NAVIGATING THE TWO-WAY RIVER

ARE POLITICS REALLY DOWNSTREAM OF CULTURE? AND WHAT IF THEY'RE NOT?

It’s become something of a cliché these days for dissidents of the managerial regime to invoke the phrase, probably most widely associated to Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream from culture. In fact, the basic idea is certainly older than that. It was at the core of Antonio Gramsci’s theory. And indeed it has become something of a cliché to observe the oddness of our political world in which we have leftwing Schmittians and rightwing Gramscians. There’s a lot here though that I don’t think stands up to close scrutiny.

First, longtime readers to this substack will have noticed that I almost never speak in the language of “left and right.” It’s not that I don’t think such divisions exist. Though I do find that the use of those terms tends to promote a lot of muddled thinking. It’s more though that I don’t think the distinctions are all that useful. For the most part, what is called left is subsumed under the agenda of the managerial class. And by using the latter term, one avoids the confusion of lumping together that “most part” and those cases of people on the left who do oppose the managerial regime.¹

The real point I want to make though dates back to a time when the naked hand of managerial power wasn’t as obvious to as many people as it is today, and so the “left and right” thing tended to be the go-to model. To be clearer, though, let’s instead invoke Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the constrained and unconstrained vision of human potential. For me, unconstrained refers to what has traditionally been called the left, and it certainly is the vision of human potential that informs the managerial regime. The constrained vision is the one usually associated with the right — though there are many explanations for the constraint: e.g., original sin, evolved human nature, path dependency, system entropy. And understandably it is this constrained vision which is more likely found in opposition to the social engineering agenda of the managerial class. But, with all that clear, I will use the less useful “left and right” nomenclature here, at least more than I normally would, just because what I’m discussing has so often been described through that language.

The rightwing Gramsci crowd, following the reasoning at the heart of Breitbart’s pithy aphorism, has long argued that before politics can be changed in America (and this is a view replicated against much of the managerial liberal world order: this view for instance was a central pillar of the original French New Right), culture must be changed first. A revolution in culture is required to lay the foundation for changing politics. Now, as I’ll point out in a moment, I already think this is wrong. But the error is exacerbated by the common retort that of course this downstream claim is true, because this is how the “left” gained power. And invariably we’ll get quotations from 1960s student radicals invoking the “long march through the institutions.” And, hey, look at how “the left” over the last 60-70 years have indeed gradually infiltrated all the apparatus of the regime: e.g., academia, media, Hollywood — even the corporations. So, yes, that’s what “the left” must have done, and if the strategy worked for them, so it can work for dissidents of the regime.

Well, no: I think this is all wrong.

First, I just want to quickly observe why it’s not very convincing to argue that politics is inherently downstream from culture. Then, I want to take on this supposedly airtight case of the “long march” as proof of the prior proposition. Finally, I’ll show how all this fits into the strategic vision of the new populism which I’ve been exploring over recent months.

Let’s begin with a stark case. In Canada the government for decades has been leveraging taxpayer dollars to create and enforce a policy of “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism, in this context though, is not some vague, spontaneous yearning. It is a dedicated policy, enforced through government coercion and taxing powers. Not only does such policy directly make Canadian culture as it creates anti-assimilation incentives for immigrants to the country, but in the process it has marginalized elements of an older Canadian culture: e.g., for many decades now there has been an ongoing concern about whether it’s ethnocentric (re: racist) of Canadians to wish each other a Merry Christmas, because it might offend all those other “multi” cultures which government policy has been actively promoting. Whether you think these cultural changes are good or not, the point is that they have been actively instantiated by government policy. So, being a product of government policy, that would be politics, right? With culture downstream of it.

