On the eve of the American election, the Left, driven by fear that Donald Trump might win this thing, is going berserk. I mean that: berserk, in a way that may foreshadow profound instability should Trump win on Tuesday.
Perhaps the most stunning sign of their intellectual corruption so far—and there are more signs to choose from than at a convention of semiotics professors—was the reaction of media and establishment anti-Trumpers to the former president’s criticism of Liz Cheney, the warmongering daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump made the point that the younger Cheney, like her father and other establishment figures, find it easy to send young American men to die in war, because they (the Cheneys) sit safely inside their Washington offices.
Trump said, of Liz Cheney, who has endorsed Kamala Harris:
She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in the nice buildings saying ‘Oh gee well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’
The media instantly broadcast headlines saying that Donald Trump wants to shoot Liz Cheney. It was such an outrageous smear that even prominent Trump-hating liberals, like the comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, denounced it. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I don’t like Donald Trump. Don’t lie to me and say he wants her to face a firing squad.”
Maher pointed out that Trump’s sentiment is exactly the same thing that anti-war hippies said in the 1960s: that Washington lawmakers were sending other people’s children to die in bad wars. The comedian might also have pointed out that this is precisely what Democrats have been saying about Dick Cheney and his ilk since the Iraq War started, but now that Donald Trump agrees with them, they have changed their mind.
Perhaps even more disgusting, the progressive online magazine Slate published an essay accusing Usha Vance, the South Asian Indian wife of GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, of being a traitor to her sex and to her race for staying married to a white conservative.
“We’re the good brown people, the ones you don’t need to be afraid of,” fumed writer Schacchi Koul. “In an attempt to keep our ears above racist waters, South Asians have sometimes associated with our own oppressors.”
It wasn’t long ago when this kind of disgusting personal attack would have been beneath professional journalists. But when the goal is defeating Donald Trump, extremism like this is no vice.
The “Liz Cheney firing squad” smear, and the vulgar attack on Usha Vance, tell us something important about who the American Left, the media, and the Democratic Party have become. It is not that they are quick to spread falsehoods about their political enemies, or hit below the moral belt. Donald Trump, alas, does these things too. No, the deeper meaning of these two instances is in what they say about what the Democrats, the media, and the broader Left believe.
Take war, for example. Many American liberals were rightly critical of the unjust and foolish Iraq War, launched by a Republican administration. But under the Obama and Biden presidencies, they learned to love wars to advance American power. Perhaps the most potent symbol of how American politics have changed is that the Cheneys, who are synonymous with neocon warmongering, embraced Kamala Harris’s campaign, and are now celebrated as patriots for it by the Democrats.
As the conservative National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted:
As for the trashy slur of Usha Vance, American liberalism, now fully conquered by wokeness, believes that human beings owe their primary loyalties to their race and sex, but only if they understand that their race and their sex require them to affirm leftist pieties. Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed of an America in which people were judged not by the color of their skin, but by “the content of their character.” Now liberalism believes that individuals are nothing more than the color of their skin, or their ‘gender identity’ (but not their genitalia, for biological males can be women, and vice versa, as the progressive Comintern has ruled).
What is crystal clear now is that Americans will not be choosing between two candidates, but between two regimes. The American Left—like its European counterparts—has become the party of managerial woke totalitarianism. It has come to define dissent, even mere disagreement, with its beliefs and policies as ‘fascism.’ The New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat writes about how we have all been living through “the seeming integration of all sorts of institutions, public and private, academic and governmental, in a common political-ideological front.”
Think of the way an idea would seem to travel from progressive academia through the world of foundations and nongovernmental organizations, popping up in the policies of a Democratic administration and the language of corporate human resources departments alike, without ever being subject to a normal kind of democratic debate. Or think of the various Covid-era entanglements between activist groups, social media companies, legislators and public health officials, and the related emergence of the liberal censor or commissar as a character across a range of very different institutional spheres—from anti-disinformation activists making demands of social media giants to sensitivity readers screening novels to bureaucrats assessing the D.E.I. statements of applicants for academic jobs.
