Western Global Hegemony Is Ambidextrous
During the early days of our podcast, Charlie and I noticed that a majority of our viewers tended to fall into one of two camps: pro-Russia or pro-Palestine. Viewers who were both pro-Russia and pro-Palestine were definitely in the minority. This either-or phenomenon reflects the left-right split that runs through Western societies. If you’re a leftist, you will get your information from certain media outlets, and some of that information—if you’re paying close attention—may lead you to the Palestinian cause. And, of course, the same can be said of right-wingers and sympathy for Russia. A few adventurous souls will, upon discovering that justice is on the side of the Palestinians, then discover that the Russian cause is just as well—and vice versa. But many, I’m guessing by far the majority, fail to leave their leftist or rightist camps. They open one eye, but the other remains firmly shut.
Left and right once meant something. Broadly speaking, leftists were reformers who represented the future, and right-wingers were conservatives that represented the past. The right identified with the establishment and defended social institutions and capitalist wealth against leftists who sought to overthrow institutions and redistribute wealth. If you were a member of a labor union, you voted for the Democrats, and if you were a CEO or a country club member, you voted for the Republicans. None of that is true anymore. What happened? The progressives of a certain type captured the institutions—the schools, the media, professional organizations, corporations, and government agencies—and made them their own. The leftists won the culture war and now occupy the heights of the economy, the culture, commerce, and politics. They run the show. They are the global hegemons intent on exporting their ideology—a toxic mix of wokeism, militarism, and corporation-friendly economics.
In winning the culture war, however, the left in a very real sense ceased to be left. The ruling globalist left has abandoned attitudes that used to be essential to leftism, such as concern for the working class, opposition to militarism, skepticism of the claims of intelligence elites, and hostility to corporations. In their takeover of these institutions, they have made their peace with them, joining hands with the conservatives that staffed them. At the pinnacles of power, they are now all one, united in a globalist, elitist vision and in their contempt of their economic and social inferiors. Principled leftists who had spent decades in opposition to foreign wars and abuses by the security state now find themselves labeled members of the “far-right.” Conservatives who had defended schools, the armed services, and churches from attacks from the left now find themselves denounced by those same institutions as “Russian agents” or “extremists.” The principled on both sides, those whose cause was always just (whether left or right in the old dispensation), now find themselves grouped together. Increasingly, they are uniting in a new opposition to the woke global elite.
As the old left-right divide is fading into insignificance, the split between Western hegemony and multi-polarism is increasingly the only divide that matters.
We need to combine the best of the Old Right and the Old Left....
Spot on. The difference between left and right has lost its significance, even more so in the US than in my still feodally stratified Europe.
The anarchist Murray Bookchin stated that the social roots of the youth movement in the 1960's never was a desire for socialism, but a anti-war movement and a rebellion against the older generations outdated family and sexuality moral. It became marxist as a ripoff, like if the surviving few leninist vempires had arisen from their crypts to suck the blood out of the young rebels.
Boockin proudly stated that:
"The Woring class movement died in the 1940'ies, never to return to history. I was there. I saw it happen. I later came to realize that the working class never had the revolutionary potential that Karl Marx ascribed it. The historic roll of thes ocialist movement was to disciplinize the working class for the needs of the industrialization of sociaety."
When the Iron cortain fell, the class rhetorics of the political left was replaced manely by feminism, "wokeism" and anti-imperialism, the north-south conflict, that had always been a strong trait amongst the political left. Gradually, the liberal establishment came to hijack the wokish ideals, much in the same way as the marxist had hijacked the sexual revolution thirty years earlier. This gradually enlargened the crack between the part of the left that mainly identified itself as feminist or woke, and the older alti-imperialist and anti-war tradition.
So when Soros, USAID and CIA started to use wokish ideals to undermine the political stability in the so called "autocraties", the anti.imperialist left suddently found themselves in the arms of the political right, that from acultural conservative or nationalist perspective rejected the wokish ideals.
To sum this up, pictured in the two actual global conflicts, while the political establishment has a heavy investment in supporting both Israel and Ukraine, the wokish trait of leftism tends to go with the establishment in Ukraine, since Russia is wieved upon as a a conservative and autocratic argressor, and are more sensitive about being accused for "antisemitism" about Israel, while the anti- imperialist side of the left more easily detects the western imperialist traits in both conflicts.
On the same time the alt right tends to stick to the establishments position in the Middle East, since they want nothing to dfo with the filthy muslim, but they stick to Putin, because they see him as a paladine against the wokish west.
The full scheme has been conluded by a chinese analytic in a two-axis diagram on the two conflicts, giving us fuor quadrant, more enlightening than the GAL-TAN model, with my comments in the brackets:
Pro Israel and Pro Russia - Social Darwinists (Might is right)
Pro Israel and Pro Ukraine - Dogs of the US Empire (mass media watchers)
Pro Palesine and Pro Ukraine - pacifists (leftists, always supporting the "victim")
Pro Palestine and Pro Russia - Realists with a clear vision of the dynamics in international relation (us enlightened few, finding each other over a substack)