhaps more acute in the USA than on the continent, so I will speak mostly to the USA problems. The problem is that a build-up of left class consciousness is going to be long, hard, and non-smooth. It is a turbulent road because liberal sensibility sensationalism is a far more appealing than the grimaced face of steely class consciousness outrage. The handsome colourful playgrounds and generators of identity politics outrage and victimhood and shaming is so much more pretty and comforting than the prospect of entering the tougher scarred battlefield of fighting for worker rights and economic freedoms. And the sensationalism generators in our culture are the real distractions from the true destiny of the political left. Plenty of commentators, like Fisher, have tried to note that these traditionally leftist issues should not be seen as competing for attention, but the sad fact is that they are, and noone can really state a proof that wining one of these battles will automatically win the other. But what seems to have transpired, if we take a fair assessment of the state of play, is that the left has won the cultural wars, but it turns out it did not help us at all in the economic wars. Just as many feminists are pro-capitalism as not, and just as many LGBTQ rights champions sit on corporate boards and take funding from corrupt wealthy financiers as those who still work hard for economic justice.

It is all the more frustrating, because objectively cultural liberalism has basically already been won even if we look within conservative ranks. Look at how many conservatives are happy to now be outed as gay or transgender or feminist or, yes, also nazi! That’s a liberation of culture we have never seen before. People have never before in post-Feudal history been more free of fear to express their individuality than they have in our times, for good or bad. The important battle now is economic. Political economic oppression is the singular battle the labour movement was supposed to win and at which it has miserably failed, so far. There is a masochistic promise in this failure however, which is that provided the fight is not abandoned then there is always a seed of hope for future success, because in general good smart people learn from their failures, and ignorant stupid people tend to get washed up and left out to dry and so become inconsequential. But, “ya know”, these sorts of changes are typically very long arcs in history, and while catastrophic radical change can occur it is often quite unpredictable, which makes it very difficult to rally the ordinary citizen around working class issues.

But for conservatism the future is even more bleak. The trajectory for conservatives is now mostly towards nihilism, they will end up either stagnating or become self-devouring. Calling the truth “false news” while spreading actual false news is self-defeating in the long run. When this current strain in society of old right racist and plutocratic conservatism dies off, then the new conservatives will be the current centrists, people still attracted to tradition, the myth of trickle down economics, and sanctimonious self-serving morality, the type of moralizers who have forgotten the spiritual basis for a true authentic morality (i.e., kindness, empathy, compassion, love, trustworthiness and honesty). As a sub-cultural force no doubt both current highly visible strains of the right wing (the ultra conservatives and the transgressive alt-right) will no doubt survive in pockets, especially online, but as a coherent respected political force they will soon be spent. Because in policy they have nowhere to go. The mass of people will simply not vote for further accelerations of unrestrained capitalism. No crystal ball is needed to see this, the polling data shows that radical anarchic free market capitalism is simply no longer popular enough to sustain an entire corrupt political class as it did during the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron and Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama years, at least not without outright authoritarian fascist dictatorship (which sadly is not altogether off the cards if current Brazil, for example, becomes a model the US could follow post-Trump).

For sure, the clothes of the naked neoliberal emperors have not yet been revealed to be fictions in the general popular culture, but we are dealing here again with historical inevitability, a naked emperor cannot parade around for long before whispered word spreads. The word on neoliberalism has not yet spread to certain key voting demographics like the baby boomers and the retirees, but the truth has started to seep in to X-gen, i-Gen and Z-Gen culture. My feeling (no data to support it sorry) is that the television watchers are still under the thrall of neoliberalism, while the YoubeTubers are either drowning in lulz garbage or are woke to neoliberalism, and this divisions (television versus Internet and lolcatz versus woke) roughly (maybe only very roughly?) characterizes these demographics. But take that for what it is, just my amatuer reading of current media consumption patterns.

