This is not a drill. This is the real deal, and we acquiesce at our great peril.
I remember considerable emphasis in my formal education on how important it is to resist these sorts of totalitarian movements. I remember watching The Wave, the Stanford Prison Experiment documentary, the Milgram Experiments, etc. I remember reading about how the Nazis were enabled by people who remained quiet. I remember learning the dangers of group think and scapegoating. We learned how important it was to think critically and question authority.
But throughout it all, the threats were coded mostly as right-wing, at least in my Seattle schooling. I don't remember being introduced to, say, Solzhenitsyn. Through the simple trick of putting a leftist mask on totalitarianism and coding resistance as "right wing," "far right," "racist," "white supremacist," etc., almost all of my educated leftist friends and family eagerly abandoned the principles we were raised with and jumped right on the authoritarian bandwagon. It is so crude and obvious a trick, but the intelligentsia are either oblivious or willfully blind to the evil they are perpetuating.
Particularly with the advent of bank account freezing, not to mention the social and career costs of resisting, this adage has a lot of explanatory power these days:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
I'd like to share a recent experience with Yelp. I started noticing that a large number of reviews had been removed, for "violating our terms." Then one of my reviews was removed, for "perpetuating negative cultural stereotypes." I wrote a review of a local Sbarro's where I was unable to order a meal because the server didn't speak English. I asked if someone else working there spoke English but no one did. I thought this was ridiculous so I wrote a negative review. This Sbarro's was in a large local shopping mall in a county that is 70 percent white non-hispanic. I don't think it is possible to shut down the flow of communication entirely, but there seem to be concerted efforts at the major websites and platforms to curate what we can see.
I do agree that recourse to the Emergency Measures Act is an overreach, but on the other hand I don't think Justin Trudeau is a very likely authoritarian leader. Some segments of the Western Canadian right have hated him since he got into politics, and this trucker convoy seems to have been organised by people of this persuasion. And the reason why they hate him really isn't anything to do with him personally, but rather because of their memory of his father. Pierre Trudeau was both much more competent and more authoritarian than Justin (indeed, he was Prime Minister when his government promulgated the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, which was a much greater authoritarian overreach than what we're seeing now), and in fact it seems to be Justin Trudeau's incompetence that eventually forced him to apply the Emergency Measures Act. In other words, it shouldn't have reached this point if the government had been competent.
What I find interesting is that the left-wing New Democratic Party will approve the use of the Emergency Measures Act this time around, while they were the only party in the House of Commons to vote against the War Measures Act in 1970. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has called the convoy protestors white supremacists, which is par for the course for the left in 2022, but which I find hard to square with Leighton's claim (which I mostly agree with, by the by) that politics has moved from the left-right axis to the centre-periphery axis. In a podcast, Leighton said that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were an instance of "the centre granting the periphery license to riot". This idea's been floating in my mind since then. I think that's right, but when and why does this happen? Because it sure didn't happen this time. It seems that just as politics is abandoning the left-right framework, the traditional (and therefore elite) political left is convincing itself that this framework is more important than ever, and that left-coded protests from the periphery are doing the good work of fighting oppression (even though they might be completely aimless) while right-coded protests from the periphery are the expression of white supremacy. I'd like to hear your opinion on this.
Trudeau is either right, or wrong. It doesn't matter that segments of the Canadian population hate him; that is arguably true of every national leader. And it doesn't matter what the reason could have started with; he has proven himself to be craven and a failure.
But non-violent protest is a right that is enshrined in the Canadian constitution, and it was over ridden in scant seconds, after that man refused to talk to his fellow citizens, lied about them, and siced his hussars on them. And, to further destroy any and all opposition, he froze all of the assets of anyone who dared speak for human rights.
I'd like to hear Leighton's thoughts on this too, but I'd like to add two quick points:
1. I think Trudeau's incompetent ineffectiveness is a feature, not a bug of the new, "enlightened" squishy world leader. I mean, why have the capacity for complex thought, or be willing to have discussions? It will only get you in trouble. (See: Biden, many other post-liberal leaders flirting with some form of soft totalitarianism.)
2. The BLM protests, and the ensuing chaos, weren't just allowed, they became a media-sponsored event. Some of the messaging even became outright compelled speech to the point where not putting a black box on your Instagram page could break up your band, or not having a sign in the window of your sandwich shop could force the neighborhood to shut you down.
I think this was a continuation of the early #resistance trick of having BLM break up Bernie's speeches, and then have leadership turn around and endorse Hillary (whose cronies are now — surprise, surprise — taking the reins of that same lead BLM chapter after their billions disappeared). Was it to take down Trump? Probably partially at least, but seeing Joe Biden stutter incoherently about "white supremacy," "Jim Crow on steroids" or, um, "Jim Eagle" when faced with any disagreement points to a necrotic democratic party that seized pure identify politics messaging (and especially co-opting language dealing with the struggle for continued racial equality). Now the rich, white leaders of the party use race as a bludgeon against small business and working types, who have committed the sin of mainly voting for Republicans.
(The worldwide Covid catastrophists and the uniform tarring of anti-lockdown types as racists, fascists or worse is all part of the same system. See also: yellow vests, which is the same story but using the trusty "climate catastophist" club.)
i think one of the reasons for this is that our entire elite class (basically everyone in any position of power who is not explicitly Conservative), from bankers and bureaucrats to journalists, celebs, and of course an army of academics, have adopted Critical Theory as their moral framework. (Crit Theory is now basically the religion of the globalist class and esp of the urban liberal creative class.)
And under Crit Theory morality (which is color-coded) anything done by any member of a marginalized group (most esp blacks and gays) is automatically just and righteous by the nature and position of the people doing it; and conversely, anything said or done by a member of a privileged group (most esp if they are Deplorables or Deplorable-adjacent), is ipso facto evil and regressive, and needs to be stopped by any means necessary.
This might be implied in your reference to “the ‘nature and position of the people doing it”, but everywhere I look I see people who are in no way marginalized, whose voices are privileged and elevated at every turn, who are given carte blanche and heaped with praise by establishment elites, no matter how low they sink, how despicably they seek to smear and ruin others for even greater ego and power and profit, who were never actually poor or oppressed or shut out of major institutions. So many grew up with at least one, often two, professional parents, and am inside track to good schools, and identity-targeted scholarships, mentorships and professional sinecures. What they and their establishment elite benefactors have done is perfect the absolutely unabashed performance of having one’s identity cake while eating it, too: they also get to play by special rules, always demand enviable positions at young ages, and never cease complaining about how uniquely oppressed they are, no matter how much largesse and how many titles are heaped on them. There is, for example, the approximately 30% of black Americans whom John McWhorter refers to as the subgroup that is actually struggling disproportionately, who do tend to be isolated and concentrated in neighborhoods where violent crime is very common, schools are generally terrible, and the physical environment is less green and more polluted. It’s long past time, for actual liberals to call the bluff of people who claim that, well over fifty years since the start of racial preferences, minority-only scholarships, contract set-asides, etc. everyone who is not white in America is still somehow oppressed. Lots of people have been benefiting for a long time for being “diverse” without experiencing any kind of meaningful racial or ethnic discrimination. It’s a dare and a bluff, this insistence we keep pretending that a black or Latino kid who is growing up in more stable, affluent, connected family than so many other American kids, is somehow in 2022 in need of massive racial privileges and profound deference, simply due identity category. In 2022, anyone with “one drop” of blood connecting them to Africa or even Spain, is going to claim to be black or Latino or biracial. All else being equal today, the advantages that confers are enormous in status, and standing, and access to an inside track to admissions slots and job offers.
It is a bizarre philosophy that claims that (say) Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are “oppressed” while a disabled, drug-addicted, homeless white male veteran is the “oppressor”.
Sorry to be a pest, this quote i think helps to answer your question, and many other questions people seem to have about our cultural/political moment.
It is from Herbert Marcuse, the Leftist guru and one of the architects of the New Left (which has supplanted the old materialist Left), from his essay "Repressive Tolerance" (the name says it all):
"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people. This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
I saw an interview on the origins of the protest. It began with a group of Canadian Native Indian truckers who were suffering under the mandates and reached out for support. The word spread; they organized, and...wow.
The BLM protests of 2020 caused economic disruption, though mostly in marginalised communities that elites might not care too much about, but more importantly, could have caused the Democratic Party to lose the 2020 election. That, I feel, might have been a threat to the Centre. The truckers originally wanted an end to vaccine requirements to cross the border. Is this really a threat to anyone? Now the movement seems to have picked up an anti-elite and specifically anti-Trudeau character, but on the face of it I don't view their original ostensible demands as especially threatening.
