"They believe that justice is achieved by tearing the existing world down. They have no interest in building anything to replace it." This line sums up the entire issue today. I'm a 4th Gen Californian and a boomer in the art world. The space where most people would consider "free thinkers" exist. No, it's just the opposite. The left wing is committed to their narrative and they do not "why". They don't read anything outside of the NYT, WAPO space. It is idolatry that knows no bounds. It is fueled by anger and rage that they cannot describe and will not discuss. Thank you, Leighton for stating the obvious in historically cohesive article. It will be shared.
Is the PMC then a kind of paid Stasi for the owning class? Seems to seamlessly move to support whatever the changing dictates are like a shoal of fish with zero ability or desire to discern?
What I see is no coherence no truth no integrity no real quest for justice no standards. Just wretched obedience, fraudulent framings (justice, progress) and impotent gossip articles and power squabbles.
Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse
Great piece.
I don't think there could be any more ironic manifestation of US Exceptionalism than the emergence of the New Left and the longevity of its descendants. Anti-collectivist/anti-materialist leftism is the sort of silliness you get to indulge in when all you've ever really known is imperialistic privilege, I guess.
A couple years ago I had the opportunity to talk to some folks who lived in Allende-era Chile and it's safe to say that they find the current USA leftism utterly bewildering.
"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."
If anything, this attitude has expanded to the left in general. Discussion of injustice is often framed as if nothing has ever been done up to now, and today is the day when the work of justice will begin. Even if the injustice has been long discussed, and solutions proposed (or even implemented) decades ago.
For example, just this morning California Senator Scott Wiener posted on Twitter that, in reference to the historical suffering of native Americans, "We can't continue to ignore this history...". Of course, this history has never been ignored. In the U.S. we've essentially given native Americans a lucrative, partial monopoly on running casinos, as a form of reparations. Yet Wiener talks as if nothing whatsoever has been done.
I'd like to add to this the whole "We never discussed slavery till George Floyd/1619 Project" or that old chestnut "America has still not grappled with its racist history" (when we pretty much have not stopped grappling w it on a daily basis for at least 50 yrs).
I went to high school in the 1980s and we had whole weeks dedicated to slavery/Jim Crow/the Civil Rights movement. The idea that no one teaches this (or Indian displacement) is just more insane gaslighting.
I think it's partially from the Eternal Present that social media has created, where nothing has ever happened or existed unless it is happening today RIGHT NOW on my Twitter feed; and also wielding historical guilt as a weapon to manipulate people through Guilt & Shame is not only a tried and true political tactic it has also become a major industry and revenue stream for our endless legions of Bigotry Archaeologists and professional activists.
The odd thing is that these same ultra-individualists will then turn around and support mandatory private health insurance, and vaccinations, and masking, and traditional public schools, and on and on. It's like, they absolutely love authoritarian coercion when applied to regular, middle-class, law-abiding citizens, and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill and undocumented immigrants. It's amazing to try to understand how people hold both of those positions without their brain just shorting out from cognitive dissonance.
“and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill”
It’s worse than that - they set up these vast networks of non-profits that purport to address these issues but don’t. Instead they exist to enrich themselves whist enforcing conformity to Owning Class dictates. They also provide vanity board positions to entitled trust funders and legacy nobility goons.
Leighton wrote a fantastic article on this topic recently.
When I read this from Tom Hayden: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority” it rings so familiar in a historical sense.
For a moment I wondered, who said this first: Rousseau? Saint-Simon? Adorno?
This seems to be the dialectic of modern Western democratic post-Christian societies: on one side is the Merchant/Money/Business class, who allied w Science/Technology create new industries, who really shape the future for better or worse, and who have supplanted the old Nobility; then on the other side is the class who've supplanted the Clerisy, or who are both Nobles and Clerisy, the Left intellectual 'activist' class who are aspiring philosopher-kings that make their claim to rule by wielding utopian fantasies of an egalitarian future.
