Donald and the Pincer
'Why did this happen?' and other obvious questions.
Reading mainstream media at the moment is giving me a sense of deja vu. That ‘how could he have won?’ is still a question eight years after it first happened is a mystery to me. But here we are. The Donald has ascended to the heights of American power again, and the victory is as resounding as the howls of confusion.
Why did he win? There might be a thousand particular answers, but the broader reason seems clear: a lot of people are sick of the political-media-cultural establishment, and they want to blow it up. This is the same reason people voted for Brexit in 2016 and continue voting for ‘populist’ parties across Europe today. People feel - correctly - that this establishment serves the elite but not the masses. Worse: it has become so self-referential that it barely even knows who the masses are. I have been writing about how this establishment developed, and about the people opposing it, for thirty years. I can say with some confidence that this is not over yet.
Given all this, I thought it might be useful to reprint this essay, which first appeared here with the title Down the River in April 2022, and will also appear in my forthcoming book. It attempts to understand this moment by exploring how progressive leftism and corporate capitalism, once supposedly sworn enemies, ended up marching in lockstep to build the world we now inhabit. Those who are swept to power on the back of the rejection of that world do not necessarily have any better alternatives - and this post is not an endorsement of Trump or anyone else. The great saviours of the moment often end up making things worse. But they have walked into history for a reason. Maybe this essay will help dig into it.
Mexico, January 1994
What may turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century emerged from the rainforest remnants of southern Mexico on 1 January 1994, carried down darkened, cobbled colonial streets by 500 pairs of black leather boots at precisely thirty minutes past midnight. The owners of the boots carried rifles and the odd AK-47 or Uzi. Those who had drawn short straws carried fake wooden guns.
Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America; a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the sixteenth century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, ‘the ones without faces, the ones without voices’ had come to make the world listen.
The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.
Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.
By the time the rebels began carrying furniture out of the Municipal Palace and using it to build barricades across the streets, to check the expected approach of the Mexican army, the Plaza was thronging with locals, drunks, tourists and curious spectators. Some shared cigarettes and soft drinks with the masked invaders. Then, as they watched, a small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square – a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN.
As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this ‘EZLN’ had also claimed as its own.
‘We are the product of 500 years of struggle,’ he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. ‘We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!’
Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his annointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the midnight bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.
Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later – much later – would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation – EZLN – had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government – and NAFTA itself.
‘Are you sure?’ croaked the president.
It’s been a long time since I wrote that, or even read it. These are the opening paragraphs of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, which was published 19 years ago. They’re a bit melodramatic, but I think they hold up reasonably well considering how young and excitable I was when I wrote it. Back then, I believed that I was in the vanguard (or perhaps was reporting on the vanguard; the distinction wasn’t very clear even in my own mind) of a new, worldwide ‘mass movement’ which was rising against globalisation. I described that movement like this:
As it occupied motorways, holding street parties where there had previously been traffic jams, invaded the shareholder meetings of oil companies; lobbied parliament; refused to lobby parliament; marched, grandstanded and grew, it talked of the global forces behind the problems it was trying to tackle. It talked of ‘neoliberalism’, whatever that was, of powerful, unaccountable corporations, of a grinding-down of democracy, of a global economic machine spinning out of control, eating up the things that people valued and spitting out share prices as it passed.
All very 1990s, but not a bad portrait of what was going on then, and at root still is. That ‘global economic machine’ is still out there, larger now and more totalising: it’s the subject of these essays. But a lot has changed since then as well, and not just my own views on the efficacy of ‘mass movements’. In fact, a dramatic polar shift has taken place in the identity of the opponents of the globalisation project.
Back then, what seemed to be coalescing around me was a kind of post-Marxist anti-capitalism. It was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. There was an optimistic energy about it. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the left. You wouldn’t see any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of ‘free’ trade, or over in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.
How times have changed. Here in the early 2020s, the most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation can often be found on the right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the left. Conservative and ‘post-liberal’ critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to the elite class war and the associated culture of inversion that I wrote about in my last two essays. And because this ‘progressive’ left, which dominates the elite strata of Western countries, is drawn from the beneficiary class of globalisation, it is overwhelmingly supportive of the process.
The left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is today barely in evidence anywhere. When it does rear its head its proponents stand a good chance of being labelled ‘red-brown’ crypto-fascists by an online mob of supposed radicals which cheers on government vaccine mandates, Big Tech censorship, the freezing of protestors’ bank accounts, and the demonisation of the problematic working classes of their own nation.
As for NAFTA: the treaty that drew the Zapatistas’ ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, the left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.
Since at least the end of the Cold War, and perhaps the end of World War Two, the declared aim of the Western powers, led by the USA, has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market cannot function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade has been towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wanted it or not. This threefold rollout - global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model - is usually referred to using the bland term ‘globalisation’; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism - the latest iteration of the Western empires - and a hugely successful one.
Back when I was a young and fiery activist, the left of the spectrum was where you went if you stood against this. Though wrong about plenty of things, the left have traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of capitalism, while the right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valourising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the ‘traditional values’ they love so much have gone to. It’s only in recent years that conservative thinkers in any numbers have begun to explore the territory where Wendell Berry planted his flag half a century ago and Chesterton half a century before that.