Douthat’s point is that for all the Sturm und Drang among left-wing politicians, academics, and media figures about the rise of right-wing illiberalism, the Left has been instantiating its own version under our noses.
In an important essay in First Things, Nathan Pinkoski identifies the entire American establishment’s betrayal of the “essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction,” as the advent of postliberalism. He writes:
Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.
Pinkoski makes the crucial point that this was by no means solely a left-wing project. It began all across the West, under both left-wing and right-wing democratic governments, in the wake of 1989’s Cold War victory. Postliberalism got a big boost under the George W. Bush administration, as legislation passed after the 9/11 attacks gave the state warrant to monitor many areas of private life, in search of terrorists. It continued under subsequent presidents, but it took the Great Awokening, which began in the second Obama administration, to accelerate the politicization of private society in a way unprecedented in American history. Writes Pinkoski:
We are seeing in domestic life what has been happening at the global level since the 1990s. Civil society, especially its economic dimension, is being weaponized. Those who threaten the regime, or who give even the appearance of being the sort of person who might pose a threat, are at risk of being made non-persons.
Europeans of the Right are well acquainted with this strategy. When I first arrived in Hungary for a fellowship in 2021, it soon became clear to me that what political, academic, and media elites all over the West denounce as the democratically elected government’s ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ is mostly just a refusal to bend the knee to the illiberalism of the established powers.
That year, after the Hungarian parliament passed a law forbidding the transmission of LGBT information to schoolchildren – perhaps after seeing how in the United States, even kindergarten students are propagandized for gender ideology – the then-prime minister of the Netherlands called for Hungary to be expelled from the European Union. Think of it: because a sovereign nation declined to adopt a policy of sexualizing the imaginations of children in ways that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, that nation faced calls for its exile from the community of European nations. Whatever else that is, it’s not liberalism.
This is precisely why I and other American conservatives see in the Viktor Orbán government a potential model for mounting serious resistance, within democratic constitutional bounds, to the illiberal regime governing the United States now.
This has not so much to do with specific policies of the Orbán government, policies that may or may not be defensible, and that might not be workable in America’s very different political culture. Rather, it has to do with the refusal of conservatives to be dupes for power elites–of both established parties.
For example, the entire Western establishment, including most DC Republicans, have been all-in supporting NATO’s role in the Ukraine war. Viktor Orbán has fought a lonely battle arguing for an armistice and a peace settlement. And he has explained himself all along. For his trouble, he has been widely denounced as “Putin’s lapdog.” Now it is becoming ever more clear that Orbán was right—not because he has any special love for the Russians, but because he read the battlefield clearly from the start, not ideologically.
There has been little to no true reckoning in America about Washington’s failed Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and no real effort to hold military leaders accountable, or politicians either. The same blind confidence that led America into those wars-as-nation-building exercises—the idea that with enough money, military firepower, and confidence, the United States can create its own reality—has guided much of Washington’s Ukraine effort. To visit America over the past two years, since the war started, is to be stunned by the lack of debate about the war. You were either for it, or were Putin’s lapdog.
No wonder Michael Brendan Dougherty is so angry about the media’s outrage over Trump’s insult of Liz Cheney, while they have said nothing about what this century’s foolish wars, conducted by both Republican and Democratic administrations, have done to America’s economy, military, and people.
The point here is that the United States is governed, in both public and private life, by an illiberal left-wing monoculture, joined by fellow travelers of the Right who are happy to be noble losers, as long as they can get their wars and, from time to time, tax cuts. And, of course, if they can avoid being called bigots too often by the media.
This is what I mean by a regime. Viktor Orbán figured this out long ago about the governing establishments of the West. He also figured out that there is nothing to be gained by hoping to appeal to their sense of liberal fairness, and old-fashioned norms of diversity. To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.
Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?
