There’s No Way Out But Through

A primer for the uninitiated on why everything's so weird right now

One of the first ideas I had for The Slow Dystopia was a primer on Why Is Everything Weird?* Just some kind of broad overview – a FAQ in essay form if you will –  about the forces that have molded life in the 21st century. Because after every significant episode of public violence or after every cold-blooded bit of political chicanery at the Federal level, I always see an outpouring of folks on Twitter wailing, both just venting their emotions about something they have no control over and in a kind of inchoate frustrated confusion. Why are there so many mass shootings? How can the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade? @Postmates, where is my refund???

*(I think, existentially at least, it can kind of be boiled down to “hypernormalization”. What’s that? It’s the state we’re all living in right now, where there is an official narrative about reality that is created by politicians, elites and the media. A constant barrage of “We’re fine! We’ve got this! Everything’s going to be okay!” which is both just a projection of their own beliefs (perhaps out of narcissism or egomania, they do think it’s all okay) and a wild denial of reality. So there’s this official narrative that you see on the news, on social media, and in political speeches, and it’s false, and you know it’s false and maybe they know it’s false, but it’s still ubiquitous. And then you look at the reality of your own life and the lives of the people around you and you see it’s wildly different from this official narrative, but you still can’t get away from that narrative. It’s everywhere. And the tension between the official narrative and your own lived reality makes you feel a little crazy all the time. That’s hypernormalization, and it’s one of the reasons everything feels so weird currently.)

Sometimes I see cogent responses, but mostly I see either cynical explanations or, just, well, dumb dipshits offering every possible excuse for why the folks with the (seemingly) most amount of power are (seemingly) as stymied as you and me. Paired with exhortations to “Vote harder” or whatever – everyone just mashing their hands down on those Diebold touchscreens until their fingers bleed – the range of Liberal responses is disheartening at best and actively enraging at worst.

I mean, Nancy Pelosi reading poetry whenever some Christian fascists exert their power is beyond parody. It’s so jaw-droppingly out of touch that it makes Marie Antoinette look like Rosa Luxemburg, which is an analogy so esoteric that it makes Alejandro Jodorowsky look like Steven Spielberg. So yeah, when the Liberal Centrist (which in reality is really center-right) response ranges from screaming at Susan Sarandon on Twitter to breaking out a copy of Leaves of Grass for an impromptu slam session (which is definitely a nickname for poetry slams and cannot possibly refer to anything else), it’s confusing.

I see a lot of people asking – on Twitter at least – “Why aren’t the Democrats doing X, Y or Z?”. And people respond to them with a range of answers (or like I said, in typical American boot-licking fashion, they put forward their own excuses on behalf of the Dems) as to why the Democrats aren’t stopping the GOP’s fascist march to Christian Authoritarianism. Filibuster, Manchin/Sinema, Biden locked himself out of the Oval Office and they’re waiting for the locksmith, etc.

The problem is, even when the answers come from well-meaning folks who are reasoning in good faith, these people are misunderstanding the game we’re all playing. The ruling elite have spent DECADES using PR, power and payments in order to propagandize the media class and nice, well-meaning Liberals into thinking we’re playing, whatever, Monopoly. But the ruling elite are playing a different game: Rich People Monopoly (I’m fucking killing it with analogies today). So whenever the ruling elite break the rules, the media class and the well-meaning Liberals hold up the rule book and complain that they’re not following the rules. But the media class and the well-meaning Liberals are so beholden to the rules that instead of 1) realizing the ruling elite are playing a different game or 2) breaking the rules themselves to wield power, they grumble and complain and fundraise and publicly wonder why and etc.

I think more and more well-meaning Liberals are starting to realize what the game actually is, but I thought I’d take a few pages and lay out some of the major dynamics of the system AKA What’s Actually Going On. You know, explain what the rules of… Rich People Monopoly really are.* Because the only way to know what we can possibly do – if anything – is to have a clear understanding of the terrain. If people keep playing Rich People Monopoly with the rules of Monopoly, we’re fucked.