A good example of the bankruptcy of the neoliberal right is the case of Venezuela. A left wing fake socialist government under Maduro with clownish policies and tin pot dictatorship tendencies is still massively popular among it’s peoples. Why is that? It is not because of propaganda. Journalist Abby Martin has recorded the voices of the Venezuelan proletariat majority for English language audiences, and they are clearly under no illusions about the corruption and clownishness of firstly Chavez and now the even worse Maduro. The fact is most ordinary working class Venezuelans are prepared to support what they know is an imperfect faux socialist government because they know the right wing neoliberal opposition is so much worse for them. Venezuela may soon collapse, but not because the neoliberals will win on policy and popular support, the right will win a hollow victory in Venezuela thanks only to cynical manipulation, right wing terrorism and CIA support. Again, in the long sweep of history, if it eventually occurs, the right wing take-over in Venezuela will not last, and might persist only as long as oil reserves hold out. Once the oil is gone the neoliberals will abandon Venezuela and the country will have to rebuild from near agrarian subsistence conditions if the oil revenues are not used to build up a prosperous civil society. Worse, if plutocrats seize control in Venezuela the country might have to endure many more years of wage slavery conditions. In supporting Maduro the people of Venezuela are doing the only sensible thing they can do given their scarce options, short of forming a principled left workers alternative to Maduro.

The bankruptcy of the far-right and alt-right is almost just as bad. They have gained some recent rejuvenation thanks to Internet activism and pop culture subversion, and by cravenly bashing up the easy soft lunatic liberal targets they can cheaply find online as sources of great lulz amusement. But they offer no credible political economics that a mass of democratically minded voters can ever support. So their cause will always be at the fringes. There is maybe still some juice they can squeeze from the corrupted un-woke left liberals in countries like the USA, but this cheap fodder for them will also likely not last. You only have to watch the drivel on CNN and MSNBC to realise the left wing of neoliberalism and the victim subculture and madness of the whole strategy of identity politics will not last. It is going to be a long road though. You cannot get people off a diet of cheeseburgers, cheetos and Coca Cola until you offer them something better as an alternative, and the burgeoning online serious progressive left media has been very slow to arise, and will take several more years I suspect to reach a broad audience at an older age demographic which now still, near-braindead, consumes the garbage on CNN and MSNBC and all the horrid local Fox News subsidiaries.

Folks who shop on Amazon and feed the Facebook and Twitter social network are doing no better for civil society. They are feeding the capitalist engines just as much as the CNN, MSNBC and Fox viewership. You should know there are alternatives if you are not so narcissistic to need thousands of “followers”. Diaspora, for example, is a free open source distributed social network which is not extracting your personal data and selling it to advertisers. Quitter is a free open source alternative to Twitter. DTube is a free distributed alternative to YouTube. And there are dozens of other free non-proprietary online networks (see for example https://alternativeto.net/software/facebook/ or https://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/ or https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/) . If you are not greedy for the social capital of “followers“ and “likes” then these alternative media are a good way to go. It is worth pointing out that Facebook really have no real power but what they derive from their users, from their social graph. If you all close your Facebook accounts then Facebook will lose all it’s power. This is entirely feasible, there was a society before Facebook existed you might like to know. And Diaspora, or GNU Social, or Mastadon, are freedom respecting non-proprietary open source social media platforms that you could port all your Facebook pages over to in a day.