On his Substack, Freddie deBoer's talks today of "definitional collapse", the idea that politics are now devoid of meaning, but are entirely about ingroup versus outgroup. The truckers' protest became right-coded (which is largely orthogonal to being meaningfully right-wing), which dictated how we would react to it and how threatening we would perceive it to be. For example, while we here are claiming that the government's response to the truckers' protest was especially harsh, people who identify as left-wing claim that the reason why the protest was even allowed to last as long as it did was that it is "right-wing" and the police is therefore sympathetic to it, and that "left-wing" protests, or protests for indigenous rights, would have been broken up much more harshly and much faster. At this point, I don't even know whether it's left-coded or right-coded issues that the Centre views as more threatening. Possibly neither. But it seems to drive how we think about things.
All true, but the better question is how does this new form of authoritarianism impact social movement building strategy. I have to admit, the Antifa-types long ago seem to have altered their tacts to fit the reality described above. But the right-wingers still show up to quasi-legal, quasi-revolutionary events with their faces proudly bared.
I guess after tonight’s Darth Vader speech Biden’s minders are getting ready to get our senile POTUS to toggle the switch to “God mode”. As one of the commenters below wrote months ago “this is not a drill”. Great essay! And great writing generally—keep fighting the good fight! Thirty years ago you’d be a star writer for The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly (not the zombie publications of the same name still lumbering along today).
"Crawling Eye"...yes a favorite on Chiller Theatre...having lived in California...before NY...this weekend dose was a more visual bit of boomer paranoia (albeit produced in CA)...as a child in California...it was get under your desk drills to protect you from Russian nuclear fallout...actually could have been blowing over from Las Vegas...if the winds reversed. Living now in Italy for some 20 years...I look at the US and recall the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". From the distance...like trying to watch the daily growth of hair...the US is far down the "slippery slope"...it has not been glacial...like Moores Law...it is apparent from..."beyond the horizon". During a life of 69 planetary rotations...I have enjoyed traveling throughout this planet...observing closely different cultures and the synthesis of their rotations...sans "Chiller Theatre". Landing the first time in Moscow...I had to wonder why I had scuffed the knees of my tan Levi's delivered from Sears...just the week before in September 1960? Drip feed fear...we humans are filled with delusion, illusion, and error...isn't it so?
This is not a drill. This is the real deal, and we acquiesce at our great peril.
I remember considerable emphasis in my formal education on how important it is to resist these sorts of totalitarian movements. I remember watching The Wave, the Stanford Prison Experiment documentary, the Milgram Experiments, etc. I remember reading about how the Nazis were enabled by people who remained quiet. I remember learning the dangers of group think and scapegoating. We learned how important it was to think critically and question authority.
But throughout it all, the threats were coded mostly as right-wing, at least in my Seattle schooling. I don't remember being introduced to, say, Solzhenitsyn. Through the simple trick of putting a leftist mask on totalitarianism and coding resistance as "right wing," "far right," "racist," "white supremacist," etc., almost all of my educated leftist friends and family eagerly abandoned the principles we were raised with and jumped right on the authoritarian bandwagon. It is so crude and obvious a trick, but the intelligentsia are either oblivious or willfully blind to the evil they are perpetuating.
Particularly with the advent of bank account freezing, not to mention the social and career costs of resisting, this adage has a lot of explanatory power these days:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
Brilliant analysis
I'd like to share a recent experience with Yelp. I started noticing that a large number of reviews had been removed, for "violating our terms." Then one of my reviews was removed, for "perpetuating negative cultural stereotypes." I wrote a review of a local Sbarro's where I was unable to order a meal because the server didn't speak English. I asked if someone else working there spoke English but no one did. I thought this was ridiculous so I wrote a negative review. This Sbarro's was in a large local shopping mall in a county that is 70 percent white non-hispanic. I don't think it is possible to shut down the flow of communication entirely, but there seem to be concerted efforts at the major websites and platforms to curate what we can see.
I do agree that recourse to the Emergency Measures Act is an overreach, but on the other hand I don't think Justin Trudeau is a very likely authoritarian leader. Some segments of the Western Canadian right have hated him since he got into politics, and this trucker convoy seems to have been organised by people of this persuasion. And the reason why they hate him really isn't anything to do with him personally, but rather because of their memory of his father. Pierre Trudeau was both much more competent and more authoritarian than Justin (indeed, he was Prime Minister when his government promulgated the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, which was a much greater authoritarian overreach than what we're seeing now), and in fact it seems to be Justin Trudeau's incompetence that eventually forced him to apply the Emergency Measures Act. In other words, it shouldn't have reached this point if the government had been competent.