In this century, Washington has worked to advance its interests through helping fund and direct various so-called “color revolutions” in former Communist states. This is not to say that the revolutionaries had no cause, or were entirely a creation of the CIA. No, this is rather to say that they were not always spontaneously generated by domestic protesters, and that the U.S. has at the very least used NGOs and civil-society institutions to spark political change favorable to Washington. There’s a reason why the Obama U.S. Agency for International Development partnered with George Soros to translate the revolutionary manual Rules For Radicals, and publish it in Macedonia, to undermine that country’s conservative government.
Perhaps the most egregious example was the role senior US officials, such as GOP Sen. John McCain, and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who were both on the ground in Kiev during Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan uprising, which overthrew the elected government of Russian ally Viktor Yanukovych. The Russians released audio of an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the then-US Ambassador, discussing Washington’s picks for a post-Yanukovych government.
Again: whatever that is, it’s not liberalism. The American people, and European peoples, have been gaslighted by our elites, who have set up a public-private system that benefits them, and have demonized as racist, bigoted, authoritarian, or even fascist, anyone who challenges that system and its institutions. One of the reasons Elon Musk, who supports Trump, has become a hero to dissidents is that he is too rich and too powerful to cancel—and he tells the truth about the ruling regime, and its hatred of free speech.
Unsurprisingly, two government professors at Harvard, the most exclusive educational institution in the US, and perhaps even the world, took to the pages of The New York Times, the parish newsletter for the elite institutional complex that neoreactionaries call “the Cathedral,” to call for an American color revolution to topple Trump if he is elected. They call this “defending democracy,” and ask, of the institutional elites they want to lead this revolution, “What are they waiting for?”
Those professors know that what is at stake here is the kind of regime that will govern the American people. They deceive themselves into thinking that they are defending liberal democracy. No, they are calling for an anti-democratic movement to defend the postliberal democracy that benefits their class, from the vote of the American people. In other words, they want to all but destroy democracy to save it from Donald Trump.
The catastrophizing hysteria seen and heard in the elite media, which the regime strongly dominates (“soft totalitarianism” is when one political ideology exercises control over a society without the state ordering it), signals that even if most Americans cast their ballots for change, the cold civil war will just be beginning. The only way to defend Americans who do not wish to be told what to do by the postliberal Left and its allies in the right-wing establishment is to get behind a tough, postliberal Right leader who knows how the game is rigged.
One hopes Donald Trump, who has faced the brunt of postliberal Left persecution, understands that now. If he doesn’t, he only needs to pick up the phone and call his friend in Budapest for advice.
America Votes in a Clash of Postliberalisms
Photo by LOREN ELLIOTT and CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP
On the eve of the American election, the Left, driven by fear that Donald Trump might win this thing, is going berserk. I mean that: berserk, in a way that may foreshadow profound instability should Trump win on Tuesday.
Perhaps the most stunning sign of their intellectual corruption so far—and there are more signs to choose from than at a convention of semiotics professors—was the reaction of media and establishment anti-Trumpers to the former president’s criticism of Liz Cheney, the warmongering daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump made the point that the younger Cheney, like her father and other establishment figures, find it easy to send young American men to die in war, because they (the Cheneys) sit safely inside their Washington offices.
Trump said, of Liz Cheney, who has endorsed Kamala Harris:
The media instantly broadcast headlines saying that Donald Trump wants to shoot Liz Cheney. It was such an outrageous smear that even prominent Trump-hating liberals, like the comedian and talk show host Bill Maher, denounced it. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I don’t like Donald Trump. Don’t lie to me and say he wants her to face a firing squad.”
Maher pointed out that Trump’s sentiment is exactly the same thing that anti-war hippies said in the 1960s: that Washington lawmakers were sending other people’s children to die in bad wars. The comedian might also have pointed out that this is precisely what Democrats have been saying about Dick Cheney and his ilk since the Iraq War started, but now that Donald Trump agrees with them, they have changed their mind.
Perhaps even more disgusting, the progressive online magazine Slate published an essay accusing Usha Vance, the South Asian Indian wife of GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, of being a traitor to her sex and to her race for staying married to a white conservative.
