Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.
Sohrab Ahmari is very perceptive in this piece. I think it's true that conservatives in the recent past were starting to question whether unfettered corporate power was a good thing. At the very least they were realizing that CEOs and tech high rollers didn't share their values. But now everyone's gotten distracted and the suits have gotten away with just making some tacky gestures.
It's still possible and important for right and left populists to cross barriers and hash things out between themselves. But some people who seemed into that before now aren't.
2 comments:
Your title is a particularly good match for the current situation. When recently fabricated ideologies have been allowed to rule the public sphere, whether that's what has been promoted by the mainstream media or by social media, then not only is there no time for reflection, none is allowed.
Meanwhile, the class war, the ongoing battle of rich vs poor, disguises itself in cultish jargon like wokery vs tradition which, in the end, is mostly rooted in economic inequality. I'm happy militant woke, dei, blm, lbgtq++ etc. appears to have been defeated because that dogma afforded no hope for anyone still inclined to actually find common ground.
I must say I've wondered how cynical the elite has been in all this. Was dei and other woke ideologies accepted so fast because members of that exclusive class really believed in it, or was it a diversion to cover what was really going on. Then I remind myself how having a 'trans' child became a source of pride among the rich. Sheer madness.. let's look for something better.
It's society traveling at the speed of technology. Apps and operating systems are updated all the time. What do these updates do? As often as not you can't get a straight answer, but it's almost--or sometimes entirely--impossible to refuse them. Our political and social leaders want to make social change frictionless in this way, and also maintain their own authority. Ultimately I don't think this works with actual people outside the club, but the higher-ups keep trying.
What these ideologies all had/have in common is that they're methods for appearing to flatten all social distinctions and hierarchies when they are ruthlessly hierarchical themselves. There are certain people who you're just not allowed to criticize or question, and while the cover story is that they're the "marginalized" of society, more often than not we're talking about those who've attained a certain social and economic position. It can very easily become abusive.
I think a lot of it is cover. There are those who really believe, but mostly I think it starts from trying to be in with the in crowd. The thing is that sometimes if you keep repeating something you start to believe it. Having a trans child was a source of pride for those who wanted to be part of the elite but weren't sure that they actually were or could be. Of course there are certainly better things to aspire to than acceptance by elite radicals.
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