What I find interesting is that the left-wing New Democratic Party will approve the use of the Emergency Measures Act this time around, while they were the only party in the House of Commons to vote against the War Measures Act in 1970. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has called the convoy protestors white supremacists, which is par for the course for the left in 2022, but which I find hard to square with Leighton's claim (which I mostly agree with, by the by) that politics has moved from the left-right axis to the centre-periphery axis. In a podcast, Leighton said that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were an instance of "the centre granting the periphery license to riot". This idea's been floating in my mind since then. I think that's right, but when and why does this happen? Because it sure didn't happen this time. It seems that just as politics is abandoning the left-right framework, the traditional (and therefore elite) political left is convincing itself that this framework is more important than ever, and that left-coded protests from the periphery are doing the good work of fighting oppression (even though they might be completely aimless) while right-coded protests from the periphery are the expression of white supremacy. I'd like to hear your opinion on this.
Trudeau is either right, or wrong. It doesn't matter that segments of the Canadian population hate him; that is arguably true of every national leader. And it doesn't matter what the reason could have started with; he has proven himself to be craven and a failure.
But non-violent protest is a right that is enshrined in the Canadian constitution, and it was over ridden in scant seconds, after that man refused to talk to his fellow citizens, lied about them, and siced his hussars on them. And, to further destroy any and all opposition, he froze all of the assets of anyone who dared speak for human rights.
I'd like to hear Leighton's thoughts on this too, but I'd like to add two quick points:
1. I think Trudeau's incompetent ineffectiveness is a feature, not a bug of the new, "enlightened" squishy world leader. I mean, why have the capacity for complex thought, or be willing to have discussions? It will only get you in trouble. (See: Biden, many other post-liberal leaders flirting with some form of soft totalitarianism.)
2. The BLM protests, and the ensuing chaos, weren't just allowed, they became a media-sponsored event. Some of the messaging even became outright compelled speech to the point where not putting a black box on your Instagram page could break up your band, or not having a sign in the window of your sandwich shop could force the neighborhood to shut you down.
I think this was a continuation of the early #resistance trick of having BLM break up Bernie's speeches, and then have leadership turn around and endorse Hillary (whose cronies are now — surprise, surprise — taking the reins of that same lead BLM chapter after their billions disappeared). Was it to take down Trump? Probably partially at least, but seeing Joe Biden stutter incoherently about "white supremacy," "Jim Crow on steroids" or, um, "Jim Eagle" when faced with any disagreement points to a necrotic democratic party that seized pure identify politics messaging (and especially co-opting language dealing with the struggle for continued racial equality). Now the rich, white leaders of the party use race as a bludgeon against small business and working types, who have committed the sin of mainly voting for Republicans.
(The worldwide Covid catastrophists and the uniform tarring of anti-lockdown types as racists, fascists or worse is all part of the same system. See also: yellow vests, which is the same story but using the trusty "climate catastophist" club.)
A very prescient comment. Biden’s speech tonight confirms your insights
i think one of the reasons for this is that our entire elite class (basically everyone in any position of power who is not explicitly Conservative), from bankers and bureaucrats to journalists, celebs, and of course an army of academics, have adopted Critical Theory as their moral framework. (Crit Theory is now basically the religion of the globalist class and esp of the urban liberal creative class.)
And under Crit Theory morality (which is color-coded) anything done by any member of a marginalized group (most esp blacks and gays) is automatically just and righteous by the nature and position of the people doing it; and conversely, anything said or done by a member of a privileged group (most esp if they are Deplorables or Deplorable-adjacent), is ipso facto evil and regressive, and needs to be stopped by any means necessary.
