Liberalism - Straight to the source

[blindpig]

edited to remove 'bumps' & non-sequiturs

https://web.archive.org/web/20151017000 ... hp?t=48696

[blindpig]

The Road to Hell, Brought to You by Liberalism
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 04 May 2022



Elon Musk's purchase of the Twitter platform was a hotly debated topic. But neither Musk nor any other individual is the root of the world's problems. Liberalism which pretends to be oppose capitalism and US state hegemony but which is in fact an ally, is the problem.

Elon Musk successfully won his bid to purchase Twitter on April 25th just days after a rally in New York City chanted “Azov” to express support for Ukraine. While these events appear unrelated on the surface, they represent key examples of the road to hell paved by U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology: liberalism.

Liberalism is often viewed as the most progressive political ideology of the prevailing social order in the West. In actuality, liberalism is the driving ideological force of capitalist and imperialist expansionism. Liberal ideology is characterized by the fetishization of racism, individualism, and the political preconditions necessary for the expansion of capitalism. Once a kick-starter for the explosive growth of capital, liberalism has devolved into an ideology that defends the rule of the rich at any and all cost.

Hell, of course, has religious connotations and is employed here as a metaphor for the conditions that the planet finds itself in. Musk buying Twitter is but another step toward the complete monopolization of the media, a process that has already characterized the development of social media platforms. Twitter’s top shareholders include financial titans such as the Vanguard Group, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock. Musk himself held a nine percent stake in Twitter prior to the full purchase, which will be bankrolled in large part by Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks. Vladimir Lenin himself could not have produced a better example of imperialism in the modern era.

Liberals in the corporate media have voiced opposition to Twitter’s takeover. While unlikely, many in the liberal corporate media hope that Musk’s move to buy Twitter will be struck down by regulators in Biden’s Department of Justice. Fears about the fate of free speech have arisen despite the role that liberals and especially the Democratic Party have played in facilitating media monopolization. In 1996, the Clinton administration signed off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated nearly all restrictions to media mergers in the United States. Two decades later, Democrats led the charge in empowering big tech Silicon Valley corporations in their campaign of censorship under the guise of a conspiracy theory aptly termed Russiagate.

Russiagate prompted big tech monopolies such as Google to reconstruct their algorithms so to suppress dissenting voices. A countless number of accounts have been suspended and purged from social media platforms for voicing anti-war and anti-imperialist views. Media affiliated with Russia, Iran, China, and progressive countries in Latin America were forced to register as agents of foreign governments beginning in 2017 and repressed all the same. The censorship has only worsened during Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. Outlets such as RT America have been completely removed from YouTube, as have podcasts from prominent voices on the anti-war Left such as Lee Camp.

Liberals have cheered on this kind of censorship all along the way without taking a single breath. Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, these same liberals have warned users that the platform will become a “scary place.” The New York Times flooded its opinion pages with concerns that the further monopolization of Twitter under Musk will exacerbate already existing problems with billionaire rule over social media platforms. Of course, the New York Times has shown no concern over the suppression of left-wing activists and journalists on social media platforms and has even resorted to smearing them publicly. The Daily Beast went a step further by going directly to these platforms and advocating for the removal of this author and a handful of other anti-war journalists.

The road to hell paved by liberalism is rife with hypocrisy. Under Donald Trump, liberals expressed panic over the rise of fascism. They cheered on Antifa for punching rightwing personality Richard Spencer and secured more funding for federal law enforcement following the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol building. Yet liberals have taken center stage in siding with Ukraine’s military in its conflict with Russia to the point of apologizing for the Nazi organization, the Azov Regiment. Western corporate media has whitewashed the Azov Regiment as a small, passionate group of nationalists that decoupled its “political” roots from its current military operations once it was absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014.

Such mental gymnastics have been exposed as farce, not least because Azov has an extensive record of war crimes . Furthermore, the Western corporate media cannot help but promote Azov in its Ukraine coverage. This contradicts the notion that Azov is a small, ineffectual organization. So too does a rally in a major U.S. metropolis emphatically chanting “Azov.” But pointing this out has its consequences. The ruling class has emphatically defended what it believes is the “good” kind of Nazis by suppressing voices that raise concern about the role that the Azov Regiment has played in the current conflict.

Liberal collaboration with censorship and fascist repression is nothing new. Operation Paperclip, a covert intelligence operation that absorbed Nazis into the ranks of American scientific institutions in a bid to gain an “advantage” over the Soviet Union, was launched during the “liberal” Harry Truman administration. So-called “liberal” U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was close with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and fully supported COINTELPRO , a massive campaign of repression that terrorized left-wing political organizations and their leaders. COINTELPRO laid the basis for the War on Terror’s surveillance regime. The assassination, imprisonment, and surveillance of left-wing political leaders set a precedent for the state-sponsored repression of dissenting voices on issues such as war and peace.

Liberalism is no antidote to fascism. In fact, liberalism has time and again paved the road to an even steeper descent to the far right. Whether it was Obama’s two-term administration expanding Bush-era policies and opening the door for Donald Trump or the Democrats wielding social media as a weapon of repression and thereby giving Elon Musk ample leverage to buy Twitter, liberalism has a proven record of covering up the crimes of capitalism under a veneer of progress. That the glorification of fascist organizations such as “Azov” and the further monopolization of the media is happening under Joe Biden’s watch should thus come as no surprise. Liberalism and its political expression in the U.S., the Democratic Party, are moribund engines of U.S. imperialism.

These engines have outlived their usefulness. Humanity has two choices: socialism or barbarism. The latter choice can only be made once the perils of liberalism are confronted by the masses in their just resistance to the oppressive conditions of imperialism.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/road- ... liberalism

[blindpig]

Political Liberalism Was Never Meant For The Masses
Roger Boyd
Jun 23, 2025

The role of liberalism, as so well detailed by Losurdo (Liberalism: A Counter History), was to free the growing bourgeoisie/merchant class from the limitations placed upon them by the sovereign and their state apparatus. That is why property was given the central mythological basis of freedom, because it was that class that was most concerned about constraints upon their usage of their property (which included slaves). In a time when the franchise was limited by property ownership and/or income requirements, the joys of democracy could also be restricted to that class only, and not the hoi polloi. Very much akin to the highly-restricted Greek democracy where those that owned, ruled.

But there was a problem, the masses decided to force themselves into the democratic arena after being used as the battering ram of revolution in Britain, France and the US. The problem for the bourgeoisie was detailed by Ishay Landa (The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition And Fascism):

But in the course of the 19th century it became clear that the demand for popular representation is a political weapon that cuts both ways: wielded by the bourgeoisie in the name of the people against the aristocracy, it was effective in bringing about and consolidating bourgeois society. But once “the people” wished to dispense with their bourgeois proxies and speak and act for themselves, demanding, as a necessary first step, that the suffrage be universally extended, popular representation threatened to encroach upon bourgeois prerogatives and interests. After wrestling the economy from the nobility, the bourgeoisie now had to defend it from “the masses”. (p. 21)

This was dealt with in two ways, firstly by sanctifying the rights of property and to separate the economic and the political realms. As the liberal philosopher John Locke insisted, property and capitalist production were not a political arrangement and therefore could not be the subject of political control. Property rights were sacrosanct and inscribed in natural law that could not be adjudicated on by the political realm. Locke was in no way a populist, rather he was an elitist rich man who was happy with labour for children as young as three and wanted criminalization of beggars and vagabonds. He considered that the masses should be kept dumb and obedient, as Landa quotes him on page 27:

Hearing plain commands, is the sure and only course to bring them [the masses] to obedience and practice. The greatest part [the masses] cannot know, and therefore they must believe. (Locke 1824: 146)

Was not this the role of establishment religion, and later fascism? As Landa also notes:

Believe and Obey. Two tenets which came, after all, more than two centuries later, to pertain to “the most well-known of Fascist slogans: Credere Obbedire Comabattere (Believe, Obey, Fight)" (Payne 1996: 215).

The second way was to create institutional blockages that severely curtailed the ability of the masses to express their will through formal democratic means. The myriad of such clever tactics was detailed by Losurdo (Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy). Gramsci then detailed how a modern ruling class utilizes many different instruments to manipulate and coerce the masses into political acceptance of the status quo power structure; acting against their own interests through a false consciousness backed up with coercion.

The problem for the bourgeoisie is when the masses manage to overcome these obstacles to successfully create their own counter-hegemonic project and start to gain control over the democratic levers of power; overcoming the institutional constraints and rejecting the artificial delineation between the political and the economic. As Landa so well explains, in such a case the liberals can decide to maintain economic liberalism while removing political liberalism, and are quite ready to operate within such an arrangement for extended periods of time if necessary. As Landa notes, the historian Salvemini characterized “Italian fascism as a limited planned economy deferential to capitalism … and underlined the important fact that such economic intervention was scarcely different from that witnessed by other, western economies, whose capitalist pedigree is not doubted” (p. 73). Economic liberalism sans political liberalism, just as with Nazi Germany and fascist Spain.