What I would like to say (maybe like to believe) but I will write it instead, is that the liberal cultural “left” who play identity politics and act out postmodernist relativism as if it were a real truth (the only truth!) are complete idiots with no historical appreciation of the real struggle of the working political left to assert worker rights, basic human rights and social justice. The trendy Tumblr style SJW’s all out to one-up each other in who can be the most progressive and pure in liberalness and the most racially intolerant of racism, conservatism and traditional values are, I want to say, not “leftist” at all. They are nowhere. They are not of this world. Because the cause of the political left is, and ever will be, the project to lift each and every human being up out of poverty and suffering into a material and spiritual prosperity. Identity politics has little to add to this project and would be, in any case, a collateral benefit of the success of the original leftist struggle for human dignity. These days there are so many vested interest parties in the identity politic culture wars that identity has become almost meaningless. You cannot separate out one identity group and treat them as different to any other, because it has become impossible to do so, there are simply too many proliferating identities now for anyone to easily distinguish amongst them in praxis. The point of having an identity is that you can be treated like a member of a group. But that opens up the spectre of prejudice and bias which transgress the very founding principles of SJW identity politics. And so I say, let’s not single out any group for special treatment. Let’s instead respect all identities for what they are (which means, by the way, respecting the psychological origins of white nationalist racism in terms of their emotional crippling alienation and fear psychology, while not needing to respect what ugliness results). Let’s instead treat the underlying cause of the symptoms of racial and gender and “other” prejudice and oppression by removing the cancer that has inflamed the culture wars to begin with.

The enemy of the left is not the old corrupt mafia infested unions, it is not the new identity politic social justice warrior, the enemies are, and will ever be, entrenched wealth and plutocratic power, period. We need a renewed labour movement, a more resolute and materially sane civil rights and social welfare championing, and a refurbished scientifically literate environmental movement, all under the banner of the political left project to ensure social welfare is eventually not needed because once this project is mature no one will be living in abject poverty or deprived of basic humans needs and comforts anymore. Until that ideal is achieved, we need social safety nets, it is just the minimally humane thing we can do for each other. But at present we need a lot more than safety nets. There are millions of people who could more meaningfully contribute to society if they had a decent living wage. They will end up being your identical politics champions if you let them, but if you are of the class who is sucking all their labour productivity up and channeling it into your inflated bank accounts, then you are losing their generous social support. For monetary greed you are becoming socially corrupt.

I am sympathetic to anyone who wishes to identify as a particular archetype, or who wants comfort in safe spaces where they can live in peace and relative freedom, but if they are not engaged politically with the massive effort to destroy the forces of authoritarian capitalism and unregulated free market economic vampirism, then they are not on the list of workers who are fighting for true social justice. Hiding away in your bubble of identity security does not help the wider progressive left cause. Yet this sphere of protection seems to be what the liberal class are doing in many ways, insulating themselves from cultural conservatism while doing nothing to fight the far greater evils of economic neoliberalism. It is self indulgent and it is just not good enough to be worthy of the old label associated with the political left. Maybe we need to simply abandon those old labels? I’ve often thought so. But in the Trump era the “left” has seemed to gain renewed force of meaning, because there is now a more clearly exposed evil underbelly threat to peace and economic security from the vampires of old conservative and new transgressive far right politics.

A continuing frustration is that they (the right) really know how to play the game. They use the culture wars as a scowl, and they are even happy in a self-pitying way of losing these wars, every culture war battle they apparently lose in the mainstream media is a thrill to them, a bonus, because it invigorates their political battle, they fight in cultural terms while truly knowing they are fighting the far more lethal political economic wars, and so far, they are winning.

To see how strange the liberal left has become, you could do worse than read through Mark Fisher’s essay Exiting the Vampire Castle here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle
If you dare to read some of the comments to that article you will see how laughably Fisher’s critics prove the point Fisher is making.

Having flayed the online nouveau faux leftist intolerance and bigotry of the online liberal Tumblr-eque circuses, I reserve my final roast for the even worse online alt-lite and alt-right, because their particular anonymous Internet savagery is worse in pure humanist debasement and self loathing flagellation and self-pity, although with a glint of infinitesimal redemption in it’s cheeky lulz style self-deprecation and trollery. The best I can say for this subculture is that it shows a lot of childish writing and immaturity on a level that I would have thought suitable of online anonymity because it is so utterly embarrassing to own up to, the thinking involved in these anti-feminist and libtard-hating forums is matched in sophistication and adult vocabulary put to high misuse only by the equally intellectually lazy and pretentious cultural studies academic journals they probably love to lampoon or vomit over. The Reddit “red pill” subculture and it’s online cousins, for example, shows a level of maturity and fascination with women that is laughable if it were not so vicious and cruel, and of course this subculture is pitiful in it’s ironic self-defeatism which becomes self-fulfilling (the only women a Red Pill pick-up artistry junkie would ever be able to seduce would be the type of woman they deserve). Incel anxiety is not karma, it is choice. They seem to not appreciate that it is hard to find a loving companion in life. Everyone suffers from relationship anxiety, even Chad and Stacey. Period.