Over the last decade though, the political binary I grew up with has, like so much else, been inverted. The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufman calls left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.
On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parrotting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the ‘left’ than the workers? If the left was what it claims to be - a bottom-up movement for popular justice - this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be - a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation - then this would not be the case either.
But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the 'progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?
I’m arguing in these essays that our era is a time of radical flattening, with the techno-industrial matrix I’m calling the Machine working to replace previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. I defined that Machine in some detail here. It is a phenomenon which arose (or perhaps resurfaced) with modernity, was birthed in industrial cities, and is engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in the technological matrix that is rising around us.
With the possible exception of the bit about the market, this is also a good description of the historical project of the political left. The very notion of a ‘left’ was, after all, birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways - Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the ‘bourgeois family’ (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to ‘transition’ children - but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.
Looked at this way, it’s not hard to see that progressive leftism and the Machine, far from being antagonistic, are a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, ‘superstition’ and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.
Above all, both coalesce around the foundational modern notion of the blank slate, which, in Rousseau’s famous formulation, tells us that ‘man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.’ Rousseau is perhaps one of our key guiding spirits today. His primitivist worldview has a clean, Edenic note about it which can speak across the spectrum to those who feel hemmed in by the rising Machine dystopia. Who doesn’t want to lose their chains? Who doesn’t want to be free?
The question that quickly arises, of course, is ‘free from what?’ A key term, found everywhere in current leftist discourse, is ‘emancipatory.’ To be ‘progressive’ is to emancipate. What is it that is to be emancipated? The individual. What are they to be emancipated from? All societal structures. And what is the best instrument for achieving this emancipation? Uncomfortably for both Rousseauvian primitivists and old-school leftists, who have seen large-scale experiments in socialist economics go up in flames time and time again, the answer appears to be: global capitalism. No other system in history has ever been as effective in breaking the chains of time, place and culture as the global empire of corporate power.
The advert at the top of this essay is a fine contemporary illustration of this fact. It’s an advert from a global bank - the apogee of faceless Machine capitalism - which was produced in the wake of the Brexit vote in the UK. It seeks to explain to the dull and backward Brits that they are connected to the wider world, and are ‘part of something far, far bigger’ than their rainy little country and its own elected parliament.
But note the arguments being used here: they are cultural, not economic. The bank is not telling you that staying in the EU would make your credit card transactions cheaper. It is issuing you with a series of cultural instructions about the goodness of all things global and the badness of all things parochial, and it is doing it in the utopian language of post-1968 idealism. ‘Together we thrive’, it tells us. To be ‘open’ is virtuous. To be ‘closed’ is dangerous. It’s not hard to see why this message would appeal to corporate capital as well as to utopian leftists and liberals. ‘Togetherness’ is good, after all. Who could argue?
If the past forty years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. When HSBC preaches to us of ‘something far, far bigger’ than our little nation states, what is it pointing at? Is it the egalitarian utopia of the left’s historical dreams? Or it the race to the bottom, with half the world working in an Amazon warehouse and the other half living in a smoggy, AI-monitored dystopia, with no recourse against the money power which now has no borders to hold it back? Are they the same thing? Does one lead to the other? Answers on a postcard, if you can still buy them.
Those of us who remember the halcyon era in which ‘right’ and ‘left’ seemed to mean something might find all this confusing, but if we step back for a broader view we can see that the economics of capitalism and the politics of progressivism are both manifestations of what Jacques Ellul called technique: the technocratic essence of Machine modernity. Today’s left is no threat to technique: on the contrary, it is its vanguard. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of ‘revolution’ would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and Youtube, then the answer is here.
Progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian ‘red Tory’ philosopher George Grant once observed that ‘the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.’ These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.
I should, at this point, offer an obvious caveat to my argument: that ‘the left’ is not a monolith, any more than ‘the right’ is. ‘Progressive’ leftism is not the only game in town: there have been other lefts, and there still are. What is manifesting around us today is not Owenite socialism or Tolstoyan anarchism. It’s not good old-fashioned social democracy, or even a rigorous application of Marxism. My teetotal, Methodist, Labour-voting great grandfather, a proud socialist all his life, would not recognise it - and how it would hate him, with his Victorian values and his First World War medals and his archaic views on family and nation.
A couple of essays back I wrote about my time as a teenage Leveller. Back in seventeenth century England, the dream of the Levellers was a new world incorrupt: an England with no hierarchies, no weight on the shoulders of the poor. It was a dream that had flourished undergound for centuries, flaming up periodically through rebellions, risings and protests, and anyone from our vantage point should be able to understand it. Nobody now is calling for the return of serfdom.
Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. At its noblest, it is a gift to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be made to justify their existence.
But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spiggot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices - the language of levelling - to tie up its work in pretty bows?
If we are living through a revolution, it is not the rise of ‘cultural Marxism’, but the ongoing, accelerating revolution of the Machine. The post-modern left which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of Machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s: norms which act as a brake on the spread of Machine values. The left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.
Where, then, to stand? