What led to this? A Longer View (ft. Jacques Ellul, Sheldon Wolin, Wendy Brown)

In the wake of the events of the past week, most notably Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, I encourage viewers to take a bit of a step back and to consider the bigger picture. If we cannot attempt to see that bigger picture using a longer view we will be doomed to repeat our mistakes. Can we look past the outrage felt by so many to ask the question "What led us to this point?" If we can, we will take the first step towards fixing the problem, rather than either making it worse or simply putting a bandaid on it. In this reading of a section of Chapter 6 of my book Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right, I build on the thoughts of Jacques Ellul, Sheldon Wolin, and Wendy Brown.

[ajsfa]

You have no idea how pleased I am to see an analysis using Ellul and Wolin. I tell the boomer liberals around me about inverted totalitarianism ever chance I get. Just ordered one of Brown's book.

[isidoreaerys]

This is Gold. So refreshing to hear a voice of reason.

[ricchambers]

I am new to the channel so I am not familiar with all your work but I was wondering if you are familiar with this quote from Carl Jung I have carried around with me for over 10 years, “Our blight is ideologies. They are the long-expected Antichrist.” Found in Collected Works Vol. 11, page 488, paragraph 778. I have carried it around for years because it seems to hit the same nail on the head.

[samuelmuiruri]

there is an article u refereed to about populism in the global south. the names of two authors are erdem aytac and ziya onis, i believe

[ruinner]

People are starting to wake up. And noticing things is being labeled 'hate'.

[robertflury]

When discussing populism I'm sure you can't divorce what happened in DC from the summer riots. The machinations were all being subjected to are well beyond the left-right Spectrum, no? Terms like the new right sound kind of quaint and anachronistic to me.

[Ac-iphd]

While I agree with the comment below these events have to be put into the context of the summer riots, in addition to valuable insights from the video, there are massive problems with the new/alt right objected to from within along a better good faith spectrum of both conservatism and and classic/neo liberalism into libertarianism. And these were all shut out from internal discussion, let alone inter group dialogue.
There are major philosophical and religious problems to discuss since the age of reason, and enlightenment errors, and discarding of culture, and worship of economics, and social systems, leading to the culture wars, and decay, and everything wrong with post modernism, academia, and the corporate media, and elites of both parties.
But this has all thrived in context to the positivistic backlash after the French Revolution setting up religious positivism, and hollowed out identity badge use of the word God, it's led up to the militarizing of police, the drug war, prison industrial complex and the failure to fix these, and conservative overspending is also why valid conservative and libertarian facts have failed to interpenetrate to the left. Tax breaks for the rich, to increase jobs, while continuing to overspend and destroy our money supply, has reached a rate of diminishing returns. Trump and the republicans had control, and outspent Obama, IN ONE TERM. The giant industrial farms got tax breaks to make up losses due to tariffs, damaging the ability of small local farms to sell locally, the lock on education was not broken when we had control, because reminding everyone who their president was turned out to be more important than getting vouchers, or having discourse with people like Kamil Ferguson, Coleman Hughes, or Chloe Valdary that can admit many of our facts and want vouchers, along with the people at the local level of BLM that stood up to the Marxist college kid members of BLM and Antifa. But we would rather watch Crowder walk around with a cigar in the hood, pretending he's Arnold off the Chopper in Predator and listening to Limbaugh tell us "they're all Marxists who hate America." Or Trump "Biden hates God, bad for Bible" political Christianity. Cornel West, hard leftist I don't agree with talks more about our culture, Christ, mimetic exchange, Socrates, Plato, and Dostoevsky than most of our pundits and Fox News.
The culture wars and up-levleling of post modernism happened in context to the corporatists and the right refusing a discussion on deep history, comparative religion, and psychology. The Trump movement catered to loud mouthed tough guy red meat and shut down any attempt at higher level discourse, economics and anything that could have allowed for self correction. It was the main premise, along with taking the confluence of the corporate media, and the post modern fringe, and cloning into a right wing post fact era, which was just an excuse for us to do and say whatever we want, and feel like we won something for once in our lives. Economics and policy rejected by this movement would be tested for in a Trump tweet, and if you bring it up it meant, to his base: "Trump's trying! the Democrats just won't let him!" Sorry, what this means to me is that the base can reject something, not understand or make a compelling unifying case for it, and then point to a tweet and say we must join their cult of Great Man worship and everything would just work perfect.
The takeover of the schools by the left is also in the context of a sneaky game of sophistry. Because intellectuals can be arrogant and make mistakes, we catered to indoctrinating our populace when the Fords and Rockefellers of the world said "I don't want thinkers, philosophers, and artists. I want workers." As though it takes 12 years to make a worker, as though workers like me can't open a book and be a worker who can engage as an intermediary with academia, and maybe that might stop idologues from taking over the schools, when the rest of the country disdains the humanities for consumerism, and the idea we know it all 'cuz we got jobs. Here's the blunt truth: our culture was hollowed out into and identity badge slogan. Red meat guys like me had no idea there was a whole center left to right humanities crowd, and all sorts of open lectures full of people actually giving us culture, because that is not in the interest of right wing positivism. Guys like me have been trained by the 30 years of Limbaugh/Hannity, Fox News, long before Trump and Brietbart, and Obama, to act as though our male genitilia would fall off if we shared a heavy weight conservative like Roger Scruton's article or videos on Beauty, or got into discussions on poetry and art and culture. Even the amalgamated people who made up the mythologized Homer were Mycenea warriors into the people who carved out the polis, Achilles shed tears, played the lyre, as did the warrior King David when he pulled through moral injury into spiritual chivalry and poetry, or the warriorhood of Dante, the hoplite veterans who created the Greek poetry, the Norse warrior poets, or a guy like Frank Frazzetta who turned down a major league baseball contract to paint, and could knock a heavybag off a chain. It's this higher castration, and removal of culture to invigorate, removal of warriorhood for duty bound soldierhood, and disdain at the best of the humaities and the liberal arts as something to liberate us that allow woke left idiots to tear through our culture like wet toilet paper, and their professors who won't even debate to continue to be dominant in academia.
The Trump movement was a stupid movement. Period.

