Our Failed Cultural Revolution
In China beginning in 1966, there was a Cultural Revolution. Hot on the heels of the mass starvation that followed the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, the Maoist Red Guard set about tearing down what remained of pre-Revolutionary China. The Four Olds — old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits — were extirpated as being the weapons of the Five Black Categories: rich farmers, landlords, counter-revolutionaries, right-wingers, and ‘bad elements.’ The death toll was a paltry one to two million, dwarfed by the sixty million who died thanks to the Great Leap Forward. With Mao’s death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution, which had exhausted China, ground to a halt.
Traditional China did not die, but many traditional Chinese did. Mao won his power grab and confirmed his centrality within the Communist Party, and managed to prevent the Iron Law of Bureaucracy for a couple of decades. Today the event is viewed as ‘ten years of havoc.’ It is a lesson in how to mobilise the young, how to attack the old, and how to blow up your society. Today’s Chinese seem a little embarrassed about, and limit public discussion on the subject. As revolutionary China is now certainly a thing of the past, they look to shore up their authority by reaching toward the things the Cultural Revolution targeted for annihilation. There are broad lessons here, too.
The West had its own revolution in the same period, the revolution of the New Left. This revolution was a soft one, one that denied Mao’s credo, that
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
The Boomers got their revolution, and it managed to involve parties, music, and the odd riot; not quite dinner parties or embroidery but the next best thing. Their cultural revolution was the same in character as the one that happened on the other side of the world. It took aim at the old and used the young as battering rams. Like that revolution, it painted itself as an uprising of fervent youth, rather than an instrument of the establishment and those in power. But it was animated by those with power; most successful revolutions are. The best recent work on the subject is Generation ’68 by K. R. Bolton. He concludes the book with this:
In fundamental outlook there never was disagreement between the establishment and the New Left. The same situation pertains today: the left plead for an “inclusive society,” while the oligarchs and managerial elite, in their board rooms and at their think tanks and NGOs, plan the construction of an “inclusive economy.” Both see this vision in global terms. Such has been the sales pitch for this common ideology of “inclusiveness,” in the name of so-called human rights and “democracy,” that the convergence between oligarchy and revolt can be readily observed in the recurrent waves of color revolutions against those peoples (whether Afrikaner, Serb, Syrian, Iranian, or Russian) who cannot be amalgamated into this common vision of a global, inclusive dystopia. The supposed dissent comes from the heirs of the ’68ers who, like their predecessors, are in revolt only against the primary ties of family, ethnos, and nation — the same things abhorred as much by the globalist oligarchy and its managerial elite as by the left. Their “revolt” is a false one, their ideology nothing but dogmatic yea-saying to the demands of their economic overlords. From its very beginnings and into the present, the New Left has served as nothing more than a useful idiot for the elite in the struggle between the deracinated archons of the world and those who hold fast to hearth and homeland.
Ideationally the New Left were a medley of Freud, Gramsci, and Gandhi, a real rogue’s gallery. They promised individual liberation from our own repressed sexuality, the quiet overthrow of traditionally oriented institutions, and the beginning of the anti-white sentiment, later referred to as postcolonial theory, that we see everywhere now ascendant. All of this came with a great backing soundtrack. Unlike the Cultural Revolution, it was a revolution directed against people in uniforms, rather than by people in uniforms, because power in the West is rarely where it seems. Like the Cultural Revolution, it lasted a decade and no longer, at least in its fervent phase. The energy passes from these things, and stability reasserts itself, like the sun rising after a long and debaucherous party. But that does not mean the revolution has gone away. Today commentators would call it ‘putting the woke away.’ A counter-revolution of the Right emerged, best represented by William Buckley and personified a little later by Ronald Reagan, but the damage had been done. These figures could never undo the damage that decade dealt, because they were wedded to the idea that the contents of a man’s mind is his own. This is not the credo of the other side.
The Boomer Revolution was ultimately a liberal revolution, one that did little to undermine the class structure of the West, much to the annoyance of Communist types, but it did a great deal to rewire the brains of those who lived in its wake. Our cultural revolution was almost entirely an ideational one. Liberalism, like Communism, is an imbibed mode of thought that must reject the proximate and natural and established to function. Nobody in a vacuum becomes one; in this respect it is an infectious virus. Traditionalism and what we once called conservativism are instinctive, as Roger Scruton pointed out. You can override your instincts, but it takes time and effort; often somebody else’s time and effort. To keep this ideational furnace alive, billions of dollars and the waking lives of millions are thrown into the churn.