*(Look, I know I could always come up with a different analogy that was less moronic, but honestly, I kind of like how abjectly moronic it is. However, if it’s confusing, here’s a better one: it’s like trying to navigate 2022 New York with a 1918 New York map. It’s kind of right – as long as you don’t have to go to Shoe Locker or Starbucks – but mostly, it doesn’t do the job very well. So, Liberal explanations kind of explain how things work, but they’re not that satisfying and can’t really help one figure out how to navigate the world and mostly just fall apart under any kind of scrutiny.)

So here’s the big picture bad news (this is probably gobbledygook, but I’ll eventually explain it): we’re living in a time when the ruling elite is running out of strategies to paper over the contradictions of the economic system that started to crack apart in the 1970s; previous strategies could satisfy large swaths of the population, but as the contradictions get more and more pronounced, the ruling elite have to sacrifice more and more “regular people” to the machine.

Okay, what does that mean? America ever really recovered from The Great Depression. There was World War II, then the great suburbanization/consumerism of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and those kind of jump-started things for a bit, but that all started to run out of steam in the 1970s. This ushers in the neoliberal age, which I won’t take the time to get into here, but just think of the 1970s through now as period of intensifying crises for capitalism. Most of the 20th century functioned as such: rich people made money off the labor of the working class. And as long as everyone had a bit of something, there wouldn’t be too much social upheaval. Which is good for business because too much social upheaval interrupts things. So, if you’re a traditional capitalist, it’s helpful to have an amicable détente with Labor (or slavery or a working class that is so cowed they don’t complain, but I guess some kind of equilibrium is third best).

Honestly, I’m just doing a Cliff’s Notes version of David Harvey with a couple swears peppered in, but I think having a basic understanding of this dynamic is really important because it’s What Was Really Going On while most of us, myself included, thought things with the economy were generally okay.

Oh, and when I talk about “the ruling elite”, I’m not talking about some shadowy conspiracy or lizard people or anything like that. I’m talking about old money bluebloods – the dynasties, the children of oil and steel magnates and the people that first exploited America, the descendants of settler-colonialism kingpins and European monarchies. People who make decisions on international levels. Real wealth, not just nouveau riche shitheads with tacky Bridge and Tunnel mansions and TikTok celebrities, Real Housewives and other dumbfucks who have amassed some modicum of gravy. I’m talking about the people that meet at Davos and Sun Valley and Bohemian Grove. As well as the Succession motherfuckers and their ilk, cunning creeps who were able to see beyond the constricting horizon of nouveau riche limits and then leveraged their ill-gotten gains into actual power (the Bushes, the Kennedys, the kings of Goldman Sachs, etc.). These are the shitheads I’m describing.

So, what I want to do is 1) sketch out very briefly and very broadly how the neoliberal shift in the 1970s opens up the space for neofascism (people like Adam Curtis and Doug Henwood and Wendy Brown and others do the heavy lifting on this subject, and I’ll dive into them in the future) and 2) how the dynamics of the current moment explain why no one – especially the Dems – are doing anything to combat this.

So, right, in the 1970s, the WWII and suburbanization boom stops powering the economy. Everything’s suburbanized by that time, and with the end of Vietnam, there are no longer any big military operations to power the economy. This is a straight-up educated guess at the dynamics of the 1970s by the way. I think it’s a good hypothesis, but I could be totally wrong and I gladly welcome anyone with actual expertise to correct me. But it seems like with the dying gasps of these decades-long strategies to power the economy after The Great Depression, there was a shift to just extracting whatever could be extracted, the future be damned. This includes things like adopting neoliberal philosophies (austerity, deregulation, privatization), “the shareholder revolution” of the early ‘80s, where the belief that a company’s only duty is the maximize the wealth of the shareholders took hold, the explosion of credit and – completely speculating here (which is new for me, I know) – I wonder how much Exxon’s climate change findings influenced elite opinion. Was it known outside of those oily circles? Did it help add to the the general sense of doom? Regardless, it seems like all these strategies had an undercurrent of “Fuck the future”.

Whatever it was, instead of the ruling elite deciding to courageously forge a new society, they (cowed by the failures of the 60s on the Liberal end, driven by apocalyptic visions on the Neofascist end, and undergirded by a general desire to retain pleasure and power for themselves) instead decided to just ride the bomb like a bucking bronco into oblivion, and started stripping the copper wires out of the walls of America. I don’t know if they saw the crack-up of capitalism coming or were just driven by vague fear or laziness or greed or psychopathy or whatever – regardless of the reason, this is the era in which the Boomers became the quislings of the apocalypse.

