Destroying the West in order to save it
When all reform leads to revolution
The Communist movement in the West is today made up of a handful of grizzled geriatrics standing around trestle tables exuding a flavour of moth balls. Yet as the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1963: ‘The right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.’
Which is why braying Marxists are once again at the gates. According to Donald Trump, Joe Biden is ‘controlled’ by ‘Marxists, & Communists’. Elon Musk says ‘neo-Marxists’ and ‘full-on Communism’ are responsible for the estrangement of his daughter. ‘World renowned’ psychology professor Jordan Peterson rails against ‘post-modern Neo-Marxists’ and ‘cultural Marxists’. The conservative pundit James Lindsay claims that anti-racists want to impose a ‘total Racial Bolshevik Revolution’ on America.
There is no shortage of irony here. Isaiah Berlin once observed that a stratagem of totalitarian regimes is to present all situations as critical emergencies. Yet Berlin is too measured a thinker to carry weight among the frenzied populist currents sweeping today’s right. Instead we get initiatives like ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) where a person only has to make a certain kind of noise to be welcomed onto the stage and into the fold. A Legatum and Paul Marshall-funded initiative, Arc’s stated aim is to ‘help re-lay the foundations of our civilisation’. In practice this means attacking ‘radical leftists’ and anyone it is expedient to pretend is a ‘radical leftist’. To paraphrase Lionel Trilling, the recent ARC event in East London saw a succession of speakers take turns unleashing a stream of ‘irritable mental gestures which sought to resemble ideas’. Kemi Badenoch claimed that western civilisation would fall without the Tories. Psychology professor Jordan Peterson said the West was in a ‘civilisational moment’. Douglas Murray talked of ‘civilisational renewal’.
Some, like the YouTube pundit Konstantin Kisin, spoke in a more optimistic key. Thanks to Trump’s election victory across the pond, ‘The tide is turning [and] our American friends are leading the way,’ Kisin proclaimed between hammy jokes about Chinese and trans people. ‘DEI, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, has been dismantled,’ crowed the alumnus of Clifton College Boarding School (term fees £17,650).
Were screens and short bursts of video not now the dominant sources of information about the world, I suspect a lot of these newly-minted culture warriors would be languishing noisily in obscurity. Instead, as we revert to a pre-literate oral culture, pre-literal pundits are in the ascendant (Kisin has appeared multiple times on BBC current affairs programmes and Badenoch has appeared on his podcast). Intellectuals are being knocked off their perches by influencers; politicians dislodged by game show hosts. As the Times columnist James Marriott has observed:
Among the attributes of oral societies are an addiction to the memorable, such as formulaic and cliché language, ‘heavy’ crudely-characterised personalities (like Cerberus or Donald Trump or Marvel superheroes) and to more violent forms of expression. This is in contrast to print which fosters subtlety, logical argument and emotional distance.
Kisin at least pays tribute to the vanishing world of letters. ‘Words are something of a speciality and a hobby,’ he writes in An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022). Not that you would know it from the prose in this mercifully slim volume, which gurgles with cliches and off-the-shelf banalities. Censorious persons are ‘Orwellian’; bad ideas ‘spread like wild fire’; conversations about difficult subjects ‘have become a way to separate us rather than bring us together’.
Having emigrated to Britain from the Soviet Union aged 10, Kisin credits the West with ‘saving’ him. Today he wants to repay the favour despite nobody asking him to. ‘As people seek to destroy [the West], I want to save it in return,’ he writes. Clearly some are pining for a diminutive Russian saviour: the book was a Sunday Times bestseller. Yet as an expression of love it is the equivalent of a clump of sun-baked Chrysanthemums purloined from a petrol station forecourt. A potted history of the Soviet Union is followed by a torrent of whiney non-sequiturs. Portraits of life under Communism function as a warning that the West is facing ‘the exact same threat’ from progressive reformers.
Conservatives are often the left’s best students. As much as Kisin likes to rail against identity politics, he is quick to use its conventions as a cudgel when the need arrises. The most reactionary arguments in his book are cleverly placed in the mouths of women and token minorities. The pseudo-feminist Camille Paglia blames gender non-conformity for societal ruin. A Black Catholic cardinal is wheeled out to warn about an ‘invasion’ of the West by ‘other cultures’ (perhaps with Sunday Times readers in mind, Kisin wisely omits comments by the Cardinal comparing homosexuality to ‘Nazi-fascism’).
Elsewhere Kisin disparages the ‘lived experience’ of others while expecting us to defer to his own. We must ‘deal with reality as we find it’, warns Kisin, or else find ourselves subject to the ‘cruel lessons’ of the ‘Soviet virus’. It doesn’t take long for the 7 million Ukrainians who perished in the Holodomor to be similarly employed for the purposes of relativism. ‘This tragic chapter of Russia’s past [more tragic for Ukraine one would think] didn’t emerge overnight. It grew slowly from some well-intended but seriously misguided ideas…To a much lesser extent [italics mine], a similar thing is happening across the West in today’s society’.
From Butyrka to bathos. The most grizzled camp prisoner probably did less hard labour than those five words. All the same, it is good to see Kisin taking his own advice to heart and seeing reality as it really is.
Jordan Peterson has been a regular fixture on the lucrative culture war circuit since his confected ‘cancellation’ back in 2016. As the years have rolled by his outfits have taken on the timbre and hue of his politics: everything has become more zany, lurid and bilious. The Peterson of 12 Rules for Life (2018) has been replaced by a blazing eyed YouTube prophet. Somewhere in the Peterson household a dog-eared copy of Iron John is sitting in a drawer gathering dust; today he seeks to begin the reformation by nailing a copy of The Gospels to the boudoirs of ‘the modern whores of Babylon’ (i.e. pornstars and e-girls).
I recently wrote a profile about Douglas Murray for Prospect magazine. Murray comes close to Peterson in terms of popularity. However what most struck me during my research was the gulf between Murray’s public persona (erudite intellectual) and the underwhelming nature of much of his written work. As I wrote in the piece:
Whereas on YouTube anti-woke pugilists may be content to chase the same brass ring into the gutter, a published author (not least one with pretensions to be an intellectual) must work up something more substantive…Yet Murray’s research is sometimes sloppy and the opposition trenches in his culture war are largely manned by straw men.
InThe War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022), Murray misquotes Karl Marx to make it sound like he was in favour of slavery. He also repeats a long-discredited claim that the French philosopher Michel Foucault was a child rapist. Not that these bungling forays into western civilisation are any impediment to claiming a monopoly of insight into how to ‘reconstruct’ it. Indeed, Murray has been lauded by the Wall Street Journal as ‘Europe’s Paul Revere’ (Murray’s radioactive forebodings about the ‘opportunistic infection’ of Islam are apparently redolent of Revere’s warnings to the Minutemen that ‘The British are coming’. Talk about dishonouring your own history.)
Ukraine is a useful litmus test as to whether this incessant bleating about western civilisation is anything more than a rhetorical weapon: a form of cultural chauvinism masquerading as something profound and cerebral. Are Russian tanks and bullets more or less of an imminent danger than Islam, pronouns and progressives?
Hard to say, apparently. Prior to the American election, former prime minister Liz Truss stated on numerous occasions that Trump’s election victory was vital for ‘saving’ the West. ‘The world needs Trump,’ preened Kisin, who, like Murray, occasionally professes to care about Ukraine while acting as a stenographer for the politician who has been promising to sell the country out (and is presently doing so). Crawling out of the slimy entrails of Mar-a-Lago on election night, Murray declared triumphantly that Trump was going to ‘show what American leadership on the world stage actually looks like’.
A protection racket is what it looks like. It has taken less than a month for the self-serving prognostications of ‘heterodox’ intellectuals to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. The hysterical cant about western civilisation was never about the defence of democratic principles - neither at home or from a revanchist Russia. Indeed, Peterson has blamed Nato for the war in Ukraine and pondered whether Putin might be on the right side in the civilisational struggle against ‘wokeness’. Not that it is hard to see why a partnership with Russia might be attractive to our own purveyors of reactionary piffle: the Kremlin also purports to be defending Christendom against gender freedoms and ‘spiritual catastrophe’.
‘This is the most important election of my lifetime,’ proclaimed the Somalian-born pundit (and one-time muse of ‘new’ atheist men of a certain age) Ayaan Hirsi Ali on 7 November 2024. ‘The situation could not be more dire. At stake is the very survival of our republic.’ Predictably enough these words formed part of a larger excretion on why she was voting for Trump. Concerns about the candidate who failed to concede the last election were merely symptomatic of (another stock phrase) ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. Kamala Harris had to be stopped for the sake of the republic. ‘The Democratic Party is a machine, taken over by the far-left wing of the party,’ Hirsi Ali warned.
As you may have noticed by now, it isn’t only washed up pundits who see the left as the primary adversary to be conquered. American vice president JD Vance recently turned up in Munich (of all places) to lecture Europeans on the ‘threat from within’.
In 1963 the historian Richard Hofstadter noted of McCarthyism that:
Communism was not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power of international Communism where it really mattered - in the arena of world politics.
McCarthyism was more about discrediting democratic Socialists, social democrats, liberals and supporters of the New Deal than unearthing Soviet subversion. These days the orchestra may have changed but the conductor has not. Bureaucratic McCarthyist intrigue has merely been supplanted by algorithmic appeals to the mob. Hierarchies find new ways of authorising themselves. Every day the envelope is pushed a little further, the rhetoric ratcheted up a little more. As John Ganz has written, we have reached a point where Nazi salutes are treated as an irreverent lark.
It seems clear that Michael Anton’s infamous ‘Flight 93’ essay has been taken as more than a figure of speech by many conservatives. As the Intelligencer describes the piece:
Anton chose the arresting metaphor of Flight 93, the hijacked plane from September 11, 2001, whose passengers stormed the cockpit in a desperate bid to stave off certain death. Electing Trump, he conceded, was risky (like seizing a plane from terrorists midair), but the alternative of electing Hillary Clinton posed certain political and demographic death.
Following the events of January 6, 2021, Anton suggested that the Republicans should prevent a national popular vote from taking place altogether on the basis that it ‘guarantees a Democratic win in every presidential election henceforth’. He was wrong of course but don’t imagine the thought has gone away. In order to preserve a narrow and exclusionary vision of civilisation, many are willing to take such a gamble.
Lest anyone should think this is a North American problem, plenty of castor oil-ish proclamations are being emitted here in Britain. The race science movement appears to have infiltrated Westminster. GB News presenters bleat menacingly about ‘foreign’-looking people walking British streets and champion ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the AFD (following last week’s German election, apologists for the Waffen SS now sit alongside admirers of Putin in the party’s parliamentary group). Right-wing publications advocate for ‘Caesarism’ as an alternative to democracy; or for locking up ‘traitors’ in government for having the audacity to give away Britain’s last African colony. A Conservative peer has been hosting far-right activists in parliament.
Surveying the political landscape, I am reminded of Ignazio Silone’s description of fascism as ‘a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place’. Imaginary enemies can be just as powerful as real ones. You just have to convince enough people that all reform leads to revolution.