People on either side of the 1960s thought completely differently about the world, even if their modes of life had not changed. They went to work and returned to houses that stood. In keeping with the fact that man is not merely the sum of material computations, the legacy of that revolution was more significant than that of its equivalent in China. We are still living in the world the Boomer Revolution made.
We stood on the precipice of another cultural revolution not long ago in the West. The pressure toward this began building during Obama’s second term, but largely went undetected by the powers that be. This cultural revolution began online, because the internet is just the printing press with extra steps. As that invention sped along the Protestant Reformation, so green frogs and memes helped along ours. Just as intelligence agencies missed 9/11, so the establishment missed a growing threat to their own electoral success. If Bacchus was the god of the Boomer Revolution, then Loki was the god of this one. It was a proto-revolution encapsulated in a knowing wink.
Of this failed cultural revolution much is yet to be said. It takes time to see things clearly. This revolution, unlike the Cultural Revolution and the Boomer Revolution, was a genuinely grass-roots affair, which is part of the reason it was unsuccessful. It was all energy without form: it had few clear leaders, few clearly spelled-out principles, and in character was an outpouring of vitality above anything else. It latched onto Trump, who was savvy enough to harvest that energy, though he was not wedded to it. Trump is a latter-day Crassus who sees where advantage lies. He did what in politics we call ‘mobilising the base,’ only to abandon them once he had power. Part of the Great Switch — where conservative leaders ended up representing the working classes and progressive ones ended up representing the middle classes — he proved that the culture war does matter to ordinary people. Leftist pundits talk about how workers are foolish to support those ‘against their economic interests,’ while they advocate for the castration of their children.
The useful purpose Trump served was to direct all the counter-revolutionary energy of the establishment aggressively toward his person. This showed how deranged the Left is, and the lengths they would go to, both of which made for scenes of mirth, personified in the clip of that screaming woman at Trump’s inauguration. This shared sentiment did a great deal to undermine the soft authority of talk show hosts and oxymoronic comedians, who embarrassed themselves for years on end. Most of all, it demonstrated the complete moral bankruptcy of the Left. This was most obvious in the utterly dishonest coverage of the 2020 riots, which managed to lionise criminality and rapine as though Gandhi was reborn as a street thug who didn’t do nothing.
But knowing you have bad kings, who finally show that they are bad kings, is not the same as being able to do something about it. It also does not help if half your fellow countrymen have willingly blinded themselves. It is further difficult when these bad kings, while stupid in some very obvious ways, are also very cunning. Their cunning has been demonstrated in the past few years.
There were three prongs the counter-revolutionaries employed to strangle what might have otherwise been an existential threat to their position. The first was fortuitous for them; it was the pandemic. The pandemic allowed a propagandist bait-and-switch that allowed all of the Right to be regarded as unscrupulous anti-vaxxers who wanted grandma dead. This was a well-laid trap into which many stepped, especially in my country, Australia. A taste of the mockery and ridicule the Left had experienced for the past five years was redirected toward ‘cookers.’ Many of those against the vaccine at last had a singular issue into which they could pour all of their vague mistrust toward contemporary institutions and elites, those they suspected were not their friends, but had neither the vocabulary nor the opportunity to previously express. They were portrayed as being utterly selfish to the point of disregard for society as a collective: ironically, the exact ethic of the Left. This further allowed a sense of crisis to motivate the protection of the status quo, which is why we suddenly saw everybody posting pro-vax profile pictures online. The reduction of complex political matters to the acceptance of enormous government mandates was intoxicating to those in power, who had a moment not unlike the Wilsonian types who decided that, in the wake of World War I, a ‘moral equivalent of war’ was necessary to ensure that government had the popular support to do what it liked. The Ukrainian War and various other crises have served a similar purpose.
The second fatal blow dealt by the counter-revolutionary movement was in the centralisation of the internet. Of this, much more can be said. For our purposes, it is sufficient to know that ‘community standards’ have ensured that this difficult flank has been largely secured. Reddit has been purged; Facebook turned into a farm for photos of grandchildren; TikTok hypnotises and brain-damages the young; YouTube, once full of quality dissident material, is now the playground of safe fellow travellers like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. These fellows, who served as good entry points to that revolutionary vibe a decade ago, have become gatekeepers instead. They neuter the energy and direct it into manageable quarters. The conventional conservative, who still believes the society he knew as a child exists, can only help the other side, even inadvertently. The strategies they have unsuccessfully deployed for the last few decades will not suddenly begin working; besides which, their vision of the good society is one that allows a watered-down Boomer Revolution to continue forever. The difference between a gateway and a gatekeeper is subtle; they stand at the same post, but their effect is oppositional.
