I use the term liberal literally, and probably too liberally.
Until recently I referred to myself as a classical liberal. This term has typically been characterized as embodying advocacy for free speech, civil rights, freedom of movement, rejection of war, anti-surveillance, free markets, and so on — not what the word has been twisted to now become in the political milieu in which we find ourselves — totalitarian.
Words themselves are rapidly losing meaning in the new unreality, so I’m not sure if my decades as a secular liberal humanist and feminist means that I am far right or a Neo-Nazi now.
I suppose if people like Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, and millions of ordinary, non-political people now amassing in the streets, alarmed about the rapid erosion of our freedoms in the past two years, are far right then I suppose that I too am far right.
I particularly appreciate comedians such as Russell Brand who are using humor and metaphor to cut through this Orwellian gaslighting and doublespeak. For instance, here is “Digital ID” deconstructed in under 3 minutes.
It used to bother me a little more to be labeled a conspiracy theorist, and it’s happened on more than one occasion in the past year.
But this term is starting to irritate me less as well. Here is why.
Conspiracies exist and every person on earth has been a conspirator. Anytime two or more people conspire to keep certain things hidden from another person in order to achieve an objective, that is by definition a conspiracy.
Almost all of us were victims of the Santa Claus conspiracy as children. You may have plotted a surprise birthday party. Etc.
Of course, those who deride “conspiracy theories” believe that a “conspiracy theory” happens when an ordinary person believes the powerful and wealthy conspire to keep certain things hidden from the world at large for ulterior motives. So I’ll steel-man my position and use their definition.
If you don’t think the powerful and wealthy conspire to keep certain things hidden from the world at large, you are what is known as a moron.
If you believe it does happen but are too afraid to admit it because of what others might think of you, you are what is known as a coward.
If you believe it happens and outwardly deny it, all the while working to advance the conspiracy because you think it is morally justified, or because “those in charge know better” or for any other reason you use to shrug off moral responsibility and assuage your conscience, you have moved into the realm of being a co-conspirator.
With that out of the way, I don’t intend to liberally quote other authors that often, but there is a lot of important insight coming from fairly prominent intellectuals we’ve traditionally considered “liberal”, and I find it almost a duty to share it in case you would otherwise miss it.
Without further ado, first, from Glenn Greenwald, in The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West:
Rather than sacrifice some of the benefits of inequality that have generated much of that rage or placate or appease it with symbolic concessions, Western neoliberal elites have instead opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form.
So many of the controversies over the last decade, often analyzed in isolation, have been devoted to this goal. The pervasive surveillance systems constructed by the West — revealed during the Snowden reporting but only partially reined in at best since then — are crucial tools, as surveillance powers always are, for monitoring and thus stifling dissent. We have now arrived at the point where the U.S. Government and its security state is officially and explicitly clear that it regards the greatest national security threat not as a foreign power such as China or Russia, and not as non-state actors such as Al Qaeda or ISIS, but rather “domestic extremists.” For years, this has been the unyielding message of the DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA and DOJ: our primary enemies are not foreign but are our fellow citizens who have embraced ideologies we regard as extremist.
This new escalation of repression depends upon a narrative framework. Those who harbor dissenting ideologies — and particularly those who do not embrace that dissent passively but instead take action to advocate, promote and spread it — are not merely dissenters. The term "dissent,” in Western democracies, connotes legitimacy, so that label must be denied them. They are instead domestic extremists, domestic terrorists, seditionists, traitors, insurrections. Applying terms of criminality renders justifiable any subsequent acts of repression: we are trained to accept that core liberties are forfeited upon the commission of crimes.
Accepting that premise, Naomi Wolf takes it a step further and offers a stunning prediction in her latest piece, The Fall of Canada, The Danger in the US: Understanding Martial Law:
Parliamentarians in Canada do not seem to understand that now their former colleague, Justin Trudeau, can arrest not just truckers, whose lawful protest has been declared illegal, but also the Parliamentarians themselves. This is, sadly, the next step in this kind of drama, historically. It is an extraordinarily dangerous sign that Parliament is not seated. When the Australian Parliament was suspended, by the time they reconvened, their powers had been dramatically curtailed. Tyrants seek to normalize the convening of Parliaments as “optional” or to suspend normal Parliamentary processes long enough to hollow out a legislative body’s deliberative powers, and to ensure that when and if a Parliament (or a Congress, for that matter) meets again, it will be merely a ceremonial assembly.
Parliamentarians in Canada also do not seem to understand that “dictator” is no longer rhetorical. A member of Parliament was shushed when he cried out this epithet, but the fact is that this is not a slur at this point. Justin Trudeau is by definition now in fact a dictator.