And we need them! At their best they act as our social conscience and we have them to thank for things like the 5-day week, Social Security, the minimum wage etc...but when they rule unchecked (as in Cali) or when they give in to their apocalyptic revolutionary urges, then they become a destructive force. We should all have a dash of utopian idealist in us, but now that Leftism has become one of the last thriving religions of the modern West, it is prone to all the same irrational upsurges as every religion: fundamentalism, messianism, spiritual wildfires that burn through everything and everyone in its way.
There was less than a century between Rousseau's “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains” and Proudhon's Marxian motto: "I destroy in order to build." It seems like one inevitably follows the other.
It seems you believe in the “well meaning but misguided” trope. Or maybe you just claim to out of understandable prudence and self protection.
I don’t see the ring leaders as well meaning. I see them as liars. But it’s easy for me. I have had the privilege of free range thought my whole life. Which is probably as alien to the PMC/PMC-adjacent as the corruption/obedience demanded of them is alien to me.
when it comes to statements about politics/philosophy etc 100 or 200 yrs ago, i try to be charitable and minimize any sweeping & damning indictments, mostly because the world was so different it's hard for me to judge and also bc blanket condemnations often obscure more than they reveal.
i think that in any mass movement there is some percentage of true believers, some percentage of cynics, sadists and opportunists, and some percentage of the well-meaning. but i would def classify people like Rousseau, Marx, Marcuse & Foucault as malevolent manipulators and misanthropes who hoped for some kind of apocalyptic bloodletting and should be judged accordingly.
but as for my own personal "prudence and self-protection" I am here under a pseudonym and I don't claim any tribe or ISM, but I do try to prudently self-protect my soul from the perils of hate & rage.
Intriguing piece, as usual. You draw a compelling through-line from 60s left libertarianism to the contemporary left nihilism defined by “defund the police” and support for open drug markets. But what strikes me here is that these same nihilists are at the same time ultra-authoritarian in other dimensions. These are the same people who are anti-free speech and pro-censorship, who supported the most draconian and intrusive Covid measures, who wave the Ukrainian flag in solidarity with the military industrial complex, etc. How do you reconcile these pronounced authoritarian tendencies with your thesis here?
Absolutely. I thought about including that ironic fact but the piece was already too long. The question deserves its own post, which I do want to write. I have to think about it though, because I don't have a great explanation right now. I did write on that general theme, though, here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/cold-civil-war
My cynical take is that it comes mostly down to pure tribalism. I formed my political identity during the War on Terror days. The left seemed very principled in those days, making principled civil libertarian, anti-war, anti-corporate welfare, pro-gay marriage arguments I found persuasive. The views across these different dimensions seemed consistent and compassionate. Now I don’t know what principles drive the left other than “we’re for us and things we like and against them and things they like.” Interestingly for a moment on the left, one of the primary animating principles is absolute hatred of the white working class. To analyze this movement, I think social psychology has more explanatory value than any political theories or philosophies. This is a psychologically unwell movement.
If you do decide to investigate this question, you might consider the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” defined by the writer Sam Francis as “essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.”
I think it's pretty easy to explain. Steven Pinker covered it in his book "Enlightenment Now." If they admit to any progress on any of these issues, then there is no cause to fight for to allow them their appearance of righteousness and moral superiority. The elites must be seen as the most righteous in a society or their moral diktats will be ignored. They will have no moral authority with which to control the unwashed masses.
The truly disadvantaged are being used in a most cynical fashion to agglomerate power. Because there is so little actual disadvantage (relative to history) at present (notice they are not calling out the disparity that does exist - income and wealth), they are having to reach all the way back to the beginning to leverage past generations' sins in their quest to justify their cries for revenge and censure.
It is a horrible and soulless enterprise and as a free thinker, I loathe it with every fiber of my being. I hope they end up eating their own tail. But, much damage will be done before we get to that point unfortunately.
Isn't this exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to achieve - i.e, to undermine western culture and increase alienation of the population so as to bring about a kind of barbarism that would ignite their anti-capitalist revolution. Seems like capitalists couldn't be more pleased to use these ideas against us.