[rolandxb]

I have to say Wendy Brown does an awful lot of work to ensure it's ultimately all the Right's fault and that the Left has little to do with it (aside from being too neoliberal, hah). She's somehow even blaming stagflation and economic crises on neoliberalism, even though neoliberalism as we know it was a reaction to prior leftist economic policies that caused that stagflation! Looking at her historical fictions, it seems to me that Wendy Brown is not a reliable guide, she is simply possessed by an opposing ideology. If this story is correct, why do most people refuse to vote for left-wing parties (especially in non-binary European elections)? The progressive cult of autonomy and liberation at any cost has contributed just as much to the destruction of the social fabric as economic forces, and we on the Right refuse to support elites that think attacking Western culture and heritage and fighting 'heteronormativity' are the current frontiers of social justice. I'm getting more and more convinced that the academic left is fundamentally incapable of critical introspection. People like them absolutely dominate our cultural institutions and now threaten to cancel anyone who disagrees with them. I'm not voting for socialism if that means hastening the destruction of freedom of thought.

Ironically, Trump has done more than anyone else to tank the chances of the (far) right to gain meaningful political power. He's their worst leader, since he exemplifies the right's worst instincts, to predictable results. In a few weeks, the American Right has not a single major institution on its side. All they can do is to rage and commit random acts of violence and terrorism that will do nothing for their cause but further alienate all respectable society from them. At this point, Trumpism only serves as a boogeyman for justifying social media censorship by unaccountable corporate bureaucrats (I mean, it's a pretty tall order to defend QAnon's freedom of speech rights in view of the recent destruction in Washington). Makes you wonder how sincere people like Wendy Brown are in their opposition to powerful corporations.

All this also means the most dangerous ideological possession (in America, at least) is currently found on the Left, precisely because nobody in respectable society dares to name it even though it is everywhere.

[IanFrantz]

Spot on!

If you liked this, you might find Ted Kaczynski: Industrial Society and its Future interesting.

Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis from 2016 is good too.