At this stage in history, you do not go back to a previous state of civil society order without arrests, though hopefully you can do so without civil war. Historically, when a would-be dictator has reached this point in the suspension of democratic processes and has sought this level of a power grab, his arrests of the opposition’s leaders, on trumped-up charges, come next. Also arrested at this point are labor leaders, outspoken members of the clergy, and independent journalists and editors.
She concludes:
The image of the great conflict of the 60s was of a young woman placing a daisy in a rifle barrel. The image of our great conflict, is that of scores of truckers on their knees, in the snow, praying, surrounded by unidentifiable standing thugs.
Given the events in Canada this past week, it will now be interesting to now see whether other young, attractive Klaus Schwab protégés with smiling faces (I’m looking at you, Jacinda Ardern) follow suit.
Won’t it?
I saved the best for last. N.S. Lyons offers us a fascinating new framework for understanding the truck convoys. In a genius piece called Reality Honks Back, he points out that our political situation in 2022 is not so much indicative of a divide between the “working class” vs. “intellectual elites”, but more specifically between Virtuals (people who work with information and can work practically indefinitely in isolation from home) and Physicals (people who work with physical goods and services with no layers of abstraction):
But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.
The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.
When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking brakes (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world.
It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening.
The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable.
And how did they respond?
But once they grasped the situation, the Virtuals’ response was to turn immediately to their default means of dealing with any problem: narrative and informational control.
He concludes:
That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters.
And here the Virtuals have a significant advantage because they are free to use the maximum level of coercive force available in their natural domain, while the Physicals cannot – because, in the physical world, that would mean violence, which is something the protestors have rightly forsworn.
So, the current trucker protests in Canada may soon be brought to a close by the state. But this is unlikely to mark the end of the story.
The great Honkening of 2022 has already been revelatory to people around the world. It is the climax of a process in which all the divides in society, including between the “Physicals” and “Virtuals” I’ve described here, have been revealed by the pandemic and governments’ responses. At the same time, the pandemic served to clarify the continued reliance of the Virtual class on “essential workers.” The revelation of the exceptional vulnerability of modern supply chains has demonstrated very clearly to everyone paying attention that the Physicals still possess tremendous power of their own as long as they are able to act in unity and solidarity – or as many signs at the protests have pointed out to the Virtuals: “no truckers, no food.”
In this sense the Freedom Convoy has already become the most successful labor movement in decades, awakening a genuine new “class consciousness” (as a Marxist would put it) in the minds of the reality-based “working class.” And it is notable that this has already become a transnational phenomenon, with the convoy protests spreading like wildfire around the globe precisely because the exact same divide now exists in so many developed countries, where the Virtual ruling class has everywhere overreached with similarly hubris.
Naturally, the Virtuals have everywhere greeted this development with horror. Looking at the map above, or out their windows, they may have realized just how vulnerable they are holed up in their cities. Perhaps they are imagining that, should the Physicals outside – who they once felt safe to ignore – engage in not just scattered protests but a full-scale revolutionary revolt, or even simply a general strike – suspending all movement of goods – their bastions of enlightened civilization would be starving, shivering, and buried in trash within a week.
So of course they hate and fear the truckers. It’s no wonder that Trudeau is panicking and behaving a bit like a dictator facing an existential challenge to his rule. In a sense he is.
…
For the Virtual elite, the most unforgiveable thing about the Physicals, and the physical world in general, is that they stubbornly refuse to yield to full, frictionless control. There is a reason the dominant informational class is today most comfortable in a purely virtual environment – it’s one where they can have direct, instantaneous control over (virtual) matter. Real matter is stubbornly resistant, a reminder that the self doesn’t control the universe. It’s dirty, polluting, a reminder of one’s vulnerability, even mortality. And the need to rely on other humans to deal with it is super awkward.
So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.
But at least in the near term it’s Physicals like the truckers that have the advantage. They are the ones with the real leverage, and now they know it.
Trudeau and co. just better hope the workers don’t start reading Mao like he did in his youth, or they’ll learn all about how that revolutionary managed to win by “surrounding the cities from the countryside.” Or how Mao began his revolution by declaring that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” – but then the Canucks seem to have already managed to do that part already.
Hopefully I have encouraged you to read the original pieces. Cheers, everybody.
The left / right paradigm is a false paradigm. It is one that we are accustomed to but any usefulness it may have once had has long past. Even within that paradigm...far right and far left meet -- fascism being a joining of the state and large corporations and communism where the state itself is one large corporation. So the political spectrum is more circular than lineal.
Thank you for your thoughts!
The Virtuals have the upper hand at the moment in Canada. Things may get physical if the Physicals get desperate from the Virtuals methods.