I have to read "From Counterculture to Cyberculture." I had never fully chained together hippy / activist > Silicon Valley > woke culture. The Kerr quote about subsequent generations of undergrads rehashing tired grievances is funny, but at the time, these grievances were predictable and slow-moving, and the administrations could manage them. They were also hedged by strong academic departments (tenured faculty who knew better) and strong executive leadership in companies. Today, the individualistic nihilism has fully captured many / all of these institutions, from campuses to companies to political parties.
Yeah two huge things have happened on university campuses IMO since Kerr's time: 1. Like half of the New Left ended up going into academia, so they basically remade the faculty in their own image and 2. the administration of colleges and universities exploded in scale.
So much of the capitulation and affirmation from colleges/universities of the woke demands of students comes from the corporate culture of administrators, who don't actually care about the substance of the issues brought to them, nor do they care about due process — they care about minimizing legal liabilities and/or bad PR, so they just agree to every demand brought to them because it's the path of least resistance.
Ha ha I was actually just talking to Niccolo at Fisted by Foucault about how I admire that he just went off and lived a normal life instead of becoming a politician or an activist academic like everyone else.
This cult of the individual refuses to acknowledge that civilization requires rules. Not oppression, but rules. They really cannot grok that the affluence and security they live in was hard-earned by their forebears—it didn’t happen naturally, primitively. The serpent promised Adam and Eve, “ye shall be as gods,” and they accepted. Will we learn to say no in time?
I waited to read this until I had time to read your piece and Chris Bray's "response" to it back to back. And honestly both of you make sense and I'd be interested in a back and forth between you where you actually compare your thoughts. But among what I found interesting in this piece is the idea of a fake sort of "progression" and "evolution." The old maxim "the more things change, the more things stay the same" struck me, particularly as I read Bray's piece after yours. As you say, the original PMC didn't want to be "cogs in a wheel." Yet, in an irony that could bring about the collapse of our country if not the globe (if nuclear war breaks out), the new PMC class wants us all to be cookie cutter versions with a single set of thoughts ("diverse" phenotypical features but a singular mind). In other words, factory workers, farmers, laborers of all sorts might have worked thankless jobs, but in their thoughts and in their homes, they were allowed to be individuals. There was not a "hive" mind. Today we very much have a "hive" mind, even if it doesn't produce a cohesive, working hive.
I’ve come across compelling information that are errors in our collective historical understanding. For example, in this well written essay you wrote “To the New Left, it was The System itself. Rejecting it in favor of local self-governance was self-evidently an act of youthful rebellion. But it was also, of course, the philosophical basis for the coming Reagan Revolution.” I thought this too, but both groups referenced there were intensive centralizers, the Reagan Administration took up what the Carter Admin had been doing (although it had been being constructed slowly since at least the early 1950s) and worked overtime to centralize both our private and public sectors, they did so in identifiable and, I believe provable ways, they just sort of backdoored it in through deceptive ways; but the core crowd that created the Reagan Revolution (who overlapped to a very wide degree with both the Carter Admin and very much Carter himself at leas as far back as his first run for governor) did that every where they went and just lied about it got the press and schools to assist them in that, for example, Pinochet’s system in Chile, which they also had a huge hand in, was not doing “free markets”, it was doing a heavily cartelized economy with central planning done by a joint effort between the private and public sector as one corporatist state or at least something like a corporatist state; but we’re told they were something, something “free markets”
It's hard for me to not see so many similarities today to horrific historical times I thought we all learned as to not repeat ourselves. eg: eliminating The Four Olds in China, like how the academics in Germany were ideologically captured and helped drive many atrocities that happened in the 1930's. like Cambodia's Year Zero in the 70's
"They believe that justice is achieved by tearing the existing world down. They have no interest in building anything to replace it." This line sums up the entire issue today. I'm a 4th Gen Californian and a boomer in the art world. The space where most people would consider "free thinkers" exist. No, it's just the opposite. The left wing is committed to their narrative and they do not "why". They don't read anything outside of the NYT, WAPO space. It is idolatry that knows no bounds. It is fueled by anger and rage that they cannot describe and will not discuss. Thank you, Leighton for stating the obvious in historically cohesive article. It will be shared.
