I can’t stand it anymore. How could anyone stand this? How could anyone support this? We are living through the new witch hunt. The red scare 2.0, and this time it’s coming from “the left.” Who needs Joseph McCarthy when you have the left blue check Twitterati serving the exact same political economic function that McCarthy served? DSA cancels a speaking engagement by Adolph Reed for his “class reductionism” (this is madness, the one organization allegedly solely dedicated to proletarian politics cancels one of our greatest thinkers for narrowing his critique to proletarian politics). Matt Taibbi writes a very smart piece about how the left has lost its mind as it moves from one media-manufactured outrage to the next, never stopping to ponder on its failures and regroup to strategize a coherent and singular political program. He’s not fucking wrong, is he? I don’t even want to get into the Lee Fang debacle.
I truly thought the pandemic would put a moratorium on “wokeness.” Why would anyone care about some offensive thing uttered by a woman who can’t philosophically or politically distinguish between reality (the physical one we awake into every morning) and the ludicrous, magical YA one that she created, a reality populated by giddy teenage wizards, when there is a literal demonic disease engulfing an entire population in death and paranoia? But it’s only gotten worse. Class consciousness, so close to being realized only a couple of months ago, has been washed away as cultural activists have once again sank their fangs into the pulse of the discourse.
It persists. The Vampire’s Castle is full of thirsty, fanged dullards, circling one another and dancing ecstatically, orgiastically feasting upon civil unrest and social anxiety. Illuminated by an ominous moonlight of manufactured outrages and media polarizations, the Castle seduces you with its promises of lurid camaraderie, but it will cast you out too. When you need a home the most is when your “comrades” will drain you dry. Thinking differently than the herd may be less dangerous now than it was in, say, Ancient Greece or Ancient Israel — when mere skepticism towards the belief in a higher power could result in your head being placed upon the chopping block — but it’s not like the chopping block doesn’t exist; it’s just taken on a more transcendental form. The Internet is an omnipotent force, and when it turns on you it can materialize at will throughout your physical world: you can lose your job, alienate your friends, lose whatever spending power you have. How can cancel culture not exist when it’s so clearly a force of repression and domination within our society (even though, “there is no society,” right Margaret?)?
And now of course, it’s not just in saying the wrong thing that you can squander whatever good will that you or “your brand” has developed, but your personal, constitutionally protected right to say nothing that can also leave you burning at the proverbial stake. “Silence is violence,” they’ve been saying. No, you fucking psychos, silence is mental health. Silence is a self-defense mechanism. Silence can keep a metaphysical barrier between you and the digital mob. I mean, come on. We aren’t living in fascism, we are living through the latest, most decadent stages of neoliberalism. Saying nothing is an affront to decadence, and don’t let anyone shame you into thinking otherwise. This virtue signaling is abominable, writing a self-flagellating Facebook post about your privilege doesn’t make you a good person. If anything, it makes you a phony person. If “silence is language,” as Sontag tells us, it’s not always a language of oppression. It’s a language of self-preservation. Don’t let these cool kid photography connoisseurs shame you into breaking your vow of silence. Your silence is yours. Your choice to stay out of the discourse is yours. And god bless you for it. You’ve got more strength and resolve than I do.
If I have to look at one more art world rich kid screaming about how oppressed they are despite having paid 100,000 dollars to get an MFA at Yale while living in Manhattan curating one show a year and calling it “work” (I see you, you motherfuckers, I see you. I see the looks you give me when you find out I work at a denigrating day job. I feel your scorn. But you have no idea how pathetic you look to me. We are in the same industry. You do the same work as me, and I know how much you aren’t getting paid to do that work, you trust fund creeps) I might very well lose my mind. Oh wait, it just happened. As I typed this, a rich kid art world denizen just posted about how oppressed they are on Instagram. Not a minute can go by without this madness being hammered into your eye sockets.