Only when the masses have been made safe for an elite dominated democracy that will not impinge on the rights of property will political liberalism be re-installed. One only has to look at the dictatorships of South America and South Korea to see how easily economic liberalism can be maintained alongside authoritarian, even fascist, political arrangements. Much of the underlying ideologies of these authoritarian/fascist societies come from a ruling class understanding of liberalism; freedom for the economic ubermensche and subjugation for the economic untermensche. Fascism as just another possible option for the liberal bourgeois oligarchy, with liberal tradition as the “apprentice’s sorcerer” of fascism. The Nazi philosopher Schmitt:

underlined the powerlessness of political liberalism to cope with democracy, specifically mass democracy, and consequently the need to break out of this impasse by recourse to dictatorship, that would establish once and for all who is sovereign, who is the one who can decide on the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency (literally: state of exception) … The entire set of fundamental questions raised by Schmitt and the well-known answers he provided, derived from this historical predicament. (p. 167)

Landa then continues to note that:

Far from being a democratic critic of liberal politics. in his analysis of “the crisis of parliamentarianism,” Schmitt displayed striking parallels with the standard, 19th century liberal critique of democratic politics.

The recourse to fascism (see American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Hochschild) was the decision made by US President Wilson in 1917 when faced with a population that would not do the ruling class bidding by committing themselves to a war that they did not consider to be their own. It was only after the destruction of the working class leadership of the “wobblies” (Industrial Worker of the World Union) and other socialist groups that it was agreed that the US was again “safe for democracy” and President Harding could roll-back the fascist apparatus put in place by Wilson. In Italy, the Biennio Rosso (two red years) of gains for the masses triggered the bourgeois oligarchy into fully supporting Mussolini’s brown shirt fascists. The same in 1933 in Germany when the oligarchy decided that a strong hand was required against popular agitation and the challenges of the Great Depression. The same in Spain after the masses had seized power for the benefit of the masses. In Britain the Bonapartism of the “National” government, facilitated by the treachery of the Labour leadership, worked. While in the US a new industrial coalition managed to construct a controlled democracy while fending off more radical working class demands during the Great Depression.

From the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism was implemented by the elites across the West. Firstly in the UK and the US, and then in a post-crash Japan, and also facilitated by the deeply undemocratic nature of the European Union power structures. The financial and economic failures of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis only lead to a deepening of neoliberalism within the West. After five decades of neoliberalism and offshoring driven by wage arbitrage, the masses of the Western populations have been significantly immiserated through falling real wages, massive asset price inflation, large cuts to state social services, labour market deregulation, deregulation of the financial system, and increases in corporate concentration.

With the rise of the hyper-competitive and sovereign China, together with greater independence within other nations, the Western elites were faced with a crisis in their ability to extract profits from other nations. While at the same time escalating levels of imports, especially from China, threatened their profitability at home. Their “Hail Mary” play was to trigger a war between Russia and Ukraine which could be used as a pretext to economically and financially crush Russia through sanctions and trigger a friendly regime change in that country. Then the West could return to the mass looting and exploitation of Russia that it had had a free hand to do during the 1990s; with independence movements being supported/created to drive a break up of Russia into more manageable chunks, as with Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The removal of Russia as an ally of China would also greatly strengthen the West with respect to China, facilitating its weakening and opening up to Western control and exploitation.

But things did not work out as planned, with the world outside the West refusing to take part in the destruction of Russia and with Russia showing a much greater level of strength and resilience than the Western elites had assumed. Three years later and Russia remains strong, and is now most certainly on its way to winning the war against Ukraine. At the same time, China has displayed the success of Xi’s focus on technological upgrading by taking the lead on one industry after another. Selling its own brands at home and around the world rather than just making things for Western corporations which take the vast majority of the profits. Russia’s resilience and China’s increasing strength have also facilitated greater and greater levels of rejection of Western pillaging and profiteering in other parts of the world, for example West Africa.

Faced with this new reality of a reducing ability to extract wealth from other nations, and the increasing competitive challenge of Chinese corporations (e.g. the major automakers), the Western oligarchs have to look for new avenues for profit. In an environment made worse by the boomerang effects of the anti-Russia sanctions that have both raised domestic energy prices and forced a retreat of from the lucrative Russian market. So the Western oligarchs have decided to turn the screws even tighter on their own populations through tariffs to lock out foreign competition and raise regressive taxes. With increased military Keynesianism to provide easy profit making activities, and increased authoritarianism to keep an increasingly unhappy population at bay.

An economic liberalism with an increasingly restricted political liberalism, with the rich “donor class” being the true electorate. In extremis, the political liberalism for the demos will be completely removed through a move to outright fascism. This is what Weidel and the AfD are kept in the wings by the German oligarchy for, and the same for Farage and Reform UK, and for Bardella and the National Rally in France. In the US, the issues of illegal immigration and “anti-semitism” are being used as excuses for greater authoritarianism and limitations on free speech. The consolidation of power over time within an “Imperial Presidency” already gives a US president much access to dictatorial style powers.

In contrast to the lies that we are told in the class room, through the media, and by the politicians, liberalism has very little to do with universal suffrage style democracy. Political liberalism is to be reserved for the bourgeoisie, and in the case that it is captured by the masses it can be quickly withdrawn until circumstances have been changed. The masses must be kept ignorant and obedient, taught to believe rather than think through the means of religion and other ideologies, together with the dumbing down of mass political discourse. Significant chunks of society, such as the economy and foreign policy, should also be considered “naturally” off limits for political consideration; e.g. the sanctity of property rights and the “market”. Economic liberalism works wonderfully for the bourgeoisie as long as political liberalism is kept in its “proper” place.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/politi ... ever-meant

[blindpig]

Liberalism's Death Rattle
Nate Bear
Aug 26, 2025

The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of legitimacy for western liberalism.

Firstly, let’s just reflect on how utterly absurd these conditions are: we’ll recognise your right to your own independent state ONLY IF YOUR HOLOCAUSTERS KEEP HOLOCAUSTING YOU. They are making the creation of an entity which, legally, according to the 1948 partition agreement should have existed for the last seventy seven years anyway, contingent on more slaughter.

The pitiful centrist impulse to triangulate every issue has never been more pathetically, tragically and infuriatingly on show. The belief that you can carrot-and-stick your way to a liberal sweet-spot solution on every issue, even an actual holocaust, is such an odious reflex.

Gaza should, and I believe will, mark the end of liberalism. You can't support an openly declared final solution, announce two years later that recognition for the victims is literally contingent on the final solution proceeding, while continuing to trade on the same old lines about human rights, equality, justice.

Gaza has shown it all up as a sham. The events of the last nearly two years have driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of this liberal ideology.

The truth is that (neo) liberalism encases supremacist attitudes in pro-social language and symbols despite being, today, an inherently and aggressively anti-social, racist and violent ideology. I don’t particularly want to get into history, definitions and changing use here. You can argue that classical liberal thinkers like Thomas Paine or John Locke would be horrified by genocide, permanent war and the surveillance state.

But what is inarguable is that liberalism in the twentieth century, particularly the second half of the twentieth century, has been dominated by violent centre-right and centre-left liberals. These groupings and their acolytes broadly agree on free markets, freedom of suffrage (what they call democracy), some forms of social justice and equal rights, and they agree on a geopolitical story of the world. They both identify the same good guys and the same bad guys and also believe in the need to forever expand the military and surveillance state to defeat the bad guys. And both these parties, from those in western Europe to those in North America, believe that to do this, killing lots and lots of people is frequently justified.

No one with any understanding of recent history could deny this.

Over the last eighty years, liberals of the centre-right and centre-left, Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative parties, have dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, sanctioned the murder of one million civilians in Indonesia, and from Vietnam to Korea to Libya to Iraq have invaded, raped and pillaged.

And while Gaza is of a piece with recent liberal history, I don’t think we can see it as simply another mass murderous episode in western imperialism. Because what has emerged over the past two years is something unique.

Gaza breaks what was already an ultra violent mold.

Never in the modern era have we seen two million people be cut off from the outside world, trapped, unable to leave, starved and systematically murdered while made homeless and living in tents. Never in the modern era have we seen everything be taken from a people, every university, bakery, school, cafe, office, park, restaurant. Every standing home. We’ve not seen a state destroy so much infrastructure that it has ended the ability of an entire society to function as such. No running water, no sewage systems, no grid electricity. Almost everything in Gaza has been turned to dust and rubble. Never have we seen a starving people trapped in a tiny patch of eviscerated land and watched as their holocausters baited them with food, only to gun them down for fun. Guns supplied by our governments, with our money. Never have we seen so many doctors, nurses and journalists torn apart by jets from the sky while holding nothing but the tools of their work, their stethoscopes and cameras. Jets supplied by our governments with our money.

No, this is heinous and new, even by western imperialism's barbarous standards.

You have to go back to ancient Greece or the crusades and the sacking of cities to find something comparable.

The fact that the resistance continues to inflict casualties on the invaders under these conditions is a marvel of the human spirit and should be celebrated as such.

And we certainly haven’t seen violence, war crimes and unspeakable atrocities on this scale captured so frequently on camera in such fine-grained graphic detail.