They do not “why”.
This is what i see too.
Is the PMC then a kind of paid Stasi for the owning class? Seems to seamlessly move to support whatever the changing dictates are like a shoal of fish with zero ability or desire to discern?
What I see is no coherence no truth no integrity no real quest for justice no standards. Just wretched obedience, fraudulent framings (justice, progress) and impotent gossip articles and power squabbles.
Great piece.
I don't think there could be any more ironic manifestation of US Exceptionalism than the emergence of the New Left and the longevity of its descendants. Anti-collectivist/anti-materialist leftism is the sort of silliness you get to indulge in when all you've ever really known is imperialistic privilege, I guess.
A couple years ago I had the opportunity to talk to some folks who lived in Allende-era Chile and it's safe to say that they find the current USA leftism utterly bewildering.
"But this time will be different! We are smarter and better!"
"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."
If anything, this attitude has expanded to the left in general. Discussion of injustice is often framed as if nothing has ever been done up to now, and today is the day when the work of justice will begin. Even if the injustice has been long discussed, and solutions proposed (or even implemented) decades ago.
For example, just this morning California Senator Scott Wiener posted on Twitter that, in reference to the historical suffering of native Americans, "We can't continue to ignore this history...". Of course, this history has never been ignored. In the U.S. we've essentially given native Americans a lucrative, partial monopoly on running casinos, as a form of reparations. Yet Wiener talks as if nothing whatsoever has been done.
I'd like to add to this the whole "We never discussed slavery till George Floyd/1619 Project" or that old chestnut "America has still not grappled with its racist history" (when we pretty much have not stopped grappling w it on a daily basis for at least 50 yrs).
I went to high school in the 1980s and we had whole weeks dedicated to slavery/Jim Crow/the Civil Rights movement. The idea that no one teaches this (or Indian displacement) is just more insane gaslighting.
I think it's partially from the Eternal Present that social media has created, where nothing has ever happened or existed unless it is happening today RIGHT NOW on my Twitter feed; and also wielding historical guilt as a weapon to manipulate people through Guilt & Shame is not only a tried and true political tactic it has also become a major industry and revenue stream for our endless legions of Bigotry Archaeologists and professional activists.
The odd thing is that these same ultra-individualists will then turn around and support mandatory private health insurance, and vaccinations, and masking, and traditional public schools, and on and on. It's like, they absolutely love authoritarian coercion when applied to regular, middle-class, law-abiding citizens, and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill and undocumented immigrants. It's amazing to try to understand how people hold both of those positions without their brain just shorting out from cognitive dissonance.
“and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill”
It’s worse than that - they set up these vast networks of non-profits that purport to address these issues but don’t. Instead they exist to enrich themselves whist enforcing conformity to Owning Class dictates. They also provide vanity board positions to entitled trust funders and legacy nobility goons.
Leighton wrote a fantastic article on this topic recently.
When I read this from Tom Hayden: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority” it rings so familiar in a historical sense.
For a moment I wondered, who said this first: Rousseau? Saint-Simon? Adorno?
This seems to be the dialectic of modern Western democratic post-Christian societies: on one side is the Merchant/Money/Business class, who allied w Science/Technology create new industries, who really shape the future for better or worse, and who have supplanted the old Nobility; then on the other side is the class who've supplanted the Clerisy, or who are both Nobles and Clerisy, the Left intellectual 'activist' class who are aspiring philosopher-kings that make their claim to rule by wielding utopian fantasies of an egalitarian future.
And we need them! At their best they act as our social conscience and we have them to thank for things like the 5-day week, Social Security, the minimum wage etc...but when they rule unchecked (as in Cali) or when they give in to their apocalyptic revolutionary urges, then they become a destructive force. We should all have a dash of utopian idealist in us, but now that Leftism has become one of the last thriving religions of the modern West, it is prone to all the same irrational upsurges as every religion: fundamentalism, messianism, spiritual wildfires that burn through everything and everyone in its way.
