This is really what the last few years of Progressive and Social Justice Warrior (SJW) hysteria has been all about. There certainly is a subconscious storm of existential torment within the collective liberal psyche that has been brewing for quite some time and finally came to a head with the election of Donald Trump. Hence the endless meltdowns from the left that commenced immediately following that glorious day.
Let's refer back to a piece of that Spengler quote I featured a few days ago:
A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even free thinking itself is no exception to the rule. After the stake, the guillotine; after the burning of the books, their suppression; after the power of the pulpit, the power of the Press. Amongst us, there is no faith without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort.
Once Liberalism had shed any pretense of acknowledging the divine and universal ordering force, it became fully secularized and thus ideology unto itself. And being a western ideology it succumbed to the usual neuroses and bad habits Spengler attributed to the Faustian culture. This full-scale secularization didn't really metastasize until about the mid 1960s. Decades before that point, Liberalism had long stopped being mere
Classical Liberalism; rather it veered off on that course known as Social Liberalism, which really is a type of Cultural Socialism that happens to play by constitutional or parliamentary rules out of present necessity. The Socialist ideologue will never respect those mechanisms as higher principles, no matter how much he or she may pretend to respect the rules and customs of the existing system; rather such an ideologue sees those things merely as tools to be used against factional obstacles and ideological enemies; once the Socialist party gains full power, the old constitution and parliamentary procedures are chucked into the bin without a moment of afterthought. See: Saul Alinksy's
Rules for Radicals for a clear demonstration of how this mentality and methodology works.
Old Boss, Meet New BossIn the post-1965 political climate, "Progressive" became the term to denote the
New Left's set of beliefs. It was a clever appropriation of a turn of the 19th-to-20th century political movement associated with Liberal Republicans and president Teddy Roosevelt; the movement even spawned its own short-lived third party. But the new post-1965 Progressives in actuality were Socialists in drag. The seemingly-endless revelations (see: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) that emerged exposing the abject horrors of Josef Stalin's Soviet Communist regime and Mao's China were impossible for any sane Westerner to ignore and thus being an out-and-out Socialist or Communist now carried an even greater degree of social stigma than it did prior; at this point the ideologue was thoroughly discredited and no longer just a witch-hunty sort of label to pin on anyone with vaguely-leftist beliefs.
The young 60s and 70s Socialist radicals littering countless Western universities were forced to find a civilized-sounding label to cloak their true beliefs in and Progressivism fit the bill for the die-hards. Others simply stuck to the old term Liberal. And thus Liberalism as a whole got even more ideologically muddied. What most people in the US colloquially calls "Liberals" today are in fact progressive. After the social chaos of the late 60s and the 70s, right-wing and libertarian sentiments reasserted themselves and we saw a long era of Reagan populism, Protestant Bible Thumper identity politics, both accessorized by several bursts of economic prosperity and blazing technological innovation. During the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, the Faustian collective psyche had taken a break from politics and refocused itself on material and technological progress. During this period, the reigning political ideology was Neoliberalism; this was a merge of right-wing globalist economics paired with vague social liberalism and "stay the course" welfare state policies. The left end of this ideology coalesced into Progressive Liberalism.
Party Like it's 1999The 80s and the 90s was primary an era of making money and getting lost in an endless sea of techno-distractions, vacuous pop culture, and globo-corporate infotainment propaganda. During this period there was simply no time or inclination for anything reeking of revolutionary politics. The American masses were largely apolitical during this time and merely reacted to whatever shallow wedge issues that mainstream (globo-corporate) media would be bleating about at any give time, usually right before a presidential or mid-term election. The radical fringe element within academia has largely gone underground and rendered itself dormant; the radical professors had switched to using postmodernist obscurantism as their ideological delivery device of choice, as the impenetrable and unconquerable word salad rhetoric of postmodernism provided more than enough plausible deniability if and when any suspicion of a more nefarious agenda might arise; of course, by the 2000s, academia had become such an intellectually-monocultural echo chamber that no such suspicions would be voiced from within anyway, but I digress.