On top of this, every single stage of this genocide was openly declared by Israel. Israeli politicians said there were no civilians in Gaza, that everyone was guilty, that they’d starve them, burn them and destroy everything. They said the goal was to drive them out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They said it brazenly, week after week. And then they did it. And they did it with the support of liberals. Trump has overseen eight months of genocide. Biden and Harris oversaw fifteen months. The Conservative party oversaw nine months of genocide. Starmer’s Labour Party has supported Israel through thirteen months of slaughter. The liberals in Australia and Canada don’t even have the excuse that it started on someone else’s watch. They’ve backed this genocide from the start.

Then a few weeks ago, when this dishonest threat to recognise Palestine was made, Israel’s finance minister said they’d step up the holocaust in response and make sure there was nothing left to recognise. Knowing they wouldn’t be stopped, they proceeded to do just that, with zero reaction from the complicit liberal cowards in London, Ontario, Canberra and Paris.

Liberalism doesn’t have a future after this. Not an energised one, at least. Gaza signals the final crisis of legitimacy for liberalism and its supposed international order. Spiritually, it’s over. It will take time for pro-genocide liberals to face the consequences, time for their political groupings to be defeated and made irrelevant. International institutions ruled by liberals will not evaporate over night. But no one will now take their orders from liberals. No one will be lectured to about democracy, human rights, and freedom. The global multilateral institutions run by pro-genocide western liberals will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their legitimacy in the post-Gaza holocaust era. The global south has been watching, and through the expansion of BRICS and the formalisation of new agreements, is now organising. Domestically, as we saw in the US last November, liberal bases in the west will no longer come out in sufficient numbers to keep reanimating the corpse of liberal technocratic management.

The centre could never hold. Among the dead of Gaza lies the liberal project, the only deserved victim of this genocide.

We are left then with two possible futures: a radically pro-social and communitarian one, focused on justice and equity for all, or an authoritarian cesspit of racism, war, and eugenics, administered by the tools of the outsourced surveillance state. We know these are the choices, because we’ve already seen it play out. Trump’s victory was in fact the first sign that Gaza heralded these binary futures. The causes of Harris’s loss were contested by liberals, but the polls in the weeks after were clear: her support for genocide was a priority issue for enough people who otherwise would have voted for her, and Trump snuck through.

Without viable pro-social, anti-imperial alternatives, expect this pattern of pro-genocide liberals losing to proto-fascists to be repeated throughout the west.

The answer in the face of these frightening dynamics is, obviously, not to run back to the genocidal warmongering liberals who landed us here.

The answer is to help shape those radical alternatives.

The stakes couldn’t be clearer, the lines sharper than ever.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/liberalisms-death-rattle

[blindpig]

What Do You Fear the Far Right Will Do That You Have Not Already Done?: The Thirty-Fifth Newsletter (2025)

The passivity – and complicity – of Global North liberals and social democrats has paved the way for the global rise of the far right of a special type.

28 August 2025


Samar Abu Elouf (Palestine), Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, 2025.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 12 August, Samar Abu Elouf, who won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year for the picture above, posted on her Instagram account that her son’s close friend Sami Shukour had been killed while he ‘went to look for flour to feed himself and his family’. Samar had taken Sami’s graduation photographs just before the genocide began in October 2023. Sami’s family owns one of the most famous companies in Palestine, which made halawa with tahini. ‘Among the best in Gaza’, Samar wrote. Sami, she added, ‘was killed under a hail of bullets; the sound was very terrifying… We are not just numbers; each one of us is a story’.

We have now entered the last quarter of 2025, the days galloping rapidly toward another year. The image of being chased by horses is not idle, for these are not the wild horses whose beauty stuns the landscape of the meadow – these are the horses of the apocalypse. Everywhere we turn, there is the sniff of the far right of a special type at the gates of power, its leaders riding their horses at full sprint. None of these leaders have a programme to solve our crises; rather, they throw an accelerant onto them, stoking the fires of hell to burn faster and hotter. They deny the existence of climate change and the importance of human dignity. They want to deepen austerity and encourage war. They promote irrationality and social suffocation.

Across the world, people of conscience are appalled by the rise of this far right and its appeal to large sections of our societies. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have studied the growth of this far right. We have examined how its political base is rooted in the atomisation of society, in the growth of institutions and other groups that favour their political orientation – such as new forms of religious fellowship and off-the-books economies – and in the collapse of class organisations in working-class and peasant communities. Part of our conclusion is that the political collapse of social democrats and liberals through their adoption of neoliberal austerity policies has created the conditions for the mass base of the far right. Without an acknowledgment of this fact, and without a renewal of their pre-neoliberal agenda, we cannot expect the social democrats and liberals to be significant allies in the fight against the far right of a special type.

Struck by the failure of the social democrats and liberals across the globe to conduct this kind of renewal, and by the failure of liberals in the Global North particularly to stop their support for the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, I have written a ‘letter’, which I share below, to those who remain committed to these social forces. It is addressed to social democrats and liberals, to people who sit in parties named with words that they demean – Labour (in the United Kingdom), Green (in Germany), Democratic (in the United States), and Liberal (in Japan).


Lobsang Durney (Chile), Brexit Consequences, 2019.

You have surrendered whatever limited ‘neutral’ function the state had in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. The oligarchy now runs the state, with regulations set to a minimum and worker rights set to near zero.

You have watched as the oligarchy has set fire to society, breaking up the old factories, sending the machines to countries where labour is cheaper, and making money off the factory land through speculation. There are no jobs left in the wasteland, only servile jobs to tend to the whims of the oligarchy and uberised jobs to provide mediocre quality services to each other.

You have urged the compromised state to cut taxes and reduce its social services at the same time as unemployment and poverty have increased. Old liberal ideas of helping the less fortunate have dissolved in the acid of individualism and personal ambition, the money that used to be spent on social welfare now vaporised into the financial markets for the oligarchs’ race to become the first trillionaire. What would have been recycled through the tax system is now mired in the casino-like money markets, the whoops and razzle of the monied concealing the howls of the poor.


Anurendra Jegadeva (Malaysia), On the Way to the Airport, 2017.

You have encouraged the state to build up its diabolical attachment to arms merchants and their wares. Weapons eat the commitments to society, breaking whatever bonds had been promised by the modern state to its citizens. There are families on the streets begging for food, and then high above them in the boardrooms there are ugly deals being made with the people’s money and the weapons companies. The values of a people are not in their constitutions – which have been hollowed out – but in their budgets, which are so heavily biased toward weapons that there is almost nothing left for social welfare.

You have allowed for the growth of a culture of cruelty, monstrous behaviour by the police against citizens, by angry men against women, by the hound of starvation against the cry of the hungry belly. All of this is now normal – the nature of modern civilisation. You have encouraged it. You have authorised it. You have hidden behind your social attitudes, your liberalism toward this or that social behaviour, your occasional appearance at a Pride Parade or at an International Women’s Day stroll, but you care nothing for the gay man who is dying of HIV/AIDS and cannot access drugs, or the woman who has no shelter to go to with her children when her home has become unbearable.


Dana Al Rashid (Kuwait), On the Demolition of al-Sawaber, 2020.

Your liberalism has collapsed. There are no liberal philosophers who are not merely analytical, their moral compass trapped in an academic argument that has little relevance to this world. Your thinkers are made for television, the foundation on their face designed to prevent the light from shining on them but also to prevent the light of reason from coming out of their mouths. Your liberalism is advertising, not philosophy.

Classical fascist culture was a dead culture. It was a culture of fake glory and genuine violence. It made a genuine break from the liberal culture that preceded it, and a break from the culture of the working class and the peasantry that had grown stronger through decades of struggle and institution building. The culture of the far right of a special type, on the other hand, is a refraction of neoliberal culture. It has no culture of its own but is a replica, a broken mirror of neoliberal fantasies and desires, an inflation of desire. Trump is not Hitler, but the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, the tag line being, ‘You’re fired!’

The Global North, the epicentre of the far right of a special type, is marinated in decadence and danger. There is no new philosophy emanating from it. It has no intellectuals who lead it, not even of the type of Nazi intellectuals such as Ernst Krieck, Martin Heidegger, or Carl Schmitt. It is dangerous because it commands a military that has the capacity to destroy the world: close to 80% of world military spending is done by the Global North and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, with the United States in possession of over 900 military bases, including many on European soil.


Francisco Vidal Jr. (Angola), Untitled, 1996.

Leadership from the Global North’s liberals and social democrats is a false hope. We must seek leadership from ourselves, from our own traditions and our movements. We fight to bring vitality back to our cultures, to deepen our own theories and philosophies, to seek references amongst our own thinkers. This is a deeper struggle than an electoral one alone. We must build our confidence to reject the vain national glory and the borrowed clothes that come to us from the tarnished liberalism of the Global North. The far right is terrifying, but it is only a twist in the dial more terrible than the technocratic liberals and warmongering Greens who would prefer to spend more money on militaries and debt payments than on the needs of humanity.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... iberalism/

[blindpig]

Dear Western Liberal,

Saying “I support a two-state solution” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 30, 2025

Dear western liberal,

Saying “I support a two-state solution” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “I oppose Netanyahu” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying you find the Gaza holocaust “heartbreaking” and “terrible” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “I want there to be peace” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying you think “both sides” should cease their aggressions does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “it’s complicated and I don’t understand it” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “Hamas attacked on October 7” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “the Jews deserve a homeland” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “I’m busy” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

Saying “I’m overwhelmed” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.

