Deep Down, He's What They Wanted All Along

A theory of liberal indifference

A good bit of digital ink has been spilled analyzing the vast differences between how liberals and leftists reacted when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 versus 2024. The Z Man had a great essay that just came out the other day looking at the interdiction campaign waged by the Trump brain trust against the flow of money from the Swamp to various NGOs, think tanks, and charities that serve as sinecures and rival power centers for the various ideological clusters of the deep state. But I would say it’s more than just a cash flow problem for the enemies of the God Emperor. Indeed, it might be a bit much to speak of enemies. I suspect that the truth- whatever the polls say- is that a great many of the people who voted against him are actually glad he’s in charge, and are perfectly happy with the radical changes he’s initiating.

Forget Dark MAGA, how about Off-Teal? Just kidding, she’s nuts. Yes, she.

Imagine you’re the typical Gen-Z Biden voter. You’re an upwardly mobile, educated urbanite who’s been groomed since birth to genuflect to every nostrum of neoliberalism. You did the work and got the grades and took the tests that got you into the right schools and networks that function as the measure of status in Our Meritocracy. But whatever your particular skills, you’re also an expert in what to say and to whom. Your education has been heavily geared toward conditioning the correct word association responses to social stimuli- Diversity = Strength; Masculinity = Toxic; Minority = Empowered; White = Privileged; and so on. When you responded as expected to those signals, society would reward you with employment and esteem. It worked with scientific precision. . . right up until it didn’t.

There’s a tension within neoliberalism. On the one hand, there’s that meritocratic element, the notion that the ruling class of managers got there by means of just being that much smarter and more capable than everyone else. But then there’s the central drive to homogenize everything, to treat everything particular and differentiated as an obstacle to efficient management. Class isn’t real, nor sex, nor race, nor nation or religion- we’re all blank slate human capital. But somehow, some of this ends up being elite. The notion of objective standards implies a transcendent reality to the universe against which things can be judged, which flies in the face of the old liberal commitment to a value-neutral public sphere, as well as placing a limit on the positive liberal injunction to define and pursue happiness and set values according to one’s personal definition. Thus it is that the most meritorious people- according to standardized systems- must loudly proclaim their commitment to merit as a nebulous and indefinable concept.

In practice, it mostly involves choosing the right teen sitcom characters to emulate.

The Cult of DEI is the cthonic complement to the neoliberal cursus negotium. It represents the unresolvable paradox of the individual attempting to distinguish himself in a system that valorizes the erosion of distinctions. Such differences that are deemed acceptable work as pretexts for the extension of power; the only identities allowed a positive existence are those that can both work against the remnants of older, organic cultures and provide a rationale for intervention on the part of the system. Yet the victim counter-hierarchy managerialism willed into being as a justification for its domination and intrusion into every area of life is also a parasitic force draining it of legitimacy.

All of this together has resulted in cutthroat competition under conditions of terrifying ambiguity. One rises to some degree based on technical expertise and credentials, but one must also demonstrate a fanatical commitment to an ever-more demanding yet nebulous system of luxury beliefs. Though rooted in a leftist understanding of the world, the ideas that animate progressivism have been infused with a hypercapitalist ethos of endlessly mutating novelty and ever more refined customization according to consumer taste. The purity spirals that characterize every revolution have reached the stage of becoming strangling vines, choking off new growth.

In lieu of PayPal, you could forward funds to Uber Eats.

As the demands for ever more esoteric virtue signals has grown, the material benefits of doing so have come with rapidly diminishing returns. If the goal of life under managerial neoliberalism is a high status job in a socially-acceptable urban area, both of those things are- because of that very ideology- increasingly difficult to achieve for those who want them. Mass immigration, the labor cornerstone of neoliberalism, has made major urban areas increasingly uninhabitable. Replacement from abroad, coupled with the Cult of DEI, has made finding secure and status-worthy work a far greater challenge than in the past. The leftism of the university that functions as the social conscience of progressivism has destroyed quality of life under the theory that crime should be solved my managerial social services rather than punitive law enforcement. A good progressive has to pretend all of these things are good even as they make his life and his future a living hell.

It must be remembered as well how rapidly all of these changes occurred. Barack Obama as late as 2012 could still insist- implausibly- that he believed marriage to be strictly between a man and a woman, and transgenderism was not then a significant national issue (Caitlyn Jenner didn’t hit the magazine covers until 2015). There are plenty of adults still alive who remember the ancien regime, and for the more thoughtful and self-respecting of them, it must be galling on some level to have to bend the knee to an ever-mutating list of officially-approved absurdities, whatever one’s political beliefs. But of course, the last ten years was not the time to stand in the breach and fight if one wanted to remain a liberal in good standing.

2016 was the fateful year. However ridiculous they pretended they thought he was, the system understood the threat that Donald Trump posed, not so much in his person, but in the fact that he gave voice to ideas deemed unacceptable by Globohomo. Every right-thinking person knew than free trade was good, mass immigration was good, and the indiscriminate use of military force to undergird the neoliberal economic order was beyond question. But decades of unrelenting propaganda from both political parties and the entire media and education system had not succeeded in turning a solid plurality of Americans from their own lived experience. Some were open about it; others kept their mouths shut and silently hoped the changes would happen despite their inaction.