The 80s and 90s was also a time of rapidly-mutating pop culture and sub cultural trends; in terms of musical fads this consisted of genres and sub cultures like: punk rock, hard rock, post-punk, new wave, glam rock, goth rock, hip hop, gangsta rap, death metal, grunge, industrial, pop-punk, alt-rock, techno, indie-pop, ect. Mass culture had become a kaleidoscopic expression of the 1,001 flavors of consumerism. At the "avant garde" forefront of each of these fads was an
elite subculture of young, hip trendsetters. I call this type the "hipster-consumer." The whole hipster thing was brought on by Generation X, a generation defined by expressive individualism, cynicism, irreverence toward tradition/authority, and of course the slacker ethos (FYI, I was born at the ass-end of Gen-X). Because of this cynicism and irreverence, Gen-X as a whole was somewhat immune to rigid ideology and dogma. Sentimental utterances like "up yours" or "bite me" would be an appropriate 90s-era Gen-X response to some prude or hardliner aggressively attempting to impose rules on them; basically, "fuck off and leave me alone."
PC SlackersDespite the laid back attitude found among both the hip Gen-Xer and the hip-with-the-times aging Boomer, for Progressive Liberalism the 90s was a time for much growth and expansion. Gen X's "live and let live" ethos was essentially left-libertarian in spirit. But there was a growing authoritarian underbelly to this whole thing. The new culture of
radical tolerance needed a firm set of rules if it was to be any sort of potent and lasting cultural force. And thus Political Correctness came to be.
Initially, PC culture was actually more a product of American corporate culture rather than the Marxist conspiracy many on the dissident right today claim it to be. The 80s saw the first massive influx of women into the workforce and by the 90s the cushy, air-conditioned corporate office workplace was an open arena where men and women were now effectively sharing the same space. And thus a series of rules needed to be concocted in order to mediate the unresovlvable conflicts that arise when the sexes are freely mingled and assumed to be total
equals of one other. Basically, in every period of human history outside this tiny little anomaly window that is the past 40-50 years in the industrialized West, the realm of work outside of the home has always been a man's realm. Work etiquette, behavioral norms, best practices, ect. has been a series of agreements among men. The woman's place was at home where she would raise the children and manage the household. The gendered division of labor was pretty clear-cut and unambiguous for the vast majority of people pretty much anywhere in the world at any time prior to postmodernity.
In the new mixed workplace, PC culture arose to try and smooth out the rather unequal outcomes that naturally arise when you have men and women doing the same tasks. Anyway this is a digression into the minefield known as gender politics, which maybe I'll address at a later time. Anyway we can conclude this bit by simply stating that Progressive Liberalism is an amalgamation of Social Liberal emancipatory politics, gender and ethnic-mingling PC culture, Neoliberal economics, latent Marxist radicalism in academia, and individualistic pop culture.
2010s: A Culture of CringeFast forward to the current area and we can see that the ideology of Progressive Liberalism has run out of gas and shown itself to be so rife with contradictions and hypocrisy that it exhibits a grandiose detachment from reality; so much detachment that increasing numbers of people are seeing contemporary progressivism as totally cringey. It was during the Obama presidency that throngs of progressive activists within his administration overplayed their collective hand big-time, perfectly in tandem with how the elitist progressives embedded within major institutions like the mainstream media and academia behaved so arrogantly, overconfident and stupidly-dismissive of anything outside their ivory tower bubble. The truth is that even in the current-year diehard progressives are just a small slice of the total US population; perhaps no more than 10% (if we're to refer to that recent study) and thus their actions during the Obama years amounted to a slim minority attempts to impose its largely-unwanted ideology onto the majority. By the second Obama term it became readily apparent that this agenda was indeed totally unwanted by a sizable swath of Americans. The election of Trump and the corresponding rise of right-populism. Of course, instead of look inward and realize that the people aren't buying what they are selling, progressives instead doubled down, insisted nothing they do or stand for is wrong or ineffective and that they simple need to keep on truckin' and repeating the same stupid mistakes and uttering the same shrill and tone deaf war cries that will just alienate even more people from their lost cause.
The whole charade is crashing and burning at breakneck speed.
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