All of this is bad enough, but couple it with the continued right wing neoconservative belief in Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a Clash of Civilizations, and you have the contemporary hair trigger detonator of unhinged Islamophobia --- which is so destructive to peace efforts around the globe --- connected to the C4 of rabid nationalism, which together unlock real physical violence beyond the digital weaponed frontier of cyberspace. Yet Huntington was simply plain wrong that the next great wars after the Cold War would be between western hegemony and Islam. What has actually transpired is that Islam is proving to be a spent force. Islam has grown demographically through natural birth, but culturally has been in decline since the nadir of the Umayyad dynasty which civilized Spain. Astute political scientists will tell you that when a culture lashes out in extremism, fundamentalism and violence, it is a sign of waning power, not a sign of growing power. Burgeoning power centres do not need to resort to violence. The hallmark of the birth and maturation of great power is when that potential power can be grown through non-violence and peaceful persuasion. So in this respect, not only has Israeli zionism all but lost it’s moral force even given the lease on life the Holocaust legitimately gave to zionism, we see also Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism are also in slow decline. But these traditional three great power centres of Judeo-Christian religion will be difficult to dislodge, and will likely persist for many more decades if not longer, because they once did wield great power, and they still command allegiance from many communities. Such social forces never disappear overnight, not even the most vile kind, just ask the Nazi’s. But Huntington did get it wrong.

The clash of civilizations that is occurring is not a battle over religious ideology, it is a battle of socioeconomic status and justice, it is the battle of corporate controlled capitalism against democratically run socialism. It is a battle waged by the inbred plutocrats and self-entitling autocrats against the proletariat and the liberal educated precariat. Most people fail to grasp this, but the ideological feuds in religious intellectual spheres and religious supremacy bragging rights are like gentlemanly sports contests compared to the violence and sinister machinations of capitalist pigs in the class wars against decent ordinary human beings. Your local media outlets will of course take any chance to glorify and magnify any small religious spats they can to make them seem like Huntington’s prophecy is being fulfilled, but that is because those media are run by the capitalist pigs who do not want your focus to be on the real class war that is actually the ultimate cause of fanning religious hatreds. People who are prosperous and secure tend not to pay any mind to religious intolerances. You fan these religiosity and other sectarian hatreds by placing communities and entire nations in debt and poverty. And nothing, not even feudalism, fuels debt and poverty and resentment like capitalism. Let there be no doubt, the battles of our social lives are against the capitalist wolves.

What is more depressing than all of the alt-right shackle-releasing hatred and violence is the way the liberal left has become a den of vitriol and hatred and violence as well. Angela Nagle documents how the US college campus protests against the misogynist and racist Milo Yiannopoulos tour in 2107 culminated in the Berkeley campus protests where the left wing campus student crowd rioted and showed how physically violent the anti-intellectual left can be, which was a complete repudiation of the historical leftist ideals of peace and non-violence and winning wars through intellectual strength and perseverance. It was a shocking (but by then not unexpected) betrayal of the principles underlying the civil rights movement which was supposed to be the sort of movement and protest the left stood for. So by the same analysis as above, this signals a weakening and a decline of the liberal counterculture and postmodernist trends of the twentieth century.