There was less than a century between Rousseau's “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains” and Proudhon's Marxian motto: "I destroy in order to build." It seems like one inevitably follows the other.
It seems you believe in the “well meaning but misguided” trope. Or maybe you just claim to out of understandable prudence and self protection.
I don’t see the ring leaders as well meaning. I see them as liars. But it’s easy for me. I have had the privilege of free range thought my whole life. Which is probably as alien to the PMC/PMC-adjacent as the corruption/obedience demanded of them is alien to me.
when it comes to statements about politics/philosophy etc 100 or 200 yrs ago, i try to be charitable and minimize any sweeping & damning indictments, mostly because the world was so different it's hard for me to judge and also bc blanket condemnations often obscure more than they reveal.
i think that in any mass movement there is some percentage of true believers, some percentage of cynics, sadists and opportunists, and some percentage of the well-meaning. but i would def classify people like Rousseau, Marx, Marcuse & Foucault as malevolent manipulators and misanthropes who hoped for some kind of apocalyptic bloodletting and should be judged accordingly.
but as for my own personal "prudence and self-protection" I am here under a pseudonym and I don't claim any tribe or ISM, but I do try to prudently self-protect my soul from the perils of hate & rage.
Intriguing piece, as usual. You draw a compelling through-line from 60s left libertarianism to the contemporary left nihilism defined by “defund the police” and support for open drug markets. But what strikes me here is that these same nihilists are at the same time ultra-authoritarian in other dimensions. These are the same people who are anti-free speech and pro-censorship, who supported the most draconian and intrusive Covid measures, who wave the Ukrainian flag in solidarity with the military industrial complex, etc. How do you reconcile these pronounced authoritarian tendencies with your thesis here?
Absolutely. I thought about including that ironic fact but the piece was already too long. The question deserves its own post, which I do want to write. I have to think about it though, because I don't have a great explanation right now. I did write on that general theme, though, here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/cold-civil-war
My cynical take is that it comes mostly down to pure tribalism. I formed my political identity during the War on Terror days. The left seemed very principled in those days, making principled civil libertarian, anti-war, anti-corporate welfare, pro-gay marriage arguments I found persuasive. The views across these different dimensions seemed consistent and compassionate. Now I don’t know what principles drive the left other than “we’re for us and things we like and against them and things they like.” Interestingly for a moment on the left, one of the primary animating principles is absolute hatred of the white working class. To analyze this movement, I think social psychology has more explanatory value than any political theories or philosophies. This is a psychologically unwell movement.
If you do decide to investigate this question, you might consider the concept of “anarcho-tyranny,” defined by the writer Sam Francis as “essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.”
I think it's pretty easy to explain. Steven Pinker covered it in his book "Enlightenment Now." If they admit to any progress on any of these issues, then there is no cause to fight for to allow them their appearance of righteousness and moral superiority. The elites must be seen as the most righteous in a society or their moral diktats will be ignored. They will have no moral authority with which to control the unwashed masses.
The truly disadvantaged are being used in a most cynical fashion to agglomerate power. Because there is so little actual disadvantage (relative to history) at present (notice they are not calling out the disparity that does exist - income and wealth), they are having to reach all the way back to the beginning to leverage past generations' sins in their quest to justify their cries for revenge and censure.
It is a horrible and soulless enterprise and as a free thinker, I loathe it with every fiber of my being. I hope they end up eating their own tail. But, much damage will be done before we get to that point unfortunately.
Isn't this exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to achieve - i.e, to undermine western culture and increase alienation of the population so as to bring about a kind of barbarism that would ignite their anti-capitalist revolution. Seems like capitalists couldn't be more pleased to use these ideas against us.
