Politics is Downstream of Culture, Stupid!

Why the sheep of the 'intelligentsia' were blindsided by the election - and what Trump's victory means for the future

Elon Musk; Donald Trump after being shot in Butler, PA; Friedrich Nietzsche in uniform; JK Rowling; Boris Pasternak by Leonid Pasternak; Aldous Huxley.

You’ve seen the tantrums of raging wokies by now—hysterical, self-indulgent, yet sufficiently self-possessed to turn on the video cameras, because even in their deepest despair they never miss an opportunity for virtue-signalling. You might dismiss them as the reactions of the obviously imbalanced and mentally ill, but if you’re on social media at all, and have any Leftist friends, you’ll have seen similar responses from the educated elite. I must admit it’s amused me a good deal. My mother had to take shelter in Tube stations when the Luftwaffe was bombing London, and her mother nearly lost her life when a bomb hit the pub she was in. Actual Nazis tried to kill them. And yet their reaction was not to weep or scream but to calmly fight back. What’s struck me most forcibly this week is how utterly divorced from reality most people on the Left are, particularly the educated echelons of society, and in this essay I want to consider not so much the politics, but Andrew Breitbart’s thesis that politics are downstream of culture, and why it is that academics, journalists, politicians and civil servants have failed so dismally to understand what’s happening in that culture. I’d also like to consider what the possible consequences are for Western civilisation.

This week one of my closest and dearest friends, a highly intelligent man, wrote to me that he couldn’t understand why so many Trump supporters voted against their own interests. I don’t think they did, but even if you still believe that the Democrats represent the interests of the working-class—which even that stalwart of the Left Bernie Sanders recognises is no longer the case—it’s obvious that cultural factors played a huge part. And when I say ‘culture’, I don’t mean the alleged racism and misogyny of Americans. If Americans were racist, how come they voted for Barack Obama, not once, but twice? And how come that this time they supported a candidate whose team includes Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, and whose VP pick is married to an Indian-American? As for misogyny, if Americans were truly misogynists, how do you explain that Hillary won the popular vote in 2016? These accusations don’t wash. I lived for fourteen years in Arkansas, which is now a red state (it wasn’t: people abandoned the Democrats only when the Democrats abandoned them, as Sanders has admitted). I came across very little racism or misogyny there. Most people were decent, hardworking, patriotic, and Christian—genuinely Christian, not just virtue-signallers. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, my then-wife (a committed Democrat, and atheist) helped organise the relief effort in our city, Conway, and she had a huge warehouse full of food and blankets, all donated by local churches. The generosity of local people, mostly white, who knew that most of the aid was going to poor African Americans, was astonishing. This wasn’t a vote for racism or misogyny, or fascism. (What a ludicrous charge! If Trump were a fascist, why didn’t he start imprisoning and killing political prisoners when he was in office? Where was his private army?) No, none of these scurrilous allegations stick. But it was a clear vote against the great mind-virus of our age, wokeism.

Let’s reel off a few things that ordinary people are sick and tired of, at random. For a start, they don’t like being called deplorables, or Nazis, or garbage—surprise, surprise. They don’t like being told that they should be ashamed of their history, that their heroes were genocidal racists and their statues should be removed. They don’t like being told that fully half of them, the male half, are tainted by the Original Sin of toxic masculinity. It’s not just men who find that offensive. Any woman of sense does too, particularly is she has male children, brothers, or a father she loves. They don’t like it when an insane and openly racist creed is taught in their schools, Critical Race Theory (which is anything but critical, and completely unsupported by evidence.) They don’t like DEI, and its implied value, which is as insulting to minorities as it is to white people, that all white people are inherently racist, and that minorities can only succeed if they are given artificial help. They don’t like the division that wokeism tries to sow, between the races, and the sexes. They prefer Martin Luther King’s vision: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ That’s the antithesis of Critical Race Theory, which wants to arrange the races in a hierarchy of virtue according to the colour of their skin, with white people at the bottom, because they are supposedly uniquely evil. Need I point out that ordinary, sensible people also don’t like their little children to be subjected to Drag Queens sexualising story hour at school, or health services that encourage vulnerable children to think they have ‘gender dysphoria’, and conspire to poison and mutilate their bodies? They don’t like the increasingly obvious censorship or the Newspeak. Even if you’re not a writer or an artist you have by now noticed that it’s dangerous to say, write, or even think certain things. In Britain now it’s actually a criminal offence to pray silently outside an abortion clinic, for instance. I know plenty of people who’ve told me that there’s no such thing as free speech now. They know they can lose their jobs if they speak their minds. I know this too: I nearly lost mine for doing just that. Is it any wonder that the American public has rejected this authoritarianism? Or that they recognise that the real ‘fascists’ are the woke? And why is it that so very few intellectuals understand?