What remains on the side of good? Well, I will have more to say on this in the second half of this essay. But the short facetious answer is that only good is still on the side of good. And I think we will find, as the twenty first century unfolds, that this perennial truism, although tautological, will gain more and more relevance. The reason being that it is not really vacuous, it has grit. The grittiness of moral and ethical good is that, (a) it is genuinely hard to find these days (free from hypocrisy and hyper-moralizing), and (b) when you do find authentic good in this world it is phenomenally attractive and almost giddying awesome to be surrounded by. A clue: you will not find a lot of it in churches, mosques, and synagogues. But the tragedy is that our religious institutions still thrive in the propaganda that they are the only places one can find “the good”. They are wrong. “The good” (at least on our planet) is found only in the human soul, and it can exist anywhere decent human beings have trodden, including in churches and mosques and temples. You can find it in books for example, or in great public works, and you could probably find it in most people who you will pass by on your next commute to work or shopping trip or daily outing.

If you want to find good in politics then you will need to find good people who have no trace of bitterness or hatred in their hearts, but have replaced those negative emotions with hope and optimism and trust in the basic goodness of their fellow citizens. People in general might be “good” only “on average”, but the project for the principled left and principled right in political civil discourse is now to harness that good and bend the statistics around so that the average time most people act in kindness and in honesty is longer and longer with decreasing variance. It cannot be a market centrism gravitating project though. What I mean by both the principled left and principled right is really a blend of the extremes of goodness in the left and right, not the pastiche middle ground of compromise. We cannot afford to compromise on principles, and we do no need to, instead we need to see that virtues of the left and the right are not in conflict, but are in harmony. The extremes of goodness are however not associated with the classifications “far left” and “far right”. Rather, where we find good conscience in politics and society these days is more amorphously diffused, you can find it everywhere people are displaying a sense of shared humanity and solidarity in the struggle against violence and corruption.

Anticipating hate from the ultra-liberal left I would point out my opinion is not fully informed by trawling all of the online culture the way Nagle has, I have only picked up hints of the online culture wars here and there. What seems objectively indisputable is that the alt-right have been responsible for murders, while the alt-left have bruised up a few alt-right speakers on college campuses, but have not indulged in any violence on a scale like, say, the Red Army Faction. So, at least by my knowledge, the alt-right have been far more dangerous and immoral.

Writing about the leftist deplorables and how violence seemed to be the only solution the college campus liberals had left in their arsenal to protest Milo Yiannopoulos, Angela Nagle laments:

“His [Yiannopoulos’] tour painfully exposed the deep intellectual rot in contemporary cultural progressivism and it found itself completely unable to deal with the challenge coming from the right. The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a purely identitarian self-oriented progressivism that fomented in online subcultures and moved on to college campuses is that the very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left, like the one that began on campuses like Berkeley in 1964. Milo may be vanquished but not through a battle of ideas.
”The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything we could have possibly imagined and it doesn’t look like there is any easy way out of the mess that has been created. Suddenly, how far away the utopian Internet-centric days of the leaderless digital revolution now seem, when progressives rejoiced that ‘the disgust’ had ‘become a network’ and burst suddenly into real life. Now, one is almost more inclined to hope that the online world can contain rather than further enable the festering undergrowth of dehumanizing reactionary online politics now edging closer to the mainstream but unthinkable in the public arena just a few short years ago.”

To me this seems symptomatic of an intellectual malaise and torpur in the young breed of neoliberal leftists. They seem to care more about defending identity and attacking anti-racism and anti-feminism than they do about the real historical struggle of the left. They’ve got into expensive neoliberal factory universities on the back of their baby boomer parents, so perhaps it is hard to blame them for their stupidity and complete lack of political strategy. But the future is not as bleak as Nagle seems to suggest. For one thing, part of the sensationalism and uproar generated by identity politics is due to simply more exposure than had been possible in the past. This is the same effect that makes it appear like the world is going to hell, particularly if you engulf a diet of mainstream news, and which makes it appear like the world is far more violent than ever before. The objective facts say the exact opposite, as Steven Pinker documented. Kahneman and Tversky note this as one of the big fallacies in reasoning and judgment under uncertainty, the Availability Heuristic. We tend to make judgments based on the facts available to our memory, not taking into account how many facts we are not aware of, which is of course very human and totally forgivable, yet now post-Kahneman & Tversky, is also a little irresponsible and impulsive.