It’s almost like we are seeing an accelerated version of the leftist despair that followed the fall of the Berlin wall. It’s not that socialism is “dead,” it’s even worse than that. It’s been dead — for decades now — and the last three years that have been a long-winded attempt at resurrecting some version of it have failed spectacularly. Corbyn is done. Bernie is over. And the most tragic notion of their losses is that the working class people who rejected them actually really did like those guys. But they were also ancient. They come from a left that was rooted in organized labor and knew how to speak to regular people. Regular people aren’t such sticks in the mud. While they liked Bernie and Jeremy, they hate YOU. They think you, and I, us (“the left’) are insane. When Bernie and Corbyn became associated with the excesses of the left, their defeats were written into destiny. And those people’s assessment of us is hardly unfair, given our penchant for rapid shifts in discourse and modes of thinking. Sacrosanct beliefs mutate seemingly overnight: believing in Coronavirus is racist, Coronavirus is real but keep eating at Chinese restaurants or you’re racist (god bless AOC, she never fails in saying something incoherent and then wielding emotional manipulation as a shield, she might be a failure of a leader but she is a fucking pro at the spectacle), you must wear a mask and stay at home or else you’re a racist and a murderer, white Michigan protestors are racists and killers (no room for pushback, no room for nuance), Black Lives Matter protestors are heroes because “racism is more dangerous than the pandemic” (no room for pushback, no room for nuance).
Why strategize to achieve meaningful, long-term goals like Medicare for All or a universal jobs guarantee when you can generate retweets by divorcing yourself from what little capacity for critical thinking that you had left and amplifying whatever faux truism was being broadcasted that day (or hour, minute, whatever). To be direct, leftists, you are all over the place, and the working class people you claim to want to help (though that claim is clearly dubious at this point) think you are ridiculous. “We need to understand that ordinary people simply do not like us, and they’re not wrong to feel that way,” writes “cancelled” leftist Sam Kriss. “We’re basically obnoxious, and to overcome that we need to meet the people where they are.”
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Martha, the titular, virginal, 31-year-old protagonist — played by a decadently beautiful Margit Carstensen — falls in love with a wealthy civil engineer named Helmut Salomon —played by Karlheinz Bohm. Helmut shows his true face as a violent, abusive, misogynistic brute fairly early in the film. He preys on Martha’s lack of self-will and deficiencies in her ability to understand herself. In one particularly malevolent sequence, Helmut chastises Martha for her record collection, “This is SLIME!” he howls. Martha, timid and shaky, replies, “I know nothing about music, Helmut, I just listen to it sometimes.” Helmut replaces her rock records with his stuffy classical. He tells her, “this is what you will now listen to all the time.”
“This is what you will listen to all the time.”
“This is what you will think all the time.”
“This is what you will say all the time.”
Is Martha and Helmut’s relationship not the contemporary left? That’s right, fair leftist, you are in an abusive relationship with the political culture you subscribe to. Young people have grown up with so much neoliberal chemotherapy that they have no idea what left politics looks like. To remain committed to a political ideology, one needs to be built with rock solid foundation. But neoliberalism has rendered us amorphous and fluid. We only take on form when the Internet gives us a hot take to mold ourselves around. Martha didn’t know what love is. She didn’t know who she was. We don’t know what left politics is. We don’t even know who we are. You are being exploited my friend, my comrade, by the so-called “thought leaders” and leftoid Twitter blue checks. They manufacture your outrage, and they extract surplus value from it. They feed from it. Like Countess Elizabeth Bathory, they bathe in it. Never forget that it’s also your blood that feeds this machine, not just the person targeted for cancelation on that day. This is a machine that runs on GREED and NARCISSISM. No one behaves more like capitalists than the allegedly “anti-capitalists” on Twitter profiting from their hot takes and their targeted public shamings. Exploitation evolves with the market, and “cancel culture” is a potent strain of exploitation most suitable for the exhausting information overloads of liquid modernity. “Americans have not really become more social and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe;” wrote Christopher Lasch. “They have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.”
This is how we get turned. This is how we are made vampire. That singular bloodlust that animates the Castle gives us clarity in a society that offers anything but. Go for the jugular. Take him out. “He’s a LITERAL fascist!” Drink him. Drink him dry and rejoice. Yum. Delicious. Onto the next one.
christopher lasch