“We’re the good brown people, the ones you don’t need to be afraid of,” fumed writer Schacchi Koul. “In an attempt to keep our ears above racist waters, South Asians have sometimes associated with our own oppressors.”
It wasn’t long ago when this kind of disgusting personal attack would have been beneath professional journalists. But when the goal is defeating Donald Trump, extremism like this is no vice.
The “Liz Cheney firing squad” smear, and the vulgar attack on Usha Vance, tell us something important about who the American Left, the media, and the Democratic Party have become. It is not that they are quick to spread falsehoods about their political enemies, or hit below the moral belt. Donald Trump, alas, does these things too. No, the deeper meaning of these two instances is in what they say about what the Democrats, the media, and the broader Left believe.
Take war, for example. Many American liberals were rightly critical of the unjust and foolish Iraq War, launched by a Republican administration. But under the Obama and Biden presidencies, they learned to love wars to advance American power. Perhaps the most potent symbol of how American politics have changed is that the Cheneys, who are synonymous with neocon warmongering, embraced Kamala Harris’s campaign, and are now celebrated as patriots for it by the Democrats.
As the conservative National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted:
As for the trashy slur of Usha Vance, American liberalism, now fully conquered by wokeness, believes that human beings owe their primary loyalties to their race and sex, but only if they understand that their race and their sex require them to affirm leftist pieties. Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed of an America in which people were judged not by the color of their skin, but by “the content of their character.” Now liberalism believes that individuals are nothing more than the color of their skin, or their ‘gender identity’ (but not their genitalia, for biological males can be women, and vice versa, as the progressive Comintern has ruled).
What is crystal clear now is that Americans will not be choosing between two candidates, but between two regimes. The American Left—like its European counterparts—has become the party of managerial woke totalitarianism. It has come to define dissent, even mere disagreement, with its beliefs and policies as ‘fascism.’ The New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat writes about how we have all been living through “the seeming integration of all sorts of institutions, public and private, academic and governmental, in a common political-ideological front.”
Douthat’s point is that for all the Sturm und Drang among left-wing politicians, academics, and media figures about the rise of right-wing illiberalism, the Left has been instantiating its own version under our noses.
In an important essay in First Things, Nathan Pinkoski identifies the entire American establishment’s betrayal of the “essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction,” as the advent of postliberalism. He writes:
Pinkoski makes the crucial point that this was by no means solely a left-wing project. It began all across the West, under both left-wing and right-wing democratic governments, in the wake of 1989’s Cold War victory. Postliberalism got a big boost under the George W. Bush administration, as legislation passed after the 9/11 attacks gave the state warrant to monitor many areas of private life, in search of terrorists. It continued under subsequent presidents, but it took the Great Awokening, which began in the second Obama administration, to accelerate the politicization of private society in a way unprecedented in American history. Writes Pinkoski:
Europeans of the Right are well acquainted with this strategy. When I first arrived in Hungary for a fellowship in 2021, it soon became clear to me that what political, academic, and media elites all over the West denounce as the democratically elected government’s ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ is mostly just a refusal to bend the knee to the illiberalism of the established powers.
That year, after the Hungarian parliament passed a law forbidding the transmission of LGBT information to schoolchildren – perhaps after seeing how in the United States, even kindergarten students are propagandized for gender ideology – the then-prime minister of the Netherlands called for Hungary to be expelled from the European Union. Think of it: because a sovereign nation declined to adopt a policy of sexualizing the imaginations of children in ways that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, that nation faced calls for its exile from the community of European nations. Whatever else that is, it’s not liberalism.
This is precisely why I and other American conservatives see in the Viktor Orbán government a potential model for mounting serious resistance, within democratic constitutional bounds, to the illiberal regime governing the United States now.
This has not so much to do with specific policies of the Orbán government, policies that may or may not be defensible, and that might not be workable in America’s very different political culture. Rather, it has to do with the refusal of conservatives to be dupes for power elites–of both established parties.