I hate to accuse Nagle of being irresponsible and impulsive, but her final word does suffer I think from a lack of moral imagination and deep contemplation at how we can get out of the mess. The facts are that very few people engage in the online wars. And even fewer people are taking those wars to the streets. It is also very easy to avoid those wars. You only get dragged into them by choice. Whereas the very real economic war acted out on our streets everyday is far more depressing and conducive to nihilistic conversion to the dark side (the dark sides of Accelerationism, or anti-capitalist nazism, or the more insipid "intellectual dark web") . So in the second part of this essay I want to offer a few thoughts on how I think the darkness of capitulation to neoliberalism and suffering under endless capitalism can be avoided.

The idea that the Internet would usher in an era of cyber utopia has always seemed ultra naive and delusional to me, but I have always shared the view that the Internet is a brilliant technology and, on balance, a tool for the good that we should not want to unravel. You just have to be sober about it, like any morally neutral technology, it can be used for good and bad. And the fact it amplified voices, generally, is a good thing. We get a sense of how much prejudice and hatred still exists in the world, but also how much creativity and imagination there is too. Online social media has indeed created social filter bubbles, but it has also helped make everyone more aware of the confusing diversity of people and range of opinions that exist around the globe. Most of us are not inclined to celebrate human suffering, misery and the trendiness of cynicism like an arch nihilist might rejoice in, but we can, and should, celebrate that we know a lot more about the state of the world.

In fact, I find it bemusing that Nagle could not have imagined foreseeing the online culture war mess. To me it seems like a fairly natural and predictable aspect of the adolescence of the Internet.

I’ve mentioned some rather depressing books and articles that are nonetheless worth perusing for a healthy education in what ordinary working class people are facing. Unknowingly they are in a war that they cannot see and will not win if they slumber in ignorance, wallow in mind leaching reality TV and video game hedonism, and if they continue to meekly offer their jugular to the neoliberal blood sucking feeding of the vampire corporate elite. But to end this part of the essay I want to plug some brighter alternative media. These folks will help you see that there is life after neoliberalism.

My suggestion is to not tune in so much to political oriented news shows like The Young Turks (who are ok but with maybe a woke factor of 6/10), but look out instead for more irreverent but still serious democratic socialism commentary on The Michael Brookes Show (woke factor closer to 9/10) or The Majority Report, and similar more unapologetically serious socialist podcasts and alternative media channels. Jacobin Radio is even more serious and informative if you don't like too much irreverence but cannot stomach the neoliberal taint of outlets like The Guardian, the BBC, and NPR mainstream.

TYT is ok for news and updates, but they lack the bite required for getting beyond capitalism. TMBS is actually a hell of a lot of fun too, mixed in with serious commentary. Some people do not have the stomach to be so challenged, especially if they come from a leftist neoliberal or libertarian mindset, so perhaps Stephen Colbert will have to suffice for cheap laughs after hours for that crowd. I am just here to write that you can do your brain a lot more credit if you give more serious progressive socialists a chance. You will find they can be as funny as the best 4chan irreverentes but more humane and devoid of cruelty and misogynist cynicism. And unlike the unfathomably popular Joe Rogan Experience (woke factor 3/10) you won’t be disappointed by the level of seriousness and outrage on MR and TMBS. If you cannot enjoy and get cracked up at the characters like “Right Wing Mandela” and “Nation of Islam Obama” and “Kofefe Annan” which Michael Brookes often ad libs, then you likely ain’t gonna be reading my posts to the end. So that’s where I will end.