If you’re my age or younger, we’ve been living our entire lives within this system – the contradictions of capitalism intensifying and the elite response being to grab whatever they can out of America’s pantry before the house completely collapses into a sinkhole. In the 1980s and ‘90s, there were cracks here and there, but in the 21st century, the cracks have become bigger and weightier and more frequent and more hydra-like. There may be some big crackup in the future, some real apocalypse, but it might just be cracks, cracks, cracks for the rest of our lives, everything breaking down bit by bit. First the odometer stops working, and then there’s a nail in the tire, and you go to get it patched, and on the way back from the tire shop, the carburetor and the air conditioner stop working, but you only have enough money to fix one, and you need a carburetor (Right? This is definitely a good metaphor and I obviously know a lot about cars.), so you get that fixed, but now you have no air conditioner, and then…

There’s no baby formula one day, your favorite pet food brand is backordered the next and you have to abruptly give your cat new food. A month later, gay marriage is abolished, and then half a year down the line, criticizing the president is a jailable offense. Or maybe it’s just CEOs constantly raising prices and less and less government regulation and more and more The Jungle and long covid forever and low-level Christian fascism that never fully blossoms into all-out Nazism. I can’t tell the future, but I can understand the dynamics of systems, and I can without a doubt in my mind say that life is going to slowly and slowly get more difficult to navigate. That doesn’t mean there isn’t hope, and it doesn’t mean there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel, but it does mean that there’s no way out but through.

Let’s quickly sketch out what the current moment looks like in order to use it as a map for possible action:

1) Structures.

One of the reasons it’s really difficult to grasp what’s happening is another version of the map problem (or Monopoly problem! Just wanted to remind everyone what a great analogy that was!) from above. A lot of the problems we face are structural problems, but we’re mostly taught to conceive of and explain things in simple causal ways. Like policing. The reason why a lot of us on the Left push a police abolition or defund the police line is because the problem with policing is structural. It’s not that there’s a handful of shitty cops on each police force; it’s that even if every cop was a Shining Beacon of Honor, the structures would still reward shitty behavior, and over time, you’d get a police force of motherfuckers like we have now.

People like to blame “structural reasons” but they have no idea what that actually means. Social structures are created from laws and unspoken rules and reinforced by the behavior of the people within the system. That’s why it’s difficult to think in structural ways. We’re taught to assign blame based on simple causal explanations. Cop A shoots unarmed, innocent black guy B. Why is it rare for Cop A to be prosecuted? Especially when there is a preponderance of evidence? Well, structural reasons. The prosecutor has a good relationship with the police force and the police union is strong and can throw up a lot of interference and make a big stink if Cop A is prosecuted and the mayor doesn’t want the headache of dealing with the Blue Flu, so she doesn’t put any pressure on the DA or maybe she’s sick of this stuff happening in her city, so she does put pressure on the DA and the police union donates a million dollars to her opponent in the next election…

You see how tangled and weird this is (and I’m just rattling off examples off the top of my head – a real life example would be much more complex). You have a bunch of people and organizations acting based on different rules, including the rules of their organizations, the organizations’ desires for self-preservation, their personal morals, their emotional state the day they’re making those decisions, the prevailing mores of the time, maybe historical precedence. To really get a good picture of complex events would mean to look at all the forces involved and to examine how some of the forces reinforce each other and how others contradict each other and then work out how people are making decisions within that complex network.

It's the same thing with most large-scale complex phenomena, and really to get into it would mean explaining attractors and Manufacturing Consent (To answer questions like: “How come the media doesn’t cover X, Y or Z?” or “Why does the New York Times – a so-called Liberal paper – keep framing all these issues in such a rightwing way?”), and I’ll just save that for a separate essay. Right now, the takeaway is, explaining complex phenomena with linear tools can never give satisfactory answers. So things feel weird because you’re getting a lot of cogent answers, but they never seem to actually explain the thing you want explained.

2) There is no coherent Left.