Because, when you think about it, the duty of intellectuals is to understand. They are paid—in academic institutions, usually at least partly by the taxpayer—to do just that, particularly if they are social scientists or in the liberal arts. But they failed signally. It’s partly because most of them come from comfortable, upper-middle class backgrounds, of course, and they’ve never had any contact with ordinary people. I know from teaching at an American state university that many of my colleagues despised their students, considering them rednecks, brainless fundamentalists, and so on. In my novel, Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, two professors discussing the culture of their students agree that it’s their duty to teach the correct values, because obviously they have been deprived of them all their lives. That might sound far-fetched, but I actually overheard such a conversation and put it in more or less verbatim. Many professors are activists, who believer that their main responsibility is not to help students learn to think critically and independently, but to instil the correct ‘Liberal’ (actually illiberal) values. They are brainwashers, pure and simple. Almost all US universities are now worthless propaganda machines. And most of the people who work in them have either been effectively brainwashed, or else are too afraid for their jobs to express dissent. And that goes for the whole of the Deep State, including the Intelligence Agencies, the civil service, the media, and of course Hollywood. They all follow the same irrelevant legacy media, which gets everything wrong now. No wonder they are utterly clueless. They are not thinkers, but tribesmen and women.

One of the reasons Trump won is that he and his team understood the power and reach of the alternative media now: they went on Joe Rogan and talked to him for three hours. They had Elon rooting for them—and whatever you think of him (I don’t like either Tesla or his space programme) you can’t deny that X/Twitter is one of the few uncensored platforms now, and it’s where lots of young people get their news. So they were in touch; they are in touch. You’ll notice that I haven’t discussed the respective merits of the candidates. I still don’t think Trump is the ideal President, for lots of reasons—I would have preferred RFK or Tulsi—but it was clear to me that Kamala was at best a mediocrity and a stooge and puppet of the Establishment, and that if she were elected, America’s precipitous decline could only accelerate. If politics is the art of the possible, you must go for the pragmatic choice. That is surely Trump.

Do I think that he will make America great again? I’m afraid I don’t, though I hope I am proven wrong. I have my reservations about the next few years. The neo-Marxists who spearhead the woke movement are so deeply entrenched in all our institutions that it will not be easy to root them out, and in many places—private colleges, media outlets and so on—it will be impossible. We can expect a doubling-down of the madness. The brainwashing will continue. But at least now the Donald has promised to cut public funding to institutions that practice DEI rather than meritocratic hiring and selection, and to cut funding to ‘healthcare’ facilities that mutilate children. The Qataris have announced that they’re expelling Hamas, and the Houthis have just said they are going to stop attacking American shipping. Are these coincidences? I don’t think so. This is the first major victory of common-sense over elitist numbskull wokery in the English-speaking world, and I expect it to inspire European nations to follow the path of Hungary, Poland and Italy in rejecting the insanity too. But we will have to fight, fight, fight, to echo the words of the man who survived in Butler, PA.

I don’t know if the decline of the West can be reversed. I admire Spengler’s theory of history, which holds that civilisations have their expiry dates, and that ours, the ‘Faustian’ one, is up about now. As I’ve said in these posts before, clearly we are long past the acme of our civilisation. That would probably be in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when painting and music reached their heights, with a kind of mini-Renaissance occurring a bit later in the Romantic movement, which produced the great fiction of the nineteenth century. Although great talents still arise, it’s obvious that we are not nearly as creative as we once were. And yet a culture can survive, in somewhat fossilised form, for centuries after it loses the creative spark, as we know from the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Byzantines. That is my hope.

In the meantime, for anyone hurting and crying, anyone who needs to stay in bed, or who needs mental health support—you won’t be getting much sympathy from me. You are weak. Grow up, take responsibility. Learn. You’ll survive. One of my FB friends—a very nice lady—posted that she was a safe person, if anyone from the LGBTQ etc community needed support. I suppose I am a dangerous one. I don’t wish anyone harm, but I can’t see that mollycoddling helps anyone. In the new, and I hope post-woke world, my fervent desire is that you can all live dangerously, as Nietzsche urged you to do, and speak and write dangerously, as I urge you to do. We are free spirits, unshackled, ungagged. We must make use of our freedom. Fight, fight, fight!