Heirs to the Wreckage

It’s been almost a year since I first began this blog. And at the time, I viewed this as a sort of dialectical process by which slowly but surely I’d inch closer to the truth of my desires and subsequently use that to inform my decisions. So have I? Am I any closer to realizing how a a liberal creed can be realized in a society of moderates? Am I closer to unraveling how this translates into a career? How to reconcile the idea of a career with social imperatives? 

Even if I cannot claim it to be incredibly transformative or eventful, it was still a year of existence. I’m more mature and acclimated with the idea of adulthood. Even if I knew this to begin with (and hoped it wasn’t true), I’m settled with the idea that life is about contradiction. We do not get to live a life of pure justice because that idea is inevitably subjective. And that’s fine, we’re all coming to grips with our topsy-turvy reality in our own way, piecing it together as we go along.

But what did occur to me, is that I ironically would have a much better sense of how to live if I were a Republican. Liberals have no formula, no concrete idea of what change we collectively want to see in society. We’re all locked in the same social or internal dialogue while the right has made strides in consolidating their base. Even without the President (Felon 47 seems like such a tacky name even if I agree with it), it’s painfully clear that the anima of Trumpism will remain long after he’s gone. Perhaps they’ll substitute him with a new face the very minute he’s ejected. 

You have to give this to right-wingers, they know what they want. They don’t really know, of course: they don’t know that their celebrity billionaire idols will never work to improve their material conditions, that even if a white ethnostate is achieved their ideology will always need a scapegoat, that any number of the “fixes” to male insecurity only exacerbate it. But it’s fair to say that even if this vision isn’t supported by facts, and is grounded in cultish thinking, there’s an unmistakable sense of what they desire. And crucially, they know what actions and values they’re willing to endorse in order to get it.

The left, by comparison, doesn’t really have that. As flawed as the Republican path is, there’s clear scaffolding for who you should become and what paths you should follow in life. Conversely, we have a confusing mix of ideas and contradictions, which coalesce into a list of things not to do– a liberal anti-manifesto. We may claim ourselves as the side of activism and truth, but the right outdoes us in every category. 

We don’t have a cognitive mapping for how to advance the cause, we only have idealized celebrities, or untouchable heroes whose paths simply can’t be replicated. Someone like Greta Thunberg becomes the Greta Thunberg because they have exceptional drive and discipline, the sort that leads you to confront the IDF (twice!). But history could have also unfolded in such a way that she would have gone on protesting by herself without being noticed. Micheal Moore is a documentary filmmaker first and an activist second, and the order of operations is such that those two titles could not be reversed. A life of activism cannot be reliably encountered, you can only position yourself for it to occur.

The most the average liberal feels they can do is lend their energy in scintillas to different causes. A bit of clerical philanthropy here, an afternoon of community service there, yes I would like to round up to the nearest dollar to save a child. In the best-case scenario these are meaningful actions that reduce the degree of suffering in the world by small but important increments. Worst-case, they’re detached actions of moral laundry that merely serve to satisfy an ethical standard. Protests work to our benefit, but the progress is inconsistent. TPUSA, on the other hand, knows how to mobilize young people and make it worth their while. They are underhanded, focused on the digital space and influencers, and have effective reward structures for their followers. We can deplore their tactics all we want, but the conservative shifts within Gen Z speak for themselves.

You’ll find genuine anger and conviction in conservatives, however warped and misplaced it might be. In too many liberals you find the hollowest of political correctness or confusion. Do we support post-colonial race-reparations? A color-blind anarcho-corporate world? A feminism equally grounded in sexual and material power as patriarchy? What do we as liberals want? We can’t just back an agenda or a statement and assume it’s correct. This is why I found the statement “Superman is an immigrant” (used in support of James Gunn’s distinctly pro-Palestinian Superman film) rather strange. Yes, it’s true: Superman is a progressive character who immigrates to Earth and stands for justice; any conservatives insisting Superman would have joined ICE are far off the mark. But at the same time, it’s obvious that the ‘immigrant’ of our political discourse and Superman are not the same; insisting otherwise skips over the necessary step of interrogating and redefining how we imagine immigrants in the American context (i.e. fuel for the economy isn’t much better than illegal). 