It’s really frustrating to me whenever I see people in the media, on Twitter, on Bill Maher or whatever, talk about “the Left”. There is no Left. There are a number of left organizations: DSA, Socialist Alternative and others that sometimes work together in coalitions. When Regular People talk about “the Left” in corporate media or at a school board meeting or at the Oneg Shabbat, there is no actual thing they’re talking about. What they kind of mean is Liberals and everyone to the left of them, or maybe they mean not-the-GOP, or maybe they mean “antifa”. But they certainly don’t mean (at least usually) “anarchists to social democrats”, which is who vaguely compromise the incoherent Left in America. There is certainly a Liberal (center-right White Moderates) and Rightwing and Fascist Rightwing that functions coherently as three separate groups that tend to boost each others’ agendas, but there is no coherent Left (for reasons I mentioned last essay and will be more explicit about in the future).

In general, most people do not have a coherent set of politics. When I was knocking doors for Nithya a few years ago, I canvassed a house with two lawn signs, one for Nithya and one for Pete Buttigieg. Nithya and Pete do not remotely stand for the same things, but the person who lived in that house wasn’t discerning. Maybe they wanted a gay president and a female, South Asian city council member. Or they liked Pete’s policies and Nithya’s policies and didn’t really understand that they were coming from different, incompatible political stances. Or they thought, “well, they’re both Democrats, so they must be similar.” Or maybe someone from Nithya’s campaign and someone from Pete’s campaign said, “Could we give you a lawn sign?” and they were like, “Yeah, okay, that’s cool.”

So, most people amorphously wander around towards the most powerful people, opinions and organizations that define the social space they live in (these are the attractors that I’ll talk about in a future essay). Because the Left doesn’t really have any kind of social dominance, you have to really do some work to find the Left attractor. But because the ruling elite is made up of Liberals, Rightwingers and Fascists, those attractors have a lot of power and people tend to live in the spaces those attractors define.

All this being said – and I’m sorry to say this to my friends and family that think of themselves as Liberals or Centrists – but that is not the Left (and heck, maybe my friends and family who think of themselves as Liberals don’t want to be associated with the left anyway, so no harm, no foul). You may want racial equality or an egalitarian society, but if that desire isn’t informed by an intersectional class analysis, and you don’t actually want the structures of society to change, i.e. you just want the system as it is to be a little more fair, you’re not on the Left. An egalitarian system and a capitalist system are incompatible. Our lives right now are dependent upon people in the periphery and the working class in our own country being ground up into dust. I don’t think it’s a better system if a black or queer or disabled person is the one doing the grinding instead of a cis straight white dude. People outside the US/the US working class are still having their entire existence from birth to death shredded in this global machine. If we want to create an emancipatory global social order, the only real starting point is to create a multi-racial, across the gender spectrum, working class coalition.

If you think of yourself as a Liberal, I’m not (necessarily) calling you a bad person or saying you don’t have empathy. We’re all a product of our class and upbringing. I don’t even blame rich people for behaving the way they do. If I was born a scion and tossed into the Andover -> Harvard -> $300K/year job chute, I would probably be against the not-so-coherent Left to some degree too. Maybe I’d feel guilty about it, but that wouldn’t stop me from enjoying the nine-course chef's tasting menu at Per Se before retiring to my eight million dollar Upper West Side apartment.

That being said, if you think of yourself as a Liberal, you’re on the side of the grinders, and I think it’s important to be honest with yourself about whether you actually have an ethical problem with that, and if so, what you are willing to sacrifice in the (very possibly Quixotic) attempt to build a better world. It might be nothing, which, if I’m really being honest, I don’t blame you. I’m willing to sacrifice my time and my money, but there’s a limit for me. I don’t really want to get arrested, and I very much don’t want to be killed. But I grew up middle class. I had just enough to not want to lose that, but not enough to blind me to the world. Your beliefs are in-most-cases based on your material circumstances.

My point is in this section though is that things seem weird for Liberals because they think they are Left, but really their stance – except for some social stuff, which is important, don’t get me wrong – is pretty rightwing. If people were more honest about where they stood politically, things would make more sense.

3) The Everything Everywhere All At Once of Capitalism.