We are all morally obligated to do everything we can to oppose a live-streamed genocide that’s being facilitated, supported and defended by the western power structure under which we live. Nothing besides tooth-and-claw ferocious opposition satisfies that moral obligation.

Don’t tell me about your feelings. Don’t tell me what political positions you support. Don’t tell me what thoughts you privately think to yourself. Do everything you can to stop the genocide that’s being facilitated by your government and its allies.

Nothing else qualifies. Nothing else is defensible. Nothing else will satisfy the questions you’ll be asked by younger generations about what you did during the Gaza holocaust.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/08 ... n-liberal/

[blindpig]

The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg
Nate Bear
Oct 06, 2025



The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.

World leaders who just a few years ago lauded Thunberg and rushed to share stages and photo-ops with her have said nothing. The climate scientists who hailed her moral clarity and feverishly retweeted her have ignored her. The prime minister of her own country has been silent.

Thunberg has been abandoned by a fake progressive liberal class that hailed her courage and valorised her strength just a few short years ago.


Obama and Thunberg meeting in 2022

Why? Because to confront Israel isn’t the sort of strength the liberal class lauds. To put your body on the line against a genocide backed by the west isn’t the sort of courage they applaud. By displaying a moral consistency that to her no doubt seemed obvious, but to the liberal class is a mortal sin, Thunberg exposes every professed liberal value as a lie. Because Thunberg has stepped outside of her lane and transgressed against the only true values the liberal elite class understand: imperial values. The values of war and conquest, colonialism and militarism, and the profits to be gleaned therein.

The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying.

This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army. And in doing so she’s defying the militarism practiced by the west’s colonial golden child and the billion dollar contracts that flow between the two.

For the liberal class, Greta doesn’t understand some fundamentals. She doesn’t understand that for all Israel’s genocide it is an essential bulwark against Iranian terror. She just doesn’t understand that Israel is the Only Democracy In The Middle East®™ and this is a de facto signature of superiority regardless of anything else it does. Doesn’t she understand it’s better to do a genocide as a democracy than not do one as a one-party state?

Naive child.

Of course I joke, but I imagine these lines of reasoning are not far from their thought processes.

Greta has transgressed by refusing to reproduce imperial narratives, and by refusing to be controlled.

She could have picked Aspen fireside chats with Hillary Clinton about the necessity of stepping up climate progress. She could have been contained by yearly Davos invitationals where she excoriates the liberal class for their lack of climate action. Restorative on-camera flagellation achieved, she then could have gone and enjoyed a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2004 with Barack Obama. She could have picked non-confrontational NGO-style corporate-branded activism like her Gen Z golden child compatriot Malala. She could have had the lucrative career of performative activism she was being lined up for. But by shunning this path, she shows up so many liberals for the frauds they are. She also puts a spotlight on all the big climate scientists who’ve never once said genocide is bad for the environment.

These people are really shameful.

Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them.


A Palestinian woman hugs an olive tree in a grove destroyed by Israel

Thunberg shows them up, as she shows up all those who not so long ago rushed to proclaim her a planetary saviour.

Greta exposes a bankrupt centrism.

It seems likely that she understood these ideological lines fairly quickly. It seems likely that she understood it was euro-centred privilege to proclaim the impending end of the world without recognising the world has already ended for many peoples and is currently ending for others.

This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire. A class who backed the evil doers while insisting they were backing the good guys.

And now the most grotesquely evil outgrowth of the colonial enterprise might be coming to an end, if you believe the reports about a ceasefire. But the occupation and the killing won’t end until Israel is brought to heel and Zionism dismantled.

We only to have to look at the West Bank to understand this.

From October 2023 to April this year, more than 900 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the occupied West Bank, with scores kidnapped to be placed into Israeli torture prisons without charge or trial, according to a UN report from April. In the West Bank there’s no Hamas, no weapons, no ‘war,’ no inciting excuses. There’s just pure Israeli barbarism and impunity, sanctioned and backed by western governments.

As an affront to humanity, justice, human rights and international law, Israel must be dismantled. But even the dismantling of Israel won’t be good enough. Israel is merely a colonial output, the tip of the spear. True restorative justice requires the end of the throwing arm.

And given her transformation from liberal darling to prisoner of conscience in an Israeli dungeon, I expect Greta is on board with that idea too.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-liber ... t-of-greta

[blindpig]

Liberal tyrannies
Originally published: Tribune on November 18, 2025 by Richard Pithouse (more by Tribune) | (Posted Nov 20, 2025)

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, delivered this year’s Nelson Mandela lecture to an electrified audience of 3,500 people in Johannesburg. Her words cut through the polite rituals of diplomacy and liberal self-congratulation that usually accompany such events. She spoke plainly about the violence that underwrites the liberal world order–the colonial wars, occupations, and racial hierarchies that persist beneath the language of human rights and the rule of law.

Albanese began by taking Mandela back from his liberal canonisation and affirmed his commitment to the ‘indivisibility of freedom’. Mandela, we must recall, refused to renounce his support for the Palestinian struggle or to deny the decisive role of Cuba at Cuito Cuanavale–a reminder that his humanism was inseparable from anti-imperial solidarity. For her, to honour Mandela–the real Mandela–was to recover that thread: the insistence that to be fully human is to recognise the humanity of all, without borders. She ended with two words that landed like a hammer blow: liberal tyrannies. That closing phrase did not appear in the version of her speech published by the Daily Maverick, the leading voice of South African liberalism

Albanese has been vilified and even sanctioned in Western capitals for saying what so many can see–that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal, and that the international system designed to prevent such crimes is paralysed when the perpetrator is an ally of empire. Her presence in South Africa, invited to honour Mandela, was itself an act of historical continuity. Like Mandela before her, she spoke not merely of law and rights but of power and hypocrisy, of the need to confront domination wherever it wears the mask of civilisation. Refusing euphemism, she described the situation in Gaza as apocalyptic–in the original Greek sense of revelation. ‘The genocide,’ she said, ‘has pierced the veil of Maya,’ exposing not an aberration but the structure of a world order.

Albanese noted that her European education had never taught her that the Holocaust was preceded by the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia–or that the dehumanisation practised by European fascism had its prototype in the colonies. The idea of a superior race, she warned, did not end with the Nazis; it ‘continues to fester in the world today.’ Gaza is not an exception to Western civilisation but part of its continuity–one revelation in a long, colonial apocalypse.

Herrenvolk Democracy
Liberalism presents itself as the moral conscience of the modern world: a creed of rights, reason and rule of law. But the order it built has always depended on exclusion and violence. From the birth of the Atlantic slave economy to the wars of occupation that accompanied the spread of ‘free trade’, liberalism’s promise of freedom was undergirded by the unfreedom of others. The same thinkers who wrote of natural rights defended the plantation and the colony; the same states that declared the equality of man drew their wealth from conquest, genocide, enclosure, and enslavement. As Domenico Losurdo showed, the three great liberal revolutions–in England, the United States, and France–each expanded rather than abolished slavery. Liberalism and racial slavery were born together, granting what he called Herrenvolk freedom: liberty for the master race built on the subjugation of others.

When the enslaved rose up in Haiti, defeating the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, they exposed the falsity of Europe’s universalism. That revolution, the greatest act of emancipation in modern history, was met with isolation and punishment–proof that liberal liberty was never meant for all. Across centuries, this contradiction was not an aberration but a structure. The democratic revolutions in Europe and America were inseparable from indigenous dispossession and racial slavery. The Industrial Revolution turned on cotton picked by enslaved hands. And when the enslaved or colonised demanded the liberty the metropole proclaimed, they were met with massacre–from the Caribbean uprisings of the eighteenth century to the Kenyan, Algerian and Vietnamese wars of the twentieth. From Tasmania to Namibia, settler colonies carried the genocidal logic of Europe well into the twentieth century.

Liberalism learned to manage its contradictions through distance. Violence was outsourced to the frontier, the colony, the periphery. At home, the rule of law; abroad, the law of rule. The Enlightenment’s faith in universal humanity coexisted with the assumption that certain peoples were not yet–or not fully–human. John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty remains a canonical text, still taught as an exemplary argument for freedom, yet Mill was explicit that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.’ John Brown was executed in the same year that Mill published this essay. Racism has always been a choice.

From its origin, liberal freedom was never universal; it was always bounded by race and empire. That psychic architecture endures today, when the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza are rationalised as collateral damage, and international law is weaponised by the West.

