Belmont Club: Dusk or Dawn?

There is a feeling among some that the November 2024 election is special. It is useful to consider why.

American presidential activities have become increasingly important since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ushering in a period of U.S. dominance occasionally referred to as The End of History. The Reagan victory marked a moment when the key battlefield in the struggle to determine the future of humanity shifted from the superpower competition between East and West to the simple control of the institutions of the West, following the collapse of the USSR.

Gone was Che Guevara and Mao's strategy of surrounding the global cities from the Third World countryside. Back was Gramsci's plan to infiltrate Western institutions and culture from within. If the enemy walls were impregnable from without, they were vulnerable from within. The left accepted the West would be conquered by coup. To this task they set forth with might and main.

But something happened that Gramsci did not expect. As the march through the institutions progressed, the "progressives" -- so confident of their intellectual superiority -- did not sweep all before them. Rather they found the resistance stiffening unexpectedly. Unlikely coalitions rooted in the "Working Class" and even among formerly left-wing sympathizers began to multiply. The surprise setbacks of 2016, Trump and Brexit, grew rather than declined, as one might expect of the last-gasp resistance in the inevitable tide of history.

Today the Reagan castle the progressives captured by coup is in shambles. They are in possession of a ruin. The Global World has not only shattered but is breaking out in war. The only answer to inflation is price control. Worse, the political opposition to progressive ideas has become assertive and even respectable. Things have come to a head; that is what makes November 2024 so special.

On the clock of contemporary history, it's showdown time, not simply in America but the wider West. At stake is the future of a culture; whether it will continue the suicide foretold by Nietzsche or find new hope in failure of totalitarianism and its meager promise. It is about whether history ends with a Western palace coup or it continues. In ordinary times elections are about policy. At greater moments they are about civilization. At the greatest junctures they are about issues that no one can even express in words.

One of the biggest political changes of the last decade is that the opposition to the leftist agenda has through some process become self-aware.The opposition to the Gramscian coup achieved a kind of consciousness that progressives long felt belonged only to them, like HAL attaining sentience. At first the left thought this Other was only a monkey imitation of themselves, calling it "reactionary," or "far-right" because it had to be derivative; a parody of the great original, a cheap copy of the leftist master. Only the left could think, the "Nazis" could only define themselves by negation.

Nothing captures this intellectual self-centeredness better than the liberal assertion that all the rights women, minorities and the poor enjoy "come from the left," since being the creative force of history, whence else could things come but from them? But the despised Otherside does not claim credit for these things themselves as an image in a twisted mirror might. These good things, so the counterargument against the left goes, are not gifts from the vanguard, but emergent potentialities waiting to be discovered and revealed. In oldspeak (which they dare to utter) it is information which comes from "God."

If the left is the fons and origen of history ("Revolutions are the locomotives  of history," said Karl Marx) the modern counterconsciousness to the left is distinguished by a greater degree of entropy than the marxian dogma. It admits to far more bits and a significantly greater potential to surprise than a commissariat is capable of. While left wing diversity is only expressible as costume within a given political line, like Stalin's nationalist charade korenizatsiia. "The main idea of the korenizatsiia was to grow communist cadres for every nationality." Counterleft diversity is substantive because information can come from outside the human system.

This explains why the modern left is sterile. All its supposed novelty is apparent. It hasn't said a new thing in nearly two centuries. The main idea of the progressive diversity is to grow communist cadres for every intersectionality.  This explains why Kamala Harris, despite all her newness, is actually the same old, same old. It explains why Joe Biden can be replaced in a heartbeat by the left when he had a cognitive accident; it was as simple as screwing out a busted bulb and screwing in a new one, because his substitute is the same candidate but in different costume.

Although the November 2024 election is special because the issues it addresses are fundamental, it is probably wrong to regard its outcome as the End of History any more than 1989 closed the books on human affairs. Rather than being at the end of things, it is a reminder that we are always at the beginning. Gramsci may have captured the castle only to discover the castle itself has moved. Things begin anew. Welcome back to the fight.