One of the reasons the Christian fascists are running the political board is that capitalism is an economic system that rewards bastards, tolerates cowards and destroys the virtuous. This isn’t hyperbole – it’s a system that is only able to function through the domination of people and the extraction of their life essence to feed Moloch. That is hyperbole, but it’s not too hyperbolic.

But what do I mean when I say “capitalism rewards bastards”? Well, it’s a system that dissolves relations – relations between people, communities, congregations, etc. – and replaces those meaningful bonds with, well, nothing but a vague vampiric hunger for more and a dissatisfaction with what you have. It turns people into consumers and all relationships into relationships of commerce. It gives primacy to cheaters, scammers and rapacious motherfuckers and creates ways for them to prey on the rest of us. And because the capitalist class is on top, it dictates the vibes for the rest of us.

When I was younger and really not super-self-aware, I would go into a CD store in the mall just to look around. But if I didn’t find anything I wanted, I would start to feel pressure – from within – that if I went into a store, I was supposed to buy something. I had internalized the hyper-capitalism of the ‘80s in such a way that I felt it was my duty to buy things if I entered a store. The fucking teenage clerks couldn’t give a shit – no one was verbally telling me to handover my hard-earned greenbacks – but the fucked-up superego that married my parents’ internalized voice with the demon screech of capitalism’s dictates, it deeply wanted me to buy buy buy! Casual human bonds had been annihilated, and in that moment, my only purpose was to be a consumer. Even visiting my friend Eric who worked at Little Caesars. I couldn’t just pop in to say hi, I had to plop down $1.99 for some rancid Crazy Bread. Heck, even today, when I go to a restaurant and the waiter asks if I want dessert, and I say no, I feel guilty for not buying more (which means therefore, his tip will be 20% of less).

So yeah, capitalism atomizes and essentializes everything and turns life into an airport. One of the reasons that air travel is so unpleasant is because the minute you step into that airport, you are a captured population. If you want food, you have to pay their prices. If you want to buy a book, you only can choose from the books the airport bookstore wants to sell. Everything’s expensive and lousy because they don’t have to try. You’re fucking stuck, sucker! And it literally creates classes of people based on how much they want to/can spend, apportions out benefits based on that, and creates resentment and alienation between the groups. Maybe there’s some kind of camaraderie created based on the shittiness of this all, but mostly there isn’t. It’s dog-eat-dog, everyone for themselves, and that’s the world under capitalism.

In this kind of system, cheats, exploiters and people willing to dominate and berate others get ahead. We’ve all seen it. The fucking rich loudmouth who screams at the flight attendant gets what he wants. The people in boarding group C who stand up early, blocking everyone, can sometimes sneak onto the plane with an earlier boarding group. Even without this shit, your entire meaning is based on how much money you want to spend. You could be the most vile fuck on the planet, but if you have the cashola, you are the golden god of Terminal 5! Any system that reduces your entire worth to your entire worth is a bad system. And when all of our lives are ordered by a system that prizes exploitation and domination, the whole world feels as unpleasant and weird as an airport.

4) Politics isn’t The West Wing.

Everyone in the Liberal/center Left sphere on social media, from my friends to journalists like Medhi Hasan ask ad nauseam: “Why aren’t the Democrats doing anything?” The Democrats – seemingly – control all three levers of government, yet they are allowing – and even abetting the GOP – as the Christian fascists consolidate control and make it impossible for the Democrats to even hold power after 2024. Even simply out of self-preservation, one might think the Democrats would do something to at least put the brakes on everything going to absolute shit.

Well, they can’t. Or rather, they can’t without undermining the system that gives them power in the first place. Or rather, they can’t because they weren’t built to do this kind of work. The Democrats who wield the most power currently were forged in a time where to be a Democrat, you said stirring progressive things in speeches in the primaries, then in the general elections, you pivoted to more rightwing talking points, and when you got elected, you did some token things that didn’t cost a lot or were means tested and that kind of maybe helped people (or at least didn’t completely throw people to the wolves like the GOP) and otherwise, you spent the majority of your time doing things that helped your donors.