The great Black intellectuals of the twentieth century grasped this immediately. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1947 that there was ‘no Nazi atrocity… which the Christian civilisation of Europe had not long been practising against coloured folk Three years later, Aimé Césaire observed that fascism’s crime was to have applied in Europe what Europe had long inflicted on the colonies.

Every Human Life Counts as a Life
For South Africans, this is not an abstract critique. The country’s own history is a condensed version of the global story: a vocabulary of civilisation and property–a claim to be an African outpost of the West–built atop racial expropriation and domination. When apartheid was finally dismantled, it was replaced not by an alternative to liberal capitalism but by its integration into the global system. Political democracy arrived hand in hand with neoliberal orthodoxy, and the moral prestige of liberation was harnessed to the project of market rule.

That history explains the depth of feeling stirred by Albanese’s lecture. South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice is not only a legal manoeuvre. It did not only rekindle the possibility of international law being available to all rather than just another weapon of Western domination. It affirmed an axiomatic universalism–every human life counts as a life. No people can be beneath the law, and no state can be above it.

To accuse Israel of genocide is to directly challenge the post-Cold War order in which Western powers claim the monopoly of legitimate violence. The reaction from those powers–alternately dismissive and indignant–shows how little the liberal world tolerates judgment from below.

That tone had been echoed on the pages of The Daily Maverick itself, which published Greg Mills and Ray Hartley’s claim that South Africa’s case would make it a ‘pariah’. They wrote that it had ‘exposed’ the African National Congress government to be ‘no friend of liberal values’. They were right, of course, because liberal values have always meant freedom for some at the cost of devastation for others.

When Albanese invoked ‘liberal tyrannies’, she was not merely describing this hypocrisy; she was naming a system of domination that survives through moral alibi. Liberalism justifies its wars, coups and blockades as defences of freedom; it frames resistance as fanaticism; it punishes the weak in the name of justice and order.

From the Congo to Iraq, the liberal world perfected an empire of innocence–its violence always reluctant, always regrettable, always necessary. Through the Cold War, Western governments sponsored coups from Iran to Chile, from the Congo to Guatemala, backed apartheid, and waged wars in Korea, Vietnam and Algeria–all in the name of freedom.

As Frantz Fanon wrote in 1956, when open racism began to retreat from polite society, it re-emerged as ‘cultural racism’–a claim to universal civilisation that still placed the West at its centre. Assimilation became possible for a few, and domination remained the rule for most. Its violence is always reluctant, always regrettable, always necessary. When the United States invaded Vietnam, it claimed to be defending democracy; when it bombed Belgrade or Baghdad, it spoke of humanitarian intervention. The European Union funds detention camps across Africa while celebrating itself as the guardian of human rights. The U.S. sanctions around a third of all states in the name of freedom.

This moral self-deception has consequences not only abroad but at home. The same logic that divides the world into civilised and barbaric reproduces itself in domestic hierarchies: the migrant detained, the poor criminalised, the protester surveilled. The imperial boomerang brings the frontier inward.

To expose this is not to reject every liberal advance–the extension of suffrage, the curbing of arbitrary power, the defence of certain rights hard-won by struggle–but to see how those gains have been contained within a system that cannot offer them to all, that cannot, by its nature, deliver equality or peace. The liberal state has always depended on a class structure that concentrates wealth, and an imperial structure that externalises costs. Its promise of progress conceals a reality of extraction.

Europe, as Césaire wrote, is ‘indefensible’ not as a place but as a project–first imagined as a Christian civilisation defined against Islam, and later as the home of reason defined against savagery. In 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean marked the birth of that project’s world dominion–justified first in the language of religion, and later, under liberalism, in the language of science and race. The claim to civilisational superiority was constant.

Resisting Power
Yet the façade is cracking. The ‘rules-based order’ proclaimed after 1991 is now openly flouted by its architects; the authority of Western moralism wanes as the record of Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza stands exposed. There have been earlier moments when the apocalypse of empire was briefly recognised as revelation: when France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria shattered its republican illusions; when millions marched against the war in Vietnam; when London saw its largest ever protests on the eve of the devastation of Iraq–each moment a brief lifting of the veil, before it was drawn again.

Across the Global South, a new confidence is emerging–a sense that history’s moral centre of gravity may be shifting. South Africa’s case at The Hague is part of that shift. So too are the regional solidarities forming around it, from Latin America to Asia. These are early and uneven stirrings, not yet a coherent bloc, but they carry the echo of Bandung: the conviction that the peoples once ruled by liberal empires might speak again in their own name.

This is why Albanese’s words electrified her audience. To call out liberal tyrannies is to refuse the old deferential language in which the South must plead while the North judges. It is to insist that moral authority belongs not to the powerful but to those who resist their power.

Possibility of Renewal
If the liberal order is tyrannical, what comes after it? Albanese did not prescribe a new ideology. But implicit in her appeal was the demand for an ethics of equality untethered from empire–an order grounded not in pity or philanthropy but in solidarity. That will require rebuilding international law from below, reclaiming democracy from oligarchy, and confronting the economic despotism that liberalism has naturalised.

Such transformations are far from imminent. But when apocalypse is revelation, there is a possibility of renewal. What must end, she suggested, is the capacity of Western liberalism to veil its own violence–to restore the veil of Maya every time it is torn away. The powers that sustain liberal tyranny remain vast, their narratives deeply woven into the institutions and imaginations of the world. But cracks have appeared, and through them another horizon becomes visible.

The epoch that began in 1492–Europe’s planetary domination–is drawing to a close. Economic and political tectonics are shifting, and with them the balance of moral power. The end of Western hegemony will not by itself bring justice, but it may finally unbind the idea of freedom from the civilisation that claimed to own it.

Albanese’s closing words–liberal tyrannies–carry enormous power, ringing metallic power. To think beyond liberal tyrannies requires us, as Césaire urged, to ‘see clearly, to think clearly–that is, dangerously’.

https://mronline.org/2025/11/20/liberal-tyrannies/

[blindpig]

Mere Anarchy.
What did you expect, Liberals?
Aurelien
Jan 14, 2026

Last week, I suggested that these days governments and the private sector were increasingly following a policy of nihilistic destruction, which was the logical, if uncomfortable, outcome of the kind of apocalyptic individualism now rampant everywhere after the unchallenged triumph of Liberal ideas.

I think that case is sufficiently well established, and this week I want to look in more detail at specific areas where this is happening, or has even happened, and consider what some of the practical consequences may be. They are all logically deducible from the ultra-individualist, almost autistic, mindset that Liberalism at its worst entails, and it may be worth saying just a word about that first.

Any system of radical individualism reduces relations with other people to one of three sorts. Either they are competitors, and thus a challenge to the Liberal ego and to its personal and financial freedom, or they are subordinates, to be used to secure more personal and financial benefits for yourself, or finally they are Non-Playing Characters, to be manipulated, ordered around, remonstrated with and legislated for, such that the world that results is closer to your vision of how it should be. This is to say that in a Liberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned. (The disastrous argument that “the personal is political” extends this thinking to personal relations, which are then seen as the equivalent of political or business alliances based purely and temporarily on mutual self-interest.)

Such a mindset is only interested in the more distant world insofar as it can benefit from it, and insofar as it can reshape it to correspond better to the desires of its ego. Wars or famines overseas offend the Liberal concept of how things should be, and it’s therefore normal to demand that Somebody should Do Something, to bring the world closer to how it should look. (People starving in the streets, on the other hand, is just How Things Are.) So there develops a sense of fear and disorientation when crises such as those in Ukraine and Gaza cannot be confined to the symbolic level, and escape from the TV or the Internet to have indirect and even direct practical consequences near home. Indeed, and as we’ll see, the fact that Liberal politics consists very largely of the manipulation of symbols makes it especially ill-adapted to the real-life difficulties of the world today. Perhaps never before in human history, therefore, has so much been misunderstood about so many important things by the few who govern us.

Liberalism is about instant ego gratification and its fundamental state of mind is adolescent. It is as pointless to expect a Liberal society to care about the future as it is to expect a teenager to think seriously about retirement. The kind of nihilistic looting I described last week is entirely logical for the Liberal mind: I won’t be around in a hundred years, why should I bother? My wealth will shield me from the consequences of that problem, why should I bother? I will never go to that part of the world or meet those people. Why should I bother? Why not extract the maximum short-term benefit I can for myself, and stuff the others and stuff the future? (And of course the more I destroy, the less there is left for others.)

Some of that benefit is intellectual, or at least it is presented as such. Controlling the lives, and even the speech and thoughts of others, and thus trying to remake societies, can be very exciting and fulfilling in certain cases. Now there is, of course, a long and honourable history of social reform, in which some Liberals in the past participated, and which was designed to do practical things to make the lives of ordinary people better. But the modern tradition of social reform deals overwhelmingly in signs and symbols, in abstractions and norms, with the intention of taking the giant Lego set that is society, and making a more pleasing design out of it. And because the motivation is fundamentally aesthetic (even if it wears ideological garments) negative results are irrelevant.