For example, the entire Western establishment, including most DC Republicans, have been all-in supporting NATO’s role in the Ukraine war. Viktor Orbán has fought a lonely battle arguing for an armistice and a peace settlement. And he has explained himself all along. For his trouble, he has been widely denounced as “Putin’s lapdog.” Now it is becoming ever more clear that Orbán was right—not because he has any special love for the Russians, but because he read the battlefield clearly from the start, not ideologically.
There has been little to no true reckoning in America about Washington’s failed Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and no real effort to hold military leaders accountable, or politicians either. The same blind confidence that led America into those wars-as-nation-building exercises—the idea that with enough money, military firepower, and confidence, the United States can create its own reality—has guided much of Washington’s Ukraine effort. To visit America over the past two years, since the war started, is to be stunned by the lack of debate about the war. You were either for it, or were Putin’s lapdog.
No wonder Michael Brendan Dougherty is so angry about the media’s outrage over Trump’s insult of Liz Cheney, while they have said nothing about what this century’s foolish wars, conducted by both Republican and Democratic administrations, have done to America’s economy, military, and people.
The point here is that the United States is governed, in both public and private life, by an illiberal left-wing monoculture, joined by fellow travelers of the Right who are happy to be noble losers, as long as they can get their wars and, from time to time, tax cuts. And, of course, if they can avoid being called bigots too often by the media.
This is what I mean by a regime. Viktor Orbán figured this out long ago about the governing establishments of the West. He also figured out that there is nothing to be gained by hoping to appeal to their sense of liberal fairness, and old-fashioned norms of diversity. To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.
Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?
In this century, Washington has worked to advance its interests through helping fund and direct various so-called “color revolutions” in former Communist states. This is not to say that the revolutionaries had no cause, or were entirely a creation of the CIA. No, this is rather to say that they were not always spontaneously generated by domestic protesters, and that the U.S. has at the very least used NGOs and civil-society institutions to spark political change favorable to Washington. There’s a reason why the Obama U.S. Agency for International Development partnered with George Soros to translate the revolutionary manual Rules For Radicals, and publish it in Macedonia, to undermine that country’s conservative government.
Perhaps the most egregious example was the role senior US officials, such as GOP Sen. John McCain, and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who were both on the ground in Kiev during Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan uprising, which overthrew the elected government of Russian ally Viktor Yanukovych. The Russians released audio of an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the then-US Ambassador, discussing Washington’s picks for a post-Yanukovych government.
Again: whatever that is, it’s not liberalism. The American people, and European peoples, have been gaslighted by our elites, who have set up a public-private system that benefits them, and have demonized as racist, bigoted, authoritarian, or even fascist, anyone who challenges that system and its institutions. One of the reasons Elon Musk, who supports Trump, has become a hero to dissidents is that he is too rich and too powerful to cancel—and he tells the truth about the ruling regime, and its hatred of free speech.
Unsurprisingly, two government professors at Harvard, the most exclusive educational institution in the US, and perhaps even the world, took to the pages of The New York Times, the parish newsletter for the elite institutional complex that neoreactionaries call “the Cathedral,” to call for an American color revolution to topple Trump if he is elected. They call this “defending democracy,” and ask, of the institutional elites they want to lead this revolution, “What are they waiting for?”
Those professors know that what is at stake here is the kind of regime that will govern the American people. They deceive themselves into thinking that they are defending liberal democracy. No, they are calling for an anti-democratic movement to defend the postliberal democracy that benefits their class, from the vote of the American people. In other words, they want to all but destroy democracy to save it from Donald Trump.
The catastrophizing hysteria seen and heard in the elite media, which the regime strongly dominates (“soft totalitarianism” is when one political ideology exercises control over a society without the state ordering it), signals that even if most Americans cast their ballots for change, the cold civil war will just be beginning. The only way to defend Americans who do not wish to be told what to do by the postliberal Left and its allies in the right-wing establishment is to get behind a tough, postliberal Right leader who knows how the game is rigged.
One hopes Donald Trump, who has faced the brunt of postliberal Left persecution, understands that now. If he doesn’t, he only needs to pick up the phone and call his friend in Budapest for advice.
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End Scene