You can still buy the commemorative edition on Amazon for $195.

When Trump was elected the system underwent a frenzied antibody response, cranking up the radicalism of its ideological demands in a comprehensive campaign of enforced conformity not normally seen outside of wartime. The underlying thesis was that Trump was the last gasp of a dying and obsolete America, one in which the people who bore an organic cultural relationship to the country believed themselves the natural custodians of national identity and social norms. His destruction would mark the end of that old world and the final emergence of a new order that would be the fully-realized instantiation of the neoliberal consensus, a world in which truth, goodness, and reality itself could be constructed and disseminated as an ideological product to a homogenous global community of receptive consumers.

All of this foundered on a sea of incompetence and arrogance. That latter part is important. The meritocrats of neoliberalism have all the vices of aristocrats with none of the charm, honor, or ability. They enjoy the material attributes of power, true, but it’s the psychic rewards that are really meaningful. Having no belief in God, or any sort of transcendent order, the managerial class considers itself the arbiter of truth and feels no restraint in its desire to impose its novel and ever-evolving doctrines on others. Some of this is as noted above, based on an ideological compulsion to homogenize and maximize efficiencies. But on a human level it manifests as a desire to control, punish, and humiliate. As the great Theodore Dalrymple (who really should be on Substack) once noted of a sister revolutionary ideology:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

This insight explains a great many of the oddities of managerial rule, where in terms of logic or calculation things often make little sense. Why, for example, did (does?) the British government collude for decades to abet and cover up the mass rape of English girls at the hands of foreigners? What did they get out of it, when they must have known on some level that eventually there would be some outcry? The simplest explanation is really the best; they wanted it to happen and were happy it did. Not only did it strike a blow against the “legacy of colonialism” by helping those foreigners rape white girls, it also allowed the managers to vicariously humiliate people they considered their social and moral inferiors- first when they were assaulted, then when it was made clear that the system was on the side of the rapists, and then a third time when that system responded to public protest by promising to imprison those who complained too vociferously. “We will flood your land with aliens, set them upon you, and make you tell us you like it,” was the message in essence.

No, it’s a different Sam Francis, but Elon Musk is still busy getting OG one cloned for Substack.

Everyone who colluded with this- the police, the NHS, the media, etc.- perpetuated a collection of evil lies and thereby became Dalrymple’s emasculated liars. But so especially did the people who voted for it. And those people, once so humiliated, become the eager enforcers of the system. There is nothing they hate more than someone who didn’t bend the knee, but at the same time, they long to both be free of it and to wield its power.

In America, the great promise of the resistance was that Trumpism would be destroyed forever and Trump, supposedly thin-skinned, would be humiliated and rendered obscure and infamous. And along with him would go his socially retrograde supporters, those small-town bigots with their NASCAR fandom and blue-collar-adjacent jobs. It’s impossible to understate the level of animosity the typical white progressive feels towards his backwards relations, and how much the desire to harm them fuels his politics. The prospect of being able to humiliate them from on high was an intoxicating prospect in the years leading up to the 2020 election.

Progressives- Boomer humor without the humor

George Floyd and COVID lockdowns were of a piece, the former a pretext for granting a license to pillage on the part of the clients of managerialism and the latter a flexing of its power to control. Note that the latter in no way hindered the former; in Schmidtian terms, the managers decided the exception. When Joe Biden’s puppeteers ascended to authority, it must have seemed to progressives like everything would be set right in the world. But that was not to be the case, and what happened is key to understanding why those same progressives have largely stopped fighting Trump.

The purity spiraling didn’t cease; if anything it just kept going. DEI took on a life of its own. The queering of every aspect of life accelerated with dizzying speed. Advances in AI began threatening the laptop jobs that form the backbone of the progressive economy And perhaps most importantly, immigration skyrocketed, along with related crime, when the system bothered to count it. At their very moment of triumph, things actually began to look more bleak.

Not for the people at the top, of course; they were making out like bandits. But for those forced to return to the office, life was not great. Consider the subway ride to work. You leave an apartment- the rent of which has doubled since assuming tenancy- and walk down sidewalks festooned with stumbling derelicts, hoping not to be accosted. You enter the station and pay, being among the minority who do so, and enter a train car that reeks of urine and marijuana. Then the dreaded moment comes- one of those vagrants, barely coherent but with unmistakable menace- begins ranting at the passengers. You watch him scream at an old man, then a mother with her young child, but you ignore it. Then he moves in your direction. You stare at the floor as he yells, not daring to make eye contact, as though he was some great sovereign and you his cringing subject. When he moves on, you breathe a sigh of relief, but only for a moment, because it’s here that the some inkling of a realization finally hits you.

That bum is there for a reason. Your boss put him there; the same guy who forces you to type in a cubicle instead of your living room gave millions of dollars to politicians and prosecutors to ensure that there would be people like this harassing you on the train every day. What does he get out of it? He gets to humiliate you. He gets to differentiate himself from you by inflicting upon you public abuse from a class of person he’s abjured from his own world. And you helped him do it.