Ask yourself this, why does the GOP, no matter who is in charge, no matter who has a majority in the Senate, why do they seem to always get their agenda passed, and the Dems, for most of our lifetimes, have passed almost no progressive legislation, only means tested, GOP-lite stuff? Why do they constantly compromise with the GOP? Is it because the GOP is so much better at negotiation or because the majority of Dems in power want what the GOP wants? And obviously, some of the Dems don’t want the outcomes to be as violent and cruel as the GOP wants, but you can bet for darn sure they want the same outcomes, and if it has to be violent and cruel, well, that’s a shame, but what’s one to do?

Ask yourself this, if you were in power and you cared about something, wouldn’t you do everything and use every tool in your belt to do something, anything, to keep power and deliver material gains to the people that helped elect you so they would continue to elect you, instead of offering poems, kente cloth and a landfill’s worth of excuses? What the fuck are they doing?

Well, I think one of the big things that drives this dynamic is that strategy I just outlined, which has the fun trigonometric name triangulation, and if you want to know why the incoherent Left dislikes Hillary Clinton – it’s not (in general) misogyny – it’s because triangulation was a strategy developed by the Clintons, used with great effect during Bill’s presidency and every other corporate Dem since, and it’s a methodology that has given us a completely fucked dynamic for decades.

No matter how you feel about the Democrats, you saw this dynamic in full panoramic view during the last few elections. The GOP act like the vampiric horde of feral hogs they are, and the Democrats position themselves just slightly to their left, and say, “You wouldn’t want the vampiric horde of feral hogs in charge, would you?” And most of us with empathy say, “Yeah, of course I don’t want the vampiric horde of feral hogs in charge, so sure, right, of course I’ll vote for The Gentlemen from the Buffy episode “Hush”, who, sure, are still bloodthirsty, but at least they’re not screeching assholes like the vampiric horde of feral hogs.”

After Biden was elected, he could have reversed everything Trump did by executive order. Instead, what did he do? Almost nothing! Why? He didn’t want to. That’s it. People over and over have discussed the kinds of legal things he can do with executive order, with the bully pulpit of the presidency, with threats like FDR and LBJ have done. “Oh but Manchin—” His daughter was head of Mylan during the controversy about their EpiPen pricing. You think Biden couldn’t threaten to investigate her if Manchin doesn’t get on board?

These people are all friends with each other. RBG defended Brett Kavanaugh for god’s sake! They are multi-millionaires who are beholden to their donors, and are just a less feral face of the ruling class. Like, okay, I could totally be wrong, and if I am, I 100% welcome big fat ITOLDYOUSOs, but if 1/6 was really a coup attempt, you would want to prosecute the living shit out of the people that committed it, right? That’s fucking treason. Right? But I will bet you right now that no one meaningful is prosecuted for their roles in 1/6. I will bet you right now that the Dems will do nothing meaningful about Roe v. Wade. I want them to. I desperately want them to slam the breaks on the ol’ blue station wagon instead of chanting “O’Doyle rules!” as it goes off the cliff. I would rather be wrong and have you all call me a dipshit, but I doubt you will get the chance. I mean, feel free to call me a dipshit anyway, but I don’t think it’s earned.

So, okay, triangulation creates a dynamic where empathetic folks feel compelled to vote for the Dems because they are not-as-feral-hoggy as the GOP. I think the working class gets the scam, and that’s why the Dems target middle to upper middle class folks. If you’re working class in the modern era, like I said above, the Democrats don’t do a whole lot for you, and in fact, they tend to shame you for your cultural beliefs, so why vote for a bunch of Ivies that think you’re some dumb hick?

But if you are middle class or above, most of your everyday needs are taken care of. Maybe the more middle you are, your taxes are higher than you’d like or you wish you had a bigger house or a nicer car or (if you’re lucky enough to have one in the first place) a more bitchin’ jetski, but none of these things are making you desperate enough to act. The economic policies of the Dems and even the GOP benefit you. So, you don’t mind the Dems, and in fact because the GOP are mostly made up of loud assholes, you root for the Dems because who wants a bunch of boorish shitheads in charge?

And I am not condemning this block. I would rather have Biden in office than some overt Nazi or some nouveau riche fuckwit, but it’s really important to see that for hundreds of millions of people, it doesn’t make a difference. Their lives are the same no matter who is in charge and because it doesn’t matter, who gives a fuck if it’s Senile Grandpa or Screaming Dimwit? These folks either don’t vote or vote for the most entertaining option. I get it!