Likewise, in the U.S., was it not government branches that banned prayer in school; imposed discriminatory hiring and school admission practices of affirmative action; mandated the national implementation of gay marriage; and compromised, through the ACA, the family- and community-based patient-doctor relationship model dating back before the founding? It’s almost unimaginable the cultural impact of the government’s formally recommended food pyramid (not introduced by any department of health or nutrition, but the department of agriculture), with its corporate lobbyist informed food recommendations, reaching right into the hearth of the family home. Again, the point isn’t whether or not you agree with these developments; the point is that they are government actions that have dramatically impacted culture in the U.S.

So, this idea that politics is downstream from culture simply isn’t supported by the evidence. Now, you may object that (at least in some of those cases) before the policies could have been enacted there had to be widespread cultural support for them. First, I’m not sure that’s even true. But, even if it were true, you’ve changed the position from “up a stream” to a positive feedback loop. But if it’s a loop, than it just needs to be interrupted. You can do that at either the cultural or political pole. In fact, it might even be easier and more efficient to interrupt it at the political pole.

That would seem to be the implication of the whole, multiple generation, long march through the institutions trope. In theory, it took the unconstrained vision crowd over half a century to get to where they are today. So, maybe getting elected might actually be easier. Obviously, what happened to the Trump 1.0 presidency revealed that such an approach wouldn’t be without its complications. But that was the first real populist try at it for quite a while. So, who knows? But that too is a discussion for another day.

In fact, though, as mentioned, I pretty much entirely dismiss this whole, gee, look at how successful “the left” was with its long march through the institutions, we better read some Gramsci and do the same thing, business. “Left” ideas did not succeed over the last 70 years because of some dedicated, heroic march through the institutions, winning the culture war, and so on. Rather, what really happened is that “the left’s” unconstrained vision of human capacity was simply in the right place at the right time within a society in technology-takeoff mode.

Sowell’s notion of an unconstrained vision captures the idea characteristic of “the left” that human’s are infinitely improvable. That’s why they embrace the phrase “progressive.” This of course is the very logic of managerial liberalism; if endless progress is possible than endless social engineering is justified. Undoubtedly, an unconstrained vision constitutes an optimistic opening of human potential. However, at the same time, being unconstrained eventually bumps one up against the limits of nature. The unconstrained vision tends to ever imagine and strive for freedom from nature.

That’s why we see advocates of the unconstrained vision now advancing propositions that — from the perspective of those with a constrained vision — seem unhinged. The state can print money at will, while actually suppressing the production of the goods that the money would buy; there are no natural differences between populations that evolved separately, in dramatically different environments, for many 10,000s of years; we can reduce our carbon footprint to medieval levels without sentencing hundreds of millions (at least) to death; women can be born inside of men’s bodies; and of course 2+2=5. An adherent of the constrained division can be forgiven for asking how it could be that so many people have adopted beliefs that seem utterly inconsistent with reality.

Rather than some mythical “long march,” what really happened to advance left/unconstrained ideas has been the remarkable growth of technology over the last 70 years. This technological growth has moved more of us into cities, insulating us from nitty-gritty reality. An extraordinary number of people function under the operative assumption that food is produced by grocery stores and flipping a switch creates light. Many of us live in suburbs where it is impractical to walk anywhere. Meanwhile, hordes of office drones, in lieu of doing sweat-inducing outdoors work, lift weights and run treadmills in gyms while watching cable news on TV. We have “friends” that are, possibly anonymous, avatars and “communities” composed of globally dispersed people sharing a common Facebook themed group. Tinder substitutes for courtship; pornography substitutes for sex.

The current emphasis upon fluid gender identity is simply a part of a larger transhumanist vision which sees the human individual as a mere canvas of autogenous creation. The mass tattooing and piercing was the obvious harbinger of the idea that the body would be carved up — chemically and surgically — to create an uniquely self-styled “gender.” This is the logical outcome of our technologically-denaturing environment fully penetrating the human body.