This doesn’t provoke any kind of deep introspection on your part, of course. Your progressive education and moral malleability have long rendered that largely impossible. But you do know one thing- something has gone very bad in the world. You’re not the one who’s supposed to feel humiliated, that MAGAt is! He’s cheering on his Drumpfenführer even after the people you voted for keep banning him from social media and charging him with crimes. And even as your life keeps getting more confusing, crowded, expensive, and dangerous, Trump keeps beating everything the system throws at him, including being shot. You get summoned to HR for racial microaggressions; Trump tells a room full of black journalists that Kamala Harris is an Indian. He’s winning. You’re losing. And then he gets elected.

You begin to look at things a bit differently. Your life, such as it is, is about feeling a sense of superiority to your declassee fellow whites. This means hating Trump, obviously, but not necessarily stopping him. Consider the case of Daniel Penny. If the incident and trial had transpired in 2017, Penny’s conviction would have been a forgone conclusion, which you would have fully supported. By 2023, after enough of those train rides, you wanted whoever that screaming bum was dead. You would never say it out loud, of course, but you secretly actually wish you could have witnessed Penny choke the life out of that miserable creature who had you cringing like a slave. Getting rid of train bums is now official regime policy, and though you are required to hate it, you do not feel it in your heart.

They hated him not because of what he did, but because of what they would not do.

Likewise, Trump is ridding the world of DEI. No more struggle sessions you have to pretend to look forward to; no more HR blocking your promotion. The government no longer recognizes trans as any kind of reality. The whole thing always kind of disgusted you, and of all the policies you had to play along with this one genuinely creeped you out the most, and now you can look forward to it being backgrounded from your life at the very least. But best of all, Trump is deporting people. The human flood that has resulted in astronomical rents and impossible housing costs anywhere a right-thinking progressive would choose to live is now being pushed back.

And best of all, you can get all of these benefits without even have to support Trump! You can still go to parties and hold forth on how horrible it is that they’re firing the diversity team at work or how sad that crying deported Guatemalan woman on TV was and still be secretly glad they’re all gone from your life. You can go on saying “trans women are women” without worrying that there will be any social or corporate pressure to act like you believe it. You can mock ‘Trumpers’ and fascists and rednecks and Christians, and humiliate them on a personal level should the occasion arise, while still enjoying the benefits of the social order they’re bringing into being. You get to live your own lie on your own terms, not one where you’re the goat.

So what’s to fight? If you’re not one of those progressives who’s actively materially benefiting from some government program Trump wants to destroy, or not an actual, sincere, mentally-ill ideologue, then you really only stand to gain from Trump’s policies. Much as junior Soviet apparatchiks saw every new show trial as an occasion for promotions, so too does Trump purging the upper ranks of the managerial state in the interest of ending the Cult of DEI bode well for those with some measure of actual talent currently being held back. And you don’t even need to like him.

This is something that the right should very much be aware of. For some, the new order emerging from the wreckage of liberalism is an opportunity to create a more just social order rooted in a vision of the Good. For others, like those trimmers I described above, it represents an chance to seize the reigns of power in the interest of pursuing the old ends with more competent people. The latter group is interested in power primarily for the chance for material gain and the chance to humiliate their enemies, which is to say, us. This isn’t to say that coalitions cannot be formed or that use cannot be made of the talents of venal men. But they must never become the leaders of anything of importance.

Along those lines, another group that must forever be dispensed with are the contemptible and quisling cuckservatives. These buck-broken sellouts are the opposite of the progressive in the sense that while the latter secretly enjoys policies he publicly decries, the cuck professes to uphold ‘traditional values,’ but only in the abstract and only when they do not run afoul of liberalism. Whatever else he claims, liberalism is his true faith, and his activity in any sphere is solely geared toward advancing that ideology at the expense of anything else. His only media function is the make the “Conservative Case For” some abomination. If the progressive is the Assistant Minister of Potato Harvests who secretly imports Levi’s, the cuckservative is the Evangelical pastor in the North Face vest who takes a hard line on mean tweets but a nuanced position on novel pronouns.

He’s since walked it back . . . sort of.

I would argue that most of the anti-Trump energy at the moment actually comes from the cucks rather than the progressives. The former are in their element; as their epithet implies, they actually like being humiliated, and long for a system that does so regularly and harshly. They fell apart during the Bush years when they actually got their way, and responded by sending their voters off to a pointless war so that they would return and hate them properly, which they did. Now they attack Trump so that they can enjoy the frisson that comes from being abused by actual traditionalists and the readers of their New York Times columns at the same time.

We live in exciting and promising times. There is no reason for anyone to blackpill, but there is also a great need to be mindful of pitfalls. As the right ascends there will be those who attempt to cling to it on the way up. Those in power and those with roles as employers, creators, teachers, etc. should be mindful of this and curate their relationships in the interest of justice and the common good. This is the Great Work of our generation. Let’s not screw it up.