Education theory is a good example, because it can be practiced on Other Peoples’ Children, and so nobody of importance will be hurt when things go wrong. Whilst the subject of education is vast, and I am not an expert on it, there is one tendency that every parent has seen. That is the belief that “forcing” children to learn things is aesthetically wrong, and that children should “work things out for themselves,“ except perhaps in such areas as gender studies. What this means in practice, for example, is that in many countries children are not taught to read phonetically as was traditionally the case, but by deduction from looking at words with similar letters. This doesn’t work, and has led to a catastrophic decline in literacy in many countries, but that’s irrelevant, because the model itself is non-hierarchical and participative, which means it must be aesthetically and ideologically right. The same is true of mathematics, where, as Tom Lehrer remarked acidly sixty years ago now, “the idea is to understand what you are doing, rather than to get the right answer.” It’s rather as if there were no driving tests and no driving instruction, and aspiring drivers were told to “work it out for yourself.” (Psychologically, of course, rote learning has always been more effective because, by making certain rules and procedures automatic, the conscious mind is freed for other things.) And indeed the schools that Our Children go to still use traditional methods.

If we take the above as a fair representation of the mentality that has brought us to where we are today, then we need to look at some of the practical consequences of this combination of apocalyptic selfishness and indifference to consequences in the real world.

Most of them cluster in some form around politics as a career, and the political systems of western countries. Here, it is always useful to distinguish between form and substance. What I mean by that is that the formal structure of politics has remained one based around the assumption of two or more parties with different beliefs and objectives, and competition between them to form a government. Our vocabulary, our concepts and our expectations are essentially unchanged from those of fifty years ago. This is why people naively expect that voting in a new government will change things, and complain when it doesn’t. Yet the actual substance of politics today is a largely post-ideological struggle for power, not between Parties as such but between collections of individuals with episodically overlapping personal interests. Those who complain that politics increasingly resembles competition between manufacturers of breakfast foods see more clearly than perhaps they realise, with the difference that such manufacturers do at least praise the virtues of their products: political argument today consists of little else but nihilistic attempts to destroy the opposition.

We have arrived at what I like to call The Party, because politics today in western countries increasingly resembles politics in a one-party state: fundamental ideological conformity, combined with vicious personal rivalries and violent arguments over points of detail. On the one hand there are pre-emptive moral norms to be obeyed, on the other hand a series of allegedly “scientific” theories about the workings of the economy. Neither the one nor the other is to be questioned. These assumptions are pretty much common among our political elites and the parasitic Professional and Managerial caste (PMC) which services them. All opposition, or even (and perhaps especially) intelligent criticism, is ruled out in advance. The result is a discourse which on the one hand is dominant (you find it everywhere) and on the other hard is marginal (because outside the PMC, nobody believes it.) In traditional one-party states a lot of effort went into spreading the word and mobilising the masses. Today’s Party cannot be bothered with such trivia, and relies on picking off and destroying visible opposition through the use of social media and, if necessary, imposed ideological discipline.

The problem is that we don’t actually live in one-party states. There are still elections, there is still space for new political parties and new actors, and the Party has absolutely no idea how to deal with them. The smug, introverted world in which Party functionaries live is not the real world that most of us inhabit. To actually take power and to formally rule, it’s necessary to do tedious things like win elections, and the Party is not very good at that. It is so sure of the correctness of its ideas that it doesn’t actually try to persuade the unpersuaded: it instructs and insults them. Having no real ideology of its own except power, it simply demands that the electorate vote for them. Surprisingly enough, this isn’t working, and because our modern political class has never had to develop basic political skills, it now has no idea what to do now.

The PMC is heir to an elitist political tradition found at different places and times, which distrusts the common people and feels itself inherently superior, and uniquely entitled to rule. The problem is that whereas the Greek concept of rule by the Best People (aristoi), or the later concept of rule by divine election, or even the contemporary theories of Political Islam, can actually be set out in rational terms and people can in principle be persuaded of them, nothing similar exists today. In true Liberal tradition, the justification for their rule by today’s elites is essentially one of assertion: by pseudo-science on the one hand and vituperation on the other. No wonder it’s hard to find converts outside the PMC. Let’s look at each of those two, and the potential consequences.

I suggested earlier that the politics of Liberalism are about symbolic manipulation. Certain ideas are held to be true because they are emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, and no opposition to them is allowed. Now this is partly traditional Liberal elitist arrogance, the product of a technocratic mindset that believes all problems have a single rational solution. It is well summed up in Simone Weil’s posthumously published essay advocating the abolition of political parties (as, she notes, cocaine has been banned, so why not political parties that are just as dangerous?) Parties, she thought, are just instruments of division and emotion. She quotes with approval Rousseau’s idea that, whilst passions vary, all rational examinations of a question will necessarily arrive at the same conclusion. Parties, and by implication debate, are thus unnecessary. It is striking that this totalitarian Liberal approach provoked so little opposition in 1950, when the essay was published, or even today.

But it is partly also the second- and third-order result of the confused intellectual heritage of the sixties and seventies, in which the teachers of today’s PMC grew up, and which I wrote about in one of my first essays. If theory is more important than reality, if facts are, as Althusser maintained “concepts of an ideological nature,” which have to be tested against theory to see if they are correct, then any form of traditional pragmatic government is pointless. If it’s true that uncontrolled immigration, or the export of jobs overseas accompanied by de-industrialisation, are good things, then any evidence suggesting the contrary is by definition wrong and can be ignored. Thus, in the case of Ukraine, since (1) western arms, technology and training are inherently superior to those of Russia and (2) any country applying the economic policies favoured by Moscow must be heading for disaster, then victory, or at least the defeat of Moscow, is inevitable. It’s just a question of time. And if it’s symbols that fundamentally matter, then it’s more important to have, say, a Police Chief with the right skin colour than it is to stop rising crime, since crimes themselves are only ideological concepts.

The trouble is that for most people, life is not about symbolic manipulation and ideological concepts, but the struggle to survive. Traditionally, political parties have listened to their voters and tried to articulate their concerns. This habit, now denounced as “populism,” has been replaced by a stony disinterest in the lives of ordinary people and a refusal to listen to their worries and aspirations. In a genuine one-party state (where such things might well not happen anyway) dissidents could in theory be ignored. In states that retain the formal trappings of multi-party systems, however, there is always the chance that political figures and even parties will emerge that do actually articulate popular concerns, and do promote popular aspirations. At that point, our modern political elite does not know what to do, because they no longer have the political skills to respond to such a challenge, even if they thought they needed to do so.

One response has been to try to occupy the whole of the political space, by claiming to be “above” or “beyond” traditional distinctions of Left and Right. But the problem is that voters no longer think in these abstract terms, and they are far more interested in what governments do in practice than what they say in theory. The result of this attempt, unsurprisingly perhaps, has been the destruction of traditional parties of Left and Right, and their ingestion by a featureless Blob with an amorphous and vaguely Liberal ideology, in which, as I suggested last week, individual politicians seek their own advancement at the cost of any remaining party loyalty. The problem is that the Blob and its ideas are usually very unpopular, and it has been impossible to prevent the rise of individuals and parties from outside it. In France, where this process is the most advanced, Mr Macron has succeeded in largely destroying the parties of the traditional Left and Right, in part by offering some of their major personalities government positions. The result has been a “centrist” block which has not had a majority since 2022, and will probably disappear at the next elections, leaving a gaping hole where conventional French politics used to be. Neither the Rassemblement national of Marine Le Pen, nor the Islamo-Wokist clown car of Mr Mélenchon can hope to fill the gap, and there is a great deal of alarm about what might follow in 2027.

The other response has been to demonise ideas that are not currently held by the PMC (even if they were in the past) to demonise their exponents, and even to demonise those who, through their actions or their inaction, might possibly “strengthen” those who have these wrong ideas. Indeed, if you are not a fully paid-up member of the PMC, and don’t parrot its ideology faithfully, you are seen as by definition part of the problem. The actual problem, of course, is that these negative criteria are broad enough to include nearly all of us. However, we are instructed not to vote for certain people, sympathise with certain opinions, or fail to condemn them strongly enough. In particular, the idea that even mentioning certain subjects will “strengthen the extreme Right,” has become a central part of the PMC discourse.

Ah, yes. The “extreme Right.” Or if you prefer, the “ultra-Right” or the “hard Right.” (What became of the old centre-Right in this discourse is impossible to say.) And by the usual process of the inflation of political terms, we have to add “fascist” and even “Nazi” as well. Phew. It’s worth pointing out that these are terms of abuse, not objective labels, and that very few of the PMC, who wield them like clubs, could actually explain what they mean by them. The idea that at even mentioning such subjects will “strengthen the “Fascist-Nazi-Right” (OK, I made that one up) is particularly bizarre, and frankly stupid in terms of practical politics. If you refuse to talk about the problems of ordinary people, and then try to forbid anyone else from talking about those same problems, you simply discredit yourself, and leave the field open for others. The explanation, of course, is that the PMC understands little, is deeply divided in spite of its surface unity, and so finds it impossible to articulate policies, or even positions, on most sensitive issues. Thus, treatment of women in immigrant communities, including child marriage, polygamy and genital mutilation, pits feminists on the one hand against anti-racists on the other, and both have significant support within the PMC. Any open debate about these subjects would result in different interest groups clawing each other’s eyes out, so it is important that they are not raised by the PMC, and that others are prevented from raising them as well. Only in that way can an uneasy internal peace be maintained.