This might be implied in your reference to “the ‘nature and position of the people doing it”, but everywhere I look I see people who are in no way marginalized, whose voices are privileged and elevated at every turn, who are given carte blanche and heaped with praise by establishment elites, no matter how low they sink, how despicably they seek to smear and ruin others for even greater ego and power and profit, who were never actually poor or oppressed or shut out of major institutions. So many grew up with at least one, often two, professional parents, and am inside track to good schools, and identity-targeted scholarships, mentorships and professional sinecures. What they and their establishment elite benefactors have done is perfect the absolutely unabashed performance of having one’s identity cake while eating it, too: they also get to play by special rules, always demand enviable positions at young ages, and never cease complaining about how uniquely oppressed they are, no matter how much largesse and how many titles are heaped on them. There is, for example, the approximately 30% of black Americans whom John McWhorter refers to as the subgroup that is actually struggling disproportionately, who do tend to be isolated and concentrated in neighborhoods where violent crime is very common, schools are generally terrible, and the physical environment is less green and more polluted. It’s long past time, for actual liberals to call the bluff of people who claim that, well over fifty years since the start of racial preferences, minority-only scholarships, contract set-asides, etc. everyone who is not white in America is still somehow oppressed. Lots of people have been benefiting for a long time for being “diverse” without experiencing any kind of meaningful racial or ethnic discrimination. It’s a dare and a bluff, this insistence we keep pretending that a black or Latino kid who is growing up in more stable, affluent, connected family than so many other American kids, is somehow in 2022 in need of massive racial privileges and profound deference, simply due identity category. In 2022, anyone with “one drop” of blood connecting them to Africa or even Spain, is going to claim to be black or Latino or biracial. All else being equal today, the advantages that confers are enormous in status, and standing, and access to an inside track to admissions slots and job offers.
It is a bizarre philosophy that claims that (say) Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are “oppressed” while a disabled, drug-addicted, homeless white male veteran is the “oppressor”.
Sorry to be a pest, this quote i think helps to answer your question, and many other questions people seem to have about our cultural/political moment.
It is from Herbert Marcuse, the Leftist guru and one of the architects of the New Left (which has supplanted the old materialist Left), from his essay "Repressive Tolerance" (the name says it all):
"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people. This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
I saw an interview on the origins of the protest. It began with a group of Canadian Native Indian truckers who were suffering under the mandates and reached out for support. The word spread; they organized, and...wow.
The BLM protests of 2020 caused economic disruption, though mostly in marginalised communities that elites might not care too much about, but more importantly, could have caused the Democratic Party to lose the 2020 election. That, I feel, might have been a threat to the Centre. The truckers originally wanted an end to vaccine requirements to cross the border. Is this really a threat to anyone? Now the movement seems to have picked up an anti-elite and specifically anti-Trudeau character, but on the face of it I don't view their original ostensible demands as especially threatening.
On his Substack, Freddie deBoer's talks today of "definitional collapse", the idea that politics are now devoid of meaning, but are entirely about ingroup versus outgroup. The truckers' protest became right-coded (which is largely orthogonal to being meaningfully right-wing), which dictated how we would react to it and how threatening we would perceive it to be. For example, while we here are claiming that the government's response to the truckers' protest was especially harsh, people who identify as left-wing claim that the reason why the protest was even allowed to last as long as it did was that it is "right-wing" and the police is therefore sympathetic to it, and that "left-wing" protests, or protests for indigenous rights, would have been broken up much more harshly and much faster. At this point, I don't even know whether it's left-coded or right-coded issues that the Centre views as more threatening. Possibly neither. But it seems to drive how we think about things.
Great article Leighton, so well articulated, and what a perfect title.
All true, but the better question is how does this new form of authoritarianism impact social movement building strategy. I have to admit, the Antifa-types long ago seem to have altered their tacts to fit the reality described above. But the right-wingers still show up to quasi-legal, quasi-revolutionary events with their faces proudly bared.
Huxley not Orwell. Welcome to the future…
I guess after tonight’s Darth Vader speech Biden’s minders are getting ready to get our senile POTUS to toggle the switch to “God mode”. As one of the commenters below wrote months ago “this is not a drill”. Great essay! And great writing generally—keep fighting the good fight! Thirty years ago you’d be a star writer for The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly (not the zombie publications of the same name still lumbering along today).
"Crawling Eye"...yes a favorite on Chiller Theatre...having lived in California...before NY...this weekend dose was a more visual bit of boomer paranoia (albeit produced in CA)...as a child in California...it was get under your desk drills to protect you from Russian nuclear fallout...actually could have been blowing over from Las Vegas...if the winds reversed. Living now in Italy for some 20 years...I look at the US and recall the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". From the distance...like trying to watch the daily growth of hair...the US is far down the "slippery slope"...it has not been glacial...like Moores Law...it is apparent from..."beyond the horizon". During a life of 69 planetary rotations...I have enjoyed traveling throughout this planet...observing closely different cultures and the synthesis of their rotations...sans "Chiller Theatre". Landing the first time in Moscow...I had to wonder why I had scuffed the knees of my tan Levi's delivered from Sears...just the week before in September 1960? Drip feed fear...we humans are filled with delusion, illusion, and error...isn't it so?
Risk/benefit analysis is no longer relevant now that we have built a blissfully risk-free society.