I have to read "From Counterculture to Cyberculture." I had never fully chained together hippy / activist > Silicon Valley > woke culture. The Kerr quote about subsequent generations of undergrads rehashing tired grievances is funny, but at the time, these grievances were predictable and slow-moving, and the administrations could manage them. They were also hedged by strong academic departments (tenured faculty who knew better) and strong executive leadership in companies. Today, the individualistic nihilism has fully captured many / all of these institutions, from campuses to companies to political parties.
Yeah two huge things have happened on university campuses IMO since Kerr's time: 1. Like half of the New Left ended up going into academia, so they basically remade the faculty in their own image and 2. the administration of colleges and universities exploded in scale.
So much of the capitulation and affirmation from colleges/universities of the woke demands of students comes from the corporate culture of administrators, who don't actually care about the substance of the issues brought to them, nor do they care about due process — they care about minimizing legal liabilities and/or bad PR, so they just agree to every demand brought to them because it's the path of least resistance.
"They have no interest in building anything to replace it."
If they had such an interest, it might be possible to engage with them, perhaps even to work toward building a consensus, but alas...
It says a lot about Savio that after college he did absolutely nothing worth noting.
Ha ha I was actually just talking to Niccolo at Fisted by Foucault about how I admire that he just went off and lived a normal life instead of becoming a politician or an activist academic like everyone else.
This cult of the individual refuses to acknowledge that civilization requires rules. Not oppression, but rules. They really cannot grok that the affluence and security they live in was hard-earned by their forebears—it didn’t happen naturally, primitively. The serpent promised Adam and Eve, “ye shall be as gods,” and they accepted. Will we learn to say no in time?
As a freshman at Cal I was there the day Mario Savio gave that speech. It was quite a culture shock for an 18 year old from suburban Sacramento.
I waited to read this until I had time to read your piece and Chris Bray's "response" to it back to back. And honestly both of you make sense and I'd be interested in a back and forth between you where you actually compare your thoughts. But among what I found interesting in this piece is the idea of a fake sort of "progression" and "evolution." The old maxim "the more things change, the more things stay the same" struck me, particularly as I read Bray's piece after yours. As you say, the original PMC didn't want to be "cogs in a wheel." Yet, in an irony that could bring about the collapse of our country if not the globe (if nuclear war breaks out), the new PMC class wants us all to be cookie cutter versions with a single set of thoughts ("diverse" phenotypical features but a singular mind). In other words, factory workers, farmers, laborers of all sorts might have worked thankless jobs, but in their thoughts and in their homes, they were allowed to be individuals. There was not a "hive" mind. Today we very much have a "hive" mind, even if it doesn't produce a cohesive, working hive.
Can you point me to that response? I haven't seen it.
Chris Bray, Tell Me How This Ends is his Substack: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/nothing-left
What are the moral and cohesive values that would underpin a nihilistic society?
I’ve come across compelling information that are errors in our collective historical understanding. For example, in this well written essay you wrote “To the New Left, it was The System itself. Rejecting it in favor of local self-governance was self-evidently an act of youthful rebellion. But it was also, of course, the philosophical basis for the coming Reagan Revolution.” I thought this too, but both groups referenced there were intensive centralizers, the Reagan Administration took up what the Carter Admin had been doing (although it had been being constructed slowly since at least the early 1950s) and worked overtime to centralize both our private and public sectors, they did so in identifiable and, I believe provable ways, they just sort of backdoored it in through deceptive ways; but the core crowd that created the Reagan Revolution (who overlapped to a very wide degree with both the Carter Admin and very much Carter himself at leas as far back as his first run for governor) did that every where they went and just lied about it got the press and schools to assist them in that, for example, Pinochet’s system in Chile, which they also had a huge hand in, was not doing “free markets”, it was doing a heavily cartelized economy with central planning done by a joint effort between the private and public sector as one corporatist state or at least something like a corporatist state; but we’re told they were something, something “free markets”
Great piece, Leighton!
It's hard for me to not see so many similarities today to horrific historical times I thought we all learned as to not repeat ourselves. eg: eliminating The Four Olds in China, like how the academics in Germany were ideologically captured and helped drive many atrocities that happened in the 1930's. like Cambodia's Year Zero in the 70's