Rape of the Locke

Western liberalism is being replaced. What comes next is illiberal to its core.

My personal feelings about Donald Trump, both as a man and as a politician, are complicated: there are times I admit to absolutely despising him, just as there are times when I quite admire his almost aggressive candor and pointed humor. As President, he governed well for the majority of his term; where I disagreed with him — criminal justice reform, the bump stock ban, and, most crucially, his surrendering of the federal government to our health bureaucracy during Covid — I disagreed with him strongly: whatever his successes, he didn’t clean out the Deep State; he didn’t get his wall built; and his propensity to be flattered into compliance with the policy and personnel choices of snakes and scoundrels expose his fatal flaw: narcissism. He can be controlled by those who pretend to worship him. And this is a problem we can’t ignore, and one I’m not convinced he’s adequately examined.

— Which is why my support for his repeat run has to this point remained rather tepid. Should he receive the nomination, I’ll support him; anything is better than what we have now. But I’m not certain how sanguine I’d be about his chances in a general election, even against a weak Democrat field. Some people — in both parties — are motivated by nothing so important as Never Trump. And that motivation is all consuming.

Having gotten all that out of the way, I can now without prejudice assert the following: these New York charges being levied at Trump, the latest of which he barely even defended himself against, as his main attorney is focused on the ludicrous and politically-motivated indictments brought by Alvin Bragg, are at once picayune and pitiful, while simultaneously far more important than we’ve allowed thus far. That is, their relative pettiness, combined with the verve with which they are being criminally or civilly pursued, mark a frightening shift in the political space wherein unspoken rules of comity that long prevented a splintering of our two party system into diametric ideological opposition — as opposed to a system in which friendly adversaries situated within Enlightenment liberalism squabbled over policy differences, each side trying to persuade the other — have been disregarded, replaced by pure power politics.

It’s been clear for some time that the Democratic Party, having embraced the “progressivism” of Barack Obama and his acolytes, is not the Democratic Party that existed before his two terms in office. And that’s because Obama was and is a leftist first, and a Democrat only nominally — a Marxist through and through, though not only in the vulgar sense of offering a materialist critique of capitalism, but in the more “nuanced” academic iterations of Marxian thought, which manifest in Theory and praxis (the practice of instituting Theory) growing out from a number of concomitant left-wing, or Cultural Marxist movements, following from the writings of Herbert Marcuse, among others. Each of these movements conceive of the world as organized around structural social determinism — positions of power and oppression that can predict disparity in identity group outcomes — a grand Truth that requires power dynamics be constantly interrogated, and whose proponents, as Theory reifies and is run through a Social Justice pedagogy, see no point in engaging in scholarship that doesn’t actively create social change: gender studies; Queer theory; Post-Colonial Theory; Critical Race Theory; Indigenous Studies; Whiteness Studies; Fat Studies; Disabled Studies; Latin Studies, and so on, have all become active in the political — not merely theoretical or academic — arena.

This takeover of the Democratic Party has been a carefully choreographed hijacking. Keeping the name of one of the two major political parties allowed the left to infiltrate and remake the Party from within, while maintaining the support of rank-and-file Democrats — most of whom were largely oblivious to the changes, and who voted for Democrats almost by rote. That is, until Trump, whose America First project won over a number of erstwhile Democratic voters who found the ideological transformation of their Party, which they could sense by the end of the Obama Administration, was both actual and troublesome.

Without being able to articulate the nature of the change, necessarily — but recognizing it nonetheless — these voters began to gravitate toward a policy parcel that seemed to make sense for the working class and middle class: an investment in American business and bringing businesses back to the US; de-regulation; securing the border to prevent cheap labor from undercutting American workers; a cessation of constant overseas adventurism, which kept the foreign policy mavens and the military-industrial complex flush and active in their noxious attempts to re-make the world in their own images. This return to first principles, embodied in the catchy “Make America Great Again,” was muddied by both the left, who described it as “nativist,” and the neocon right, who, worrying about its so-called “nationalism,” recognized that it was hostile to the kind of globalist worldview proponents of the Neo-Conservative wing of the GOP — essentially Wilsonian Democrats in foreign policy who happen to prefer lower taxes and more business-friendly policies (including open immigration) — embrace. In short, what Trump was offering was populism — and elites in both parties despise populism with all of their being, giving, as it does, a voice to the filthies, whose credentials are simply not in order, and whose threat to upset carefully maintained hierarchies is not only unsavory but presumptuous, especially given their lack of social status.

All of this finds its metaphorical manifestation, I’d argue, in the E Jean Carroll case: there is simply no way to defend yourself against a rape charge nearly 30-years after the alleged incident took place — particularly when, as in this case, the accuser admits in her deposition that she didn’t say no, that she didn’t scream, and that she didn’t report the incident to police. Hell, she doesn’t even know with any specificity when the alleged incident happened! And yet a New York City jury, which was always going to be politically hostile to Trump, found the former President liable in the case.

And we all knew they would, especially if they could establish plausible deniability for acting purely as political partisans. They wanted to punish Trump. And by allowing this ridiculous case to be brought, the courts let them. The verdict was practically baked in once the case was allowed to proceed. The populist ogre has now been legally vilified; order of the elites, with their rules for what democracy must look like, has been restored; the ends justified the means.

This use of the legal system as punishment — lawfare — goes beyond mere political vindictiveness. This is, in fact, common practice post-Trump. It is the normalizing of political prosecution by partisan actors using the legal system as cover in a way that appeals to American sensibilities, especially the aesthetic, “rule of law,” which we’re conditioned to believe, in a neutral sense, we still live under. But we don’t. These aren’t real trials. They’re simulacra. We’ve become a Potemkin democracy. Nothing is as it seems. All is power. And power is all.

We make a crucial category error when we describe Democrats or those on the left as “liberal.” Leftism is a response, in fact, to what it sees as the inevitable failures of the western liberal project. It rejects universalism, individuality, rationalism, merit, objectivity, science, and the idea of neutrality itself — all of which it sees as mere idealized tropes created through discourse used to protect and maintain the white supremacist patriarchal hierarchy from which those ideas emerged. The left believes knowledge is positional and experiential — subjective — and that those who’ve been marginalized have a claim to special knowledge that those who don’t recognize the overarching structures of power controlling them can’t similarly see. Leftism, by its own admission, then, is illiberal; it is totalizing; it is necessarily authoritarian, because without complete “inclusivity” — a positional imperative that there is no space outside of, by definition — social change cannot be completed, and a Socially Just space cannot be imposed without resistance. In short, it has all the hallmarks of both a fundamentalist religion and a cult. To the left, a Just society is one that has achieved a critical consciousness en mass. And the only way to achieve that consciousness is to become a student of critical consciousness, to practice what it practices, believe what it believes, to become a political activist in service of its Social Justice aims, and rid society of the lingering troublemakers who refuse to get on board. All for the Greater Good, naturally.

Given that the US was founded on the western liberal principles it is the direct aim of the left to subvert and replace with its own conception of situated knowledge production, then, it’s easy to see where the social and political tension is coming from: one of the two major political parties in the US believes the country itself is illegitimate, built on oppression, constantly at work to keep hold of the power it lords over those it has intentionally and historically marginalized. It cannot be saved. It cannot be redeemed. It must be torn down and remade in the image of the critical theorist. That is, the Cultural Marxist. Nothing else must be allowed to stand. Free speech, to the extent it deters the necessary evolution into a Social Justice society, must be scrutinized and constrained; keeping arms, to the extent allowing that right unrestrained could “problematize” the takeover of society by the critically conscious once fully in power, must be held in check and ultimately, rescinded. The leftist worldview must be constantly incentivized: having the right thoughts means you can enjoy largely unfettered travels through the social sphere; having the wrong thoughts means you may lose your livelihood, get de-platformed, be labeled any number of unsavory epithets meant to leave you toxic to others.

This is not the country you were born into. In fact, it is rapidly becoming its direct inverse.

Up is down. Black is white. Meathead is Archie.

Solidly into Obama’s third term — with Biden but a mumbling turnip doing precisely what he’s told to do by activists behind the scenes — it has become almost pedestrian to hear of dubious legal cases being pursued, always unequally, always by either a partisan DOJ or partisan state DAs. That is, by leftists who have been quite intentionally insinuated into positions of power from which they can best affect social disclocation — largely by fiat or by weaponization of process. We’ve seen this tactic repeat itself over and over again, rendering itself into a recognizable pattern: January 6 defendants are held without bail while BLM rioters are set free and never charged; Trump is the target of persistent lawfare, while our Intel Agencies and news media join forces to protect Hunter Biden from scrutiny before an election; certain mass shooters have biographical details revealed by law enforcement and media almost instantly while others receive the protection of those same institutions; “misinformation” and “disinformation” charges somehow always protect government narratives; and some whistleblowers are cheered on as heroes while others are characterized as seditious. The long march, it’s fair to say, has been wildly successful.

The goal here seems to be to present us with the veneer of our own freedom — the familiarity of nostalgia — while eluding or simply tearing down every guard rail we’ve put in place to keep power from consolidating completely. And so it will eventually consolidate. Because leftism is incompatible with the liberalism upon which this country was founded and framed, there can be only one winner.

And right now, the winner is not those of us who wish to remain free and autonomous individuals. The center cannot hold.

This can’t go on much longer, I fear. Something has to give.

****

Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?