Even our communicative mediation has been radically cut off from evident natural forces. We could see the ink from a typewriter ribbon imprinted on the white page; the grooves on vinyl records; the negative images on developed photography film; the brush stokes sculping the painting. For the vast majority of people today the simulated correlates of these experiences are generated out of a vaguely magical stew of bits and pixels. Everything is degradable into computational pulses. Again, I’m not saying these developments are inherently bad. Much pleasure and convenience has resulted from them. But they have had the effect of further insulating us from the tactile experience which more closely connects one with the raw sensual data of the natural world.

Notice how the ideas of the unconstrained vision of human potential are so much less popular in small towns and rural areas where there’s still a closer connection with nature. Though I’ve no data on this, what would you expect would be the likelihood that the unconstrained vision is less popular with plumbers and carpenters than it is with computer programmers and sociology graduate students? Being daily challenged on the frontline of tactical experience goes a long way in buffering one against the excesses of unconstrained visions. For so many of us, though, reality-checks are minimalized in daily life. This technological insulation so many have experienced from reality and natural forces over the last 70 years has been the perfect breeding ground for political and cultural ideas premised on the unconstrained vision. Notions of unconstrained human potential seem more plausible to the degree people have been insulated from the awkward and bumpy reality of the natural world with its natural constraints.

So, the “left’s” victory has not been the result of some heroic march through the cultural institutions. So it is a misunderstanding of the situation that leads to the conclusion that the “right,” or the populists, can achieve political victory along that path. The “left” were merely floating along the path of least resistance. Our technology was creating the culture from which their political projects benefited, not their dutiful (Gramscian) cultural activism. Their cultural activism was closer to a symptom than a cause.

The “long march” analogy was apparently intended to invoke the Long March imposed on the Chinese people by Mao and his crew. For those of the unconstrained vision, “leftists” or managerial class apparatchiks, their rise to cultural and political power was not so much of an arduous march. It was much closer to a luxury limousine ride, chauffeured by the cyber-tech-takeoff of Western society. I’m afraid those looking to rein in the extremes of that unconstrained view, with its managerial social engineering agenda, will need to find an alternate ride.

I appreciate that, at this point, many of you are appropriately objecting: but dude, you’ve been emphasizing for months now the necessity of the new populism contributing to a rejuvenating of organic community. And yes, I have. And yes, there is an obviously large cultural dimension to the project of the new populism. I’m not saying there isn’t a necessary cultural dimension to such a project. What I’m concerned about is this Gramscian assumption that the whole thing is a cultural project: losing sight of the inescapable political dimensions to that project.

In fact, I’d emphasize two distinct such political dimensions. First, there’s a need for the creation of a governance structure that complements, nurtures, and protects organic community and its concrete institutions. That’s something that I’ll have more to say about over the coming months. But there’s a second political dimension: overthrowing the existing political strictures that smother the space for such organic community emergence under the weight of the culture industry’s, social engineering’s and bureaucratic paternalism’s colonization of both public and private life.

It would be foolish to turn a blind eye to the prospect that the pursuit of a remedy to such political obstacles could result in revolution or war. However, given the human suffering certain to ensue from the resort to such solutions, I can only hope that the new populism will succeed in gaining enough of an electoral foothold to successfully push back the administrative state sufficiently to reopen that space for organic community and the alternate path it might yet still offer.

I have said many times on this substack, consistent with the source of its title, there is no chiliastic redemption of the people. The circulation of elites are the people’s best option for a space of freedom (populism ultimately is about helping shepherd such a rebel faction of the ruling class into power); and even that will always only be a temporary reprieve. Nor do I deny that such a resolution is a long-shot; I only assert that it’s success would be preferable to the alternatives.

Such a resolution though does require that the new populism not delude itself into thinking that if it simply engages the cultural project, somehow the political conditions will magically resolve themselves. That Gramscian-inspired confusion would be a serious strategic error.

1. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the pioneering critics of the emerging managerial class have been primarily coming from and thinking within a Marxist framework. Whether such a critique constitutes shifting from an unconstrained to a constrained vision is open to debate. In some cases, certainly; in others, not really. But that’s a discussion for another time.