But you can only take this so far. When you have evacuated politics of every remotely sensitive subject and forbidden its discussion elsewhere, you have nothing to offer your prospective voters apart from the chance to hate. Your only argument is that there is a [fill in your own term] Right that must be defeated at all costs, even if it means people voting not just against their own interests, but against common sense. It’s striking in any case quite often the political programmes of the [fill in your own term] Right are not very different from the policies of centre-Right governments of a generation ago, nor, in some cases, from policies of governments of the Left. I’ve heard it argued, for example, that immigrant parents who came to France partly so their children could have a better education, should not complain about educational standards because this could be interpreted as an argument against uncontrolled immigration, and so could strengthen the [something] Right.” When you treat people like idiots, they just ignore you and walk away, and it’s hard to blame them. And now the latest trick is to claim that saying certain things, or for that matter not saying them,“strengthens” some weird and improbable international cabal of people like President Xi, Mr Putin and Mr Orban.

Clearly, this sort of wild thrashing around is based on fear, and that fear is frankly justified. Because the purely negative rhetoric of the Party, painting our current situation as a rerun of the 1930s, and treating every election as the last chance to defeat the forces of darkness, simply isn’t working. In fact, as any traditional politician could have told them, refusing to offer the electorate anything except gimmicks, and talking incessantly about your opponents, actually strengthens those opponents. Thus, whilst psephological swings come and go, the [something] Right continues to gain strength, as do other parties on the fringes of the conventional political system, and as indeed does the Abstention Party, which is gaining ground even in countries where electoral participation has been high. So the most likely scenario for 2027 in France is that the RN—by far the most successful party in 2022, with 37% of the vote—will have an even larger number of seats but not an absolute majority and, once again, it will be impossible to form a stable government. And the level of participation will continue to fall, as people see no point in voting. (The outcome of the 2027 Presidential election is frankly impossible to foresee.) There is no magic about liberal democratic systems after all, no categorical imperative to get out and vote, or even take an interest in politics. Political systems have to earn support, and the Party in every western country has not only failed to earn it, it has refused even to see the need to do so.

None of this should be surprising. I made the point last week that political systems require care and maintenance to avoid the effects of entropy, and that by and large this has not been done.But this problem goes beyond just elections. Why should I pay taxes, after all? Why should I even obey the law, to support a government that insults me? And ultimately, why should I not give my support and loyalty to something other than the government?

This brings us to the question of legitimacy. Now, like pretty much the whole vocabulary of liberal democratic politics (including “liberal” and “democracy,”) there is no agreement on what the word actually means, and too much speculation is in any case discouraged. The dictionary does not help, because we discover that “legitimacy” comes from the same Latin root (Lex, meaning “law”) as “Legal” and other associated words. So a legitimate government is one that has been elected according to the appropriate law, and a legitimate organisation is one that obeys the law. Thank you. In other words, legitimacy is really nothing more than another Liberal box-ticking exercise, part of Liberalism’s obsession with procedure rather than purpose. If the rules have been followed, then a government is legitimately elected. Now of course this argument is a circular one, but it’s actually worse than that, because much depends on who makes the law in the first place. Elections in the old Soviet Union were governed by laws, and as far as we can tell these laws were followed. Yet the West did not regard the Soviet government as legitimate.

Other societies see things differently, taking legitimacy to be something transactional, that must be earned, and can be lost (curiously, like entropy if you think about it.) A government that leaves people to die of hunger in the streets may have been elected through a procedure which faultlessly obeyed the rules, yet many people would regard it as illegitimate in some wider sense. And there can be real questions about representivity as well, especially in cases where only half of the population even vote. “We followed the rules” doesn’t seem to be an adequate justification. In other cases (classically, the Ivory Coast elections of 2010), the result depends on the strength of various ethnic groups in the country, and even who is treated as eligible to vote. In such controversial cases, to regard the winner of an election by a couple of percentage points as legitimate, in the sense that a rugby victory by a couple of points is legitimate, simply doesn’t make sense. As more than one African said to me at the time about the western obsession with Outtara’s narrow victory, and the ultimate use of the military to enforce it, “we don’t do things that way here.” But the fact is that when you see politics as nothing more than the struggle for power, without an ideological content, then that is indeed how you do things.

Moreover, sometimes the wrong side wins, especially when “populist” forces of the “extreme Right” are successful. In that case, something must have gone wrong, so the government is not actually legitimate, even if the rules were followed. Usually, this resolves itself overtly into hand-waving about “interference” from some ill-intentioned outside group. (Our leaders, after all, think that we are fundamentally stupid and will believe anything.) In essence, though, it’s really about the Liberal conviction that the world is full of sensible, rational people like them, who think the same as them, and so, following Simone Weil, if the results of an election don’t correspond to what rational, sensible people should think ought to have happened, there must be something wrong with the elections. And sometimes, among those parts of the PMC who read books, or at least have heard of them, it will be argued that anyone who wants to escape the suffocating straitjacket of permitted PMC ideology is actually suffering from some authoritarian personality disorder, and references to Adorno, Arendt and Reich will swiftly follow.

But this whole system is clearly breaking down. The pattern for the future is likely to be the decline of the Party in its different manifestations, and the rise of protest movement parties, often transient, such that in parliamentary systems no government is possible, and in Presidential systems the result will inevitably be disputed, perhaps violently. The lack of any agreed understanding of what legitimacy is, means that it will be impossible even to discuss such questions intelligently. Likewise, the draining of any real substance out of politics makes it effectively impossible to organise a political party around any ideological programme: nobody would understand what you were talking about.

In effect, people are just asking to be heard, asking to have their concerns at least acknowledged, and asking that the governments of various countries take their interests into account. That’s not much to ask, but it’s more than the Party is prepared to offer, or indeed is capable of offering without destroying itself. The result is likely to be less and less support for existing political systems, more discontent, protest movements and single-issue parties, and countries that are increasingly less governable. At least.

So what options would be open to western governments then? The trite answer, of course, is repression, and here it’s normal to talk about surveillance, militarisation, new laws, intolerance of dissent, and so forth. None of this is necessarily wrong, but it’s better to see such developments as demonstrating weakness rather than strength, and fear rather than any desire for repression for its own sake. (Indeed, the desire for repression for its own sake is pretty rare in history, if not actually unknown.) But there are some fundamental distinctions here, which are often ignored.

Where there is an organised dissident group, ready to use violence if necessary, then in theory at least there is a good chance of disrupting it. The practical problem, though, is essentially one of numbers. Many terrorist attacks, in Europe anyway, have been carried out by people who were in some way known to the authorities, and enquiries afterwards inevitably criticise those authorities for not having acted earlier, and prevented the violence. The difficulty is that medium-sized western state with competent security authorities may well have 10,000 names of security interest in a database, for all sorts of reasons. Yes, there are various clever technologies that might alert you to the possibility that something will happen, but no more than that. To actually track peoples’ movements over an extended period of time requires significant resources: I’ve heard anything from 6 to 12 operatives per target for 24-hour cover, and there’s a limit to how long and how often you can do that. In any event, an increasing number of violent attacks are by individuals, unknown to anyone, who just decide to kill people one day. Nothing can prevent that.

But actually, that’s not the point. The fear that the Party has is less of individuals and small groups than of some kind of mass actions. Here, it’s even more a question of numbers. To actually, genuinely, identify and crush dissent on a massive scale, you need a massive organisation. It’s generally reckoned that in the old East Germany and in Ceausescu’s Romania, 10% of the population was involved in regime security, some as professionals, the rest as informers and unofficial helpers. No western state has remotely the resources to do anything of that kind, nor ever will, not least because the states themselves are becoming less capable all the time. Once more, and with a vengeance, it’s all about numbers.

What we think of as “repressive” states generally target only those they feel will be a danger to the regime, or who may in some way challenge the power structure. Those who do not openly challenge tend to be left alone. In fact, very few states, no matter how repressive in theory, can actually sustain themselves in the face of genuinely large-scale opposition: the Stasi could not prevent East Germany from disappearing almost overnight. The security forces of even tyrannical regimes may be formidable in theory, but they are seldom prepared to die for their patrons. Indeed, it turned out that regimes that the West had considered “strong,” such as those in Libya and in Syria, were actually built on sand, and violent repression simply produced even more violent opposition.

Fantasies or nightmares of soldiers and police shooting demonstrators are rare as well: Eisenstein’s October is basically a work of fantasy. Most regimes fall when their protectors decide they’ve had enough and go home. I recall watching, with a colleague, a live broadcast from Belgrade in 2000, when demonstrators broke into the Presidential Palace, and the armed MUP guards did nothing to stop them. We exchanged looks: “that’s it, it’s over,” said my colleague, and of course he was right. Likewise, no-one in Brussels today is going to die for Mrs von der Leyen.

Yet again, it’s really about numbers. Western states have very few forces trained in public order duties (the military don’t want the job and in general are useless at it.) Even a country like France, with a tradition of violent street demonstrations, could mobilise fewer than 80,000 police and gendarmes during the Gilets jaunes protests of 2018/19: essentially everyone who was available, and of that number barely a quarter were actually trained in public order duties. For that reason, the forces of order could only intervene from time to time, mainly when the safety of individuals was threatened. Many shopping centres and businesses were destroyed while the police stood by, and, had the demonstrations gone on for much longer, or been a little larger, something in the system would have broken. And most western countries have proportionately fewer trained personnel than that. It is quite easy to foresee that really large scale protests in western countries would overwhelm the forces of order quite quickly, and the government would lose control of the streets.

None of this means that individual governments won’t do stupid things; They might try to introduce more oppressive measures and laws, they might try to recruit larger public order forces, they may try to censure the traditional media and control social media. But there is only so much they can do to counteract the problem of sheer numbers. They could in theory change their laws to allow the use of lethal force against demonstrators by police and soldiers, but that would be a huge and bitterly controversial step and might well bring governments down anyway, even if the uniformed personnel were ready to obey such orders.

But what do you do then? When the government has retreated into its bunkers and tens of thousands of angry protesters roam the street, what happens next? I’ve always argued that you can’t beat something with nothing. The PMC state has an ideology and an organisation, even if they aren’t up to much. But where is the counter-ideology? Where is the counter-organisation? Successful changes of power structure come when there is an alternative waiting: this was the case of the Jacobins in 1793, the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Nazis in 1933, the Islamists in Iran in 1979, and more recently the same Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt. As Curzio Malaparte pointed out long ago, a coup d’état is a technical matter. It needs a long period of preparation and a skilled and disciplined group of conspirators. The Islamists in Iran had invested decades in preparations for the Revolution and had a complete ideology available. The current protestors there have nothing comparable. Yeats’s The Second Coming has been cited for years now, but it’s not just that “the best lack all conviction,” it’s that they lack organisation as well. And in general the worst are just after money.

So we risk the worst of all possible worlds. The political system will become increasingly fragmented and the state itself, including the security forces, will become progressively weaker and demotivated. But politics does not tolerate a vacuum. What political scientists call “ungoverned spaces” don’t actually exist: they are just governed by forces we cannot see. In many parts of the world they include tribal and clan structures, extended family networks, religious organisations and disciplined political parties. We have none of those. Nobody is going to band together to die for inclusive toilets. Ethnic and religious identities exist, of course, but they are not a basis for organisation and political struggle. (The idea that “ethic minorities” could constitute a politically useful bloc in times of crisis will get a large bucket of cold water thrown over it.) The politics of destruction I described last week has ensured not only the destruction of its practitioners, but of any organised means of replacing them. Thus, the future of Europe is more likely to resemble the chaos of factional warfare in Syria and Libya than it is the revolutionary transfer of power that occurred in Iran.

The result will be a kind of anarchy. Not the hippy anarchy of the 1960s, but the anarchy we see today in the suburbs of some major cities in Europe, where the police do not go, and the State as a whole does not intervene. There is an order of sorts, but it is enforced by drug dealers and organised criminal gangs, often linked with religious extremists, who fight each other openly for power and wealth, and corrupt what remains of the local political systems. Such forces can be driven out temporarily, but the resources, and more importantly the social and ideological foundations, for a better system, simply don’t exist. These groups profit from the basic rules of power: you don’t have to be objectively strong, just less weak, and you don’t have to be objectively organised, just less disorganised than anyone else. The current model of control of parts of cities by overlapping groups of criminals and religious extremists may start to generalise quite quickly. At that point, the PMC’s incantations against the [something] Right will reach their logical conclusion, and that Right itself will start to take de facto power of its own in certain places. It’s a lot larger and a lot meaner than the drug gangs and the men with beards.

Thus, the epitaph on the PMC, if there’s anyone around to write it, will be that its extreme Liberalism eventually produced the very forces that destroyed it. After all, is there anything more impeccably Liberal than the criminal, pursuing individual personal freedom and financial benefit? We’ll see, soon enough, what the final results are.

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/mere-anarchy

[blindpig]

The US Professional Managerial Class (PMC) Meets The Long Knives

The Long Knives Are Out For The Non-Conforming PMC
Roger Boyd
Jan 23, 2026



The US oligarchy has moved to a much more authoritarian orientation, but it has a problem that the courtier class (referred to as the PMC by many commentators) has for many decades been inculcated with the ideology required to support the previous orientation. This is the “hegemonic culture” that Gramsci identified as being needed to efficiently and effectively rule a modern capitalist state with a literate population that also possesses freedom of movement and occupation. The embedding of a “false consciousness” within the minds of the population that both supports oligarch rule and obfuscates the real basis of power, working with coercion (e.g. the need to earn a living to feed oneself) and violence (e.g. imprisonment if one strays too far outside the allowable political lines) to discipline the general population into subservience.

The PMC which is spread across many sectors, such as academia, media, corporate and institutional management and the legal profession, is critical to the maintenance of the hegemonic culture and is therefore always the most brainwashed with it. Believing that the performative elections make a real difference, that the academy is all about the search for knowledge rather than predominantly a co-creator and inculcator of the hegemonic culture, that the law is somehow “fair”, that their good work can really “make a difference”, that liberalism isn’t really all about the powerful having the freedom to exploit the less powerful. And most of all, that the PMC really rules society; perhaps the biggest lie of all that has been swallowed by so many even “leftist” commentators.

But the PMC does not rule society, the oligarchy does; the PMC are just the well paid and looked after courtiers of the oligarchy. And now the oligarchy needs a new PMC, one which is aligned with their new orientation that is at least partially removing the liberal glove from the authoritarian fist. There are many in the PMC that are pure sociopathic careerists, who will always serve whoever is in power in whatever way necessary. We see them quickly picking up the security services and other state funding and positions to push such things as the gaslighting of “disinformation” (Big Brother is telling the truth, we need to ban those people who lie about Big Brother and make things up!), and crying the crocodile tears for the Venezuelan people so subjugated by the nasty Maduro (yeah, its not really the bone crushing sanctions, and constant foreign and domestic elite sabotage that brought Venezuela to its knees!). But many in the PMC truly believed in the now outdated hegemonic culture and in their own “ethics”.

It is these that must be cleansed from the PMC, or forced into silence and submission if they cannot be flushed (e.g. tenured professors). That’s why project 2025 included a major downsizing of the administrative state, to facilitate a major cleansing and disciplining of those that remained. The Trump administration has dutifully followed this plan. In addition, started under the Biden administration, the universities have been targeted to force a climate of fear through the use of the bogus “anti-semitism”; with Deans who do not “get the message” quickly being removed. Let’s remember also that university boards of governance are packed with members and representatives of the oligarchy, and half of social science academic funding is provided by plutocratic foundations (e.g. Rockefeller, Ford). Under the Trump administration, government research funding has been used against universities that “do not get the message”.

With respect to the media, even some of the most imperial and oligarch serving journalists and commentators are not properly aligned with the new oligarch authoritarianism. The Zionist oligarch owned CBS (part of Paramount) has been take over by an even more extreme Zionist oligarch, and CBS News turned over to the extremist mouthpiece Bari Weiss. It looks like Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN, is being handed over to Netflix. The journalists in other networks such as ABC (owned by Walt Disney, headed by a Jewish Zionist CEO) and NBC (owned by Comcast which is controlled by the Jewish Zionist Roberts oligarch family) have been served notice that they need to “get with the program” or else. The Pentagon has put in place new restrictive rules on journalists, who have rolled over after some performative complaining.

The PMC will be cleansed and subjugated as it is simply the governance and management tool of the capitalist oligarchy that rules the United States. Many members of the PMC will come face to face with the truth that they were never the rulers and are readily expendable if they don’t “get with the new program”.

The extremist actions of the current administration have also driven many members of the PMC to resign, which ends up facilitating the oligarch policy of cleansing the PMC. One less misaligned government attorney, regulator or official is a step forward for the policy, whether the official is fired, downsized or leaves of their own volition. The oligarchy has moved on, and the PMC will be cleansed to align with their new orientation. Just like the German oligarchy had Hitler cleanse the SA when it had served its purpose and become problematic; having bought into the false Nazi rhetoric against the bosses. In some ways, the SA was a German version of MAGA with a membership predominantly from working class and petit bourgeois backgrounds that really did want to take down the “bosses”. When push came to shove, Hitler chose the oligarchy over Rohm - a man that he had spent 20 years closely working with.

Trump is doing the oligarchy’s work, if he wasn’t he would be stopped. His is the act of a showman, keeping the focus away from those that have power over the script, the choice of the actors, and the underlying objectives. This may be the “Years of the Long Knives” with much less explicit violence, but it will serve the same purpose. The oligarchy has moved on and needs to flush the previously useful tools that have now become problematic. It is the only way that they can reliably create a new hegemonic culture, more explicitly backed with coercion and violence.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/the-us ... rial-class