But yelling at them to vote or berating them for not just supporting the Dems won’t change this dynamic. The only way the dynamic will change – well, the Dems could en masse tomorrow decide to change as a group, but that’s unrealistic – will be for us to abandon them and figure out new ways to build power outside the Democratic party. I don’t relish this because it will lead to a lot of chaos and damage in the short term, but I don’t know if there’s any other long-term option. The Dems are the white moderates in MLK Jr’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Biden, Pelosi and Schumer are not going to save us. The more quickly we all internalize that, the better off we’re going to feel emotionally, and the more prepared we will be for what will be asked of us by Whatever Comes Next.

5) Our privileges are dependent on the system.

For the middle class and above, for the empathetic folks that make up the incoherent Left, the center-left and even some Liberals, all of our privileges, our lifestyle, our economic benefits – our very existential dreams and identities – are based on the system we were all birthed into and raised in. We might want something different, something to break up this metaphysical logjam that’s broken our society to bits, but we have no idea what that something different might be, and furthermore, even if we vaguely want something different, in the absence of a specific vision, we’re left with a void that just sucks this unrealized desire into it, leaving nothing but the gnawing terror of What If It All Goes To Shit? Better to do nothing and just spend every day in a bland pas de deux with meaninglessness.

One of the big themes in the work of brilliant documentarian Adam Curtis is that over the 20th century, the broad left, after encountering a number of political setbacks, retreated inwards to smaller and smaller areas they could control, and in the last decades, they no longer have any kind of vision of the future that they can inspire people with. None of us – even, I bet, the ruling class if any of them are thoughtful in any way – particularly enjoy this world that was handed to us and that we continued on with. But to disrupt it with nothing specific to work towards is absolutely terrifying.

After the election in 2016, Curtis was interviewed on Chapo Trap House, and towards the end of the talk, he was asked about this very topic:

“Political change is frightening. It’s scary. It’s thrilling because it is dynamic and it’s doing something to change the world, but it is scary because it can change things in ways where nothing is secure. It’s like being in an earthquake. Even the solid ground underneath you begins to move and things dissolve that you think are solid and real. And I think that the question Liberals and the Left have to face at the moment is a really sort of difficult question, which is Do you really want change? Do you really want change? Because if you do, many of them might find themselves in a very uncertain world where they might lose all sorts of things.

What we’re talking about in many cases is people who are sort of the center of society at the moment; they’re not out at the margins. They would have a lot to lose from real political change because it really would change things in the structure of power. Or, and this is the brutal question, do you just want things to change a little bit? Do you just want the banks to be a little nicer, say? Or people to be a little more respectful of each other’s identities. All of which is good, but basically you carry on living in a nice world where you tinker with it. That’s the key question.”

It's the key question we – no matter our economic class – on the incoherent Left, and all of us with empathy regardless of political commitments, have to ask ourselves. What is the vision of the future that will inspire us to finally act, and can we live with the gamble regardless of its outcome?

Modernity was about the disenchantment and secularization of the world. When Modernity died in WWI, we all became adrift. God can’t save us. Rationality can’t save us. What can?

In this adriftness, the vampiric horde of feral hogs want to rebuild god. The Liberals want to continue the static horror of the age adrift. But I don’t want the Witchfinder General or the bloodless bureaucrat. I want the next move in the dialectic, the synthesis of the rational and the holy. Not some adherence to the vicious version of Christ dreamed up by a dumptruck of pervs or the decaying administrative state of some anesthetized WASPs. Yeah, the only way out is through, but there has to be something next that compels us to go through, that is meaningful and that is worth risking the bland pleasures and the not-being-dead of The Now.

I don’t know the exact shape of The Next but it needs to be something that gives us both the grandeur of god and the self, something that gives us ourselves and something greater than ourselves, something we can dissolve into and yet still be us. It must give us the promise of solidarity and meaningfulness and joy and not just stagnant misery as everything collapses, and once we collectively work out the shape of The Next, we will have to truly reckon with, for the first time in our lives, if the game is worth the candle, if the possibility of The Next is worth giving up the familiarity of The Now.