This is why, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the Left had a meltdown reminiscent of the good old days when Trump first won the presidency. A decade ago, this would have been viewed as just another billionaire acquisition. But ideational control is now very important to our overlords, who remain nervous. The internet, we once believed, would open doors to new ideas and allow access to the world’s vast depository of knowledge and wisdom. It turns out that people who read old books don’t like the impertinence of our new sacrosanct abnormality. In response to this, the internet has become a tool of censorship and redirection, in the hands of latter-day railway moguls who have monopolised the means of communication as their precursors did for transportation.
The third reason is simple: friendly elites were nowhere to be seen. A revolution without elite support is a peasant’s revolt, and a peasant’s revolt is doomed to failure. The heirs of Watt Tyler, whose head ended up displayed on London Bridge by Richard III, are those January 6ers languishing in prison. Conservative elites seem to think society is still business as usual with woke characteristics, and, by their very tepid brand of conservativism, are vanishingly unlikely to get behind anything risky. They fail to realise that society has gone off the deep end, and we can’t pretend it’s 2006 any longer. Conventional conservatives appear to be arguing in defence of a society that no longer exists; they make vague statements as though the rug is still beneath their feet.
Conventional conservatives are children of the post-1945 world order, who are frightened by forthright shows of ethnic solidarity of any stripe, and blood and soil scares them as much as their opponents. Because they have become liberal creatures of ideation, they believe everybody else can, too. The Boomer Revolution got to them as well; they might think the sixties went a little too far, but they’re unlikely to deny the validity of the Civil Rights movement, for example. Even if they read Bentham, they’re unlikely to cleave to his utilitarian ethos, which might suggest that the greatest victims of the Civil Rights movement were those it was supposed to help.
They believed the spooky Alt-Right was the reincarnation of the naughtiest form of German nationalism. Well, if you want to stick a middle finger toward the post-1945 Liberal International Order and the Boomer Revolution, the easiest way to do that is to post a swastika somewhere. It’s a powerful symbol; it’s the equivalent of the peace sign in the 1960s. It demonstrates solidarity with the first great revolt against a totalising modern project, whether liberal or Bolshevik in character, whatever you think of the character of that revolt itself. The Second World War has become the foundational myth of our postmodern society, and everything revolves around a particular reading of that event. You don’t have to think the Nazis were heroes — I do not — to believe the world order that emerged from their defeat to be an imperfect one. The desire to pretend those things must be mutually believed is an excellent piece of propagandist mastery that puts Goebbels in the shade. Calling people Nazis still works, though it loses power by the day by virtue of a decade of inflation.
Yet both the swastika and the peace symbol are examples of the perennial adolescent desire to annoy the adults, and nobody wants to be ruled by adolescents. The difference is that the adults in the second instance were in fact quite happy to harness the energy of the manufactured revolt of the Boomer Revolution; in the former case, those who could, didn’t. The terrible irony is that the empty-headed utopianism of today’s elite, the heirs of the Boomer Revolution, will make racial politics — that thing conservative elites believe can be defeated by goodwill and liberal principles — the flavour of the future. It is not a future I look forward to. They have kicked the can down the road, perfectly in keeping with the Boomer Revolutionaries, who wanted to remain twenty-one forever.
The Loki energy of our failed Cultural Revolution was a fatal problem, because it could not convince those who took themselves seriously to support it. They instead rallied to the boring and doomed banners of populist conservatism, which is really just liberalism in the slow lane. For lack of elite support, the New Right was scattered and driven. The Biden administration created an effect of suffocation, decadence and decline. With this defeat a sense of accommodation afflicted many; for a trivial example, look at the once-edgy figures of YouTube who became flunkies of the Current Thing. The Boomer Revolution has a long reach.
But what caused the beginnings of that nascent cultural revolution of ours remains strong. Biden perfectly encapsulates the remnants of the Boomer Revolution: exhausted, without energy, and barely mentally coherent. This ethos remains powerful, because it has institutional support, the backing of global commerce, and our entire economic system behind it. But these things began, like all things, in the minds of people. The Boomer Revolution proved itself a spiritual wasteland to large swathes of societies two generations removed from the intoxication of Woodstock. In the minds of people it will die, and something else will replace it.
For this there is reason for optimism. The enemy deployed tricks: now we know what those tricks look like. As the meme-posting generation of 2014 grow older, they will become parts of the establishment themselves, part of the reason our neurotic and necrotic elite is doing everything possible to keep white males away from the levers of power. But competence has its own logic. We will see what this year’s presidential election in the United States brings. We might not be rid of bad kings for a while, but at least we now know what a bad king looks like. The next step is the formulation of a good king. For this, energy without form is necessary but not sufficient.
(The article was first published here.)