At much as it pains me to say it, there’s a shred of legitimate criticism in the word “woke” when it’s used against us. The Democrat is very quick to assume they are voting in the interests of people of color, and then react indignantly when minorities vote Republican. Too often the support is purely ideological rather than backed up by an actual agenda. Too often do we speak in hopeful, progressive rhetoric, but the only future we can imagine (and articulate to voters) is a vague shift to a more “respectable” neoliberalism. No, it is not obvious that liberalism is by default the correct ideology for the future. 

For those who know me, it comes as no surprise when I say I absolutely adore The Boys. It came out in 2019 on Prime Video and managed to burrow itself quite far into mainstream culture. This show took several of my passions and meshed them together: superheroes, social commentary, satire– and it did so while approaching its source material with a certain maturity (at least in the early seasons). The show’s premise is essentially that superheroes are real, but they take the form of corrupt and over-idealized public celebrities; existing to generate revenue for their sponsors rather than advance any conception of justice. We follow the titular team, The Boys, as they navigate how to challenge the ‘supes’ and their unchecked power. The popular consensus is that the writing declines in its later seasons (while still being enjoyable). The satire became less nuanced and almost exclusively committed to mocking conservatism. What is often forgotten about satire is that it’s not just a form of ridicule, but it can be used to reflect on and interrogate ideas. The show was willing to place both liberal and conservative ideas under that microscope, oftentimes to great effect. One of the standout moments in The Boys comes as a direct parody of the ‘girl power’ scene in Avengers: Endgame– except the moment actually lands. 

And then the other element of all this is the fundamental suspicion that comes with being a liberal. We live in the United States, a culture that is highly individualistic and competitive; communal thinking isn’t always compatible. Why would you care? You must be arrogantly high-minded, naive and immature, performative, weak when it comes to accepting the realities of the world. We’ve built a technocratized First World citadel, why would you screw with the foundations of that when it’s not depriving you specifically? Well, first off, this First World paradise masks a far more violent reality than we’d like to believe. We commonly use the Third World as a point of comparison (or at least we use the countries we cast into the role of the “Third World”). Perhaps the lonely and angry teenager furiously addicted to pornography and surfing blackpill sites isn’t quite the same as bullets and starvation; but it’s a different, quieter sort of violence all the same. Even then, you don’t wouldn’t to leave the US to encounter bullets or starvation, especially the former. Being a liberal means you have legitimate critiques with society, and the society in question isn’t undeserving of them. 

And the things I’d want to change– I do feel the impact of. In my case personally the impact has never been life-threatening, nor has it ever denied me my fair share of opportunities, but it’s tangible and it’s there. I’ve seen fates worse than mine secondhand; poverty, rape, abuse, people adrift, people without any cultural grounding to stand on. We shouldn’t need to lean on individualism to allay suspicions of wokeness, but I will for this conversation: there’s a selfishness to wanting justice, for yourself or for others. 

But what if I also claimed that I want a progressive shift not only because I’ve felt a sense of oppression, but because I have also felt myself in the role of oppressor? I’d be lying if I claimed there I had never once entertained that the sexes were not equal. I have felt myself on the opposite side of a social dichotomy with another person and, even if not entirely comfortable with it, still fully subscribing to that hierarchy. It’s not only that those things were wrong to an extent, but also because the act of alienating made me feel more alienated. Maybe I want the influences and phenomena that correlate to those things gone because they are barriers, and they limit my ability to build community and understand the world. I’m not a dilettante, nor do I have a hero complex, nor do I think I’m better than anyone else. There are just specific things I can’t ignore, outcomes I want for myself, principles that I want to satisfy, things I want to see in the world, freedoms I want everyone to be able to enjoy, freedoms that I want to enjoy together with other people. And it’s really that simple.