Getting It
The Left has adopted the word “woke” to describe people who have accepted the ideology of cultural Marxism and are willing to act on it. The equivalent I hear most often for the Right is “getting it”. What does it mean to “get it”?
First, it means understanding that the Left is no longer made up of liberals. It is now dominated by cultural Marxists, believers in the ideology concocted largely by the Frankfurt School that translates Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Like all Marxists, cultural Marxists are totalitarians. There is nothing “liberal” about them, in any sense of the word. Their goal, as we see from what they do on college campuses they control, is to punish any thought or expression that deviates from their views. The usual terms for such a deviation are “racism”, “sexism”, and “homophobia”. (Denunciation for these imagined sins is itself “ism-ism”, the magical belief that realities such as differences among races or between the sexes can be nullified by calling them names ending in “ism”.) Cultural Marxism’s call for “equality” is a lie; it seeks to put Blacks over White (and Asians), women over men, and gays over straights. Everything noble, beautiful, or grand is to be pulled down while whatever floats down humanity’s sewer is to be plopped on the civic altar with a demand we bow down and worship it.
Second, America is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy, run by a “new class” that rules both in Washington and on Wall Street. The new class has three main characteristics: it can’t make things work, it uses its wealth and power to exempt itself from the consequences of things not working, and it cares about only one thing, namely remaining the new class. It is made up overwhelmingly of people who want to be something, not people who want to do something. It knuckles under to cultural Marxism not because it believes in it--t believes in nothing but its own right to money and power--but because it is made up of moral cowards. Principles have a nasty habit of getting in the way of career progression.
The Wall Street wing of the new class--each wing supports the other--has become the top 1% financially in part by exporting the jobs of middle-class Americans. By moving a great deal of our manufacturing abroad, with white-collar jobs now following fast, the 1% has obliterated the blue-collar middle class that was the pride of 1950’s America. Middle class Americans now find themselves falling further and further behind until they can no longer afford a middle-class way of life.
Third, this whole rotten structure is about to fall. Heartland Americans are fed up with cultural Marxism, also known as “political correctness”, that’s one of the main reasons they voted for President Trump. The 2016 electoral map, seen by county, shows a vast red America with a few tiny blue enclaves. Red America will not let itself be ruled by those enclaves any longer.
Economically, the whole world is headed for a massive debt crisis, which means not a recession but a depression. When that hits, everyone but the 1% will become poor. Already, young people entering the labor force find it almost impossible to get a job with a living wage. In a depression, no one can find work, and moving home with mom and dad isn’t an option because they don’t have any money themselves.
Does this mean revolution? Over roughly the past five centuries, it might have. Now, in an era when the state is in decline, it is more likely to mean devolution. People will seek, and find, ways to disconnect themselves from the new class, a.k.a. the Establishment, and Washington; from cultural Marxism and its clients; and from a dead globalist economy. To the degree this happens peacefully, it will not be a bad thing. A return to local economies, local government, and local solutions to problems would be beneficial and welcome. This shift is in fact already underway, drawing on ideas from both the Left and Right.
Unfortunately, neither Washington, nor Wall Street, nor the cultural Marxists are likely to step aside voluntarily or peacefully. The collapse of the current order will probably get messy. Disorder is not something any conservative can ever welcome. But “getting it” includes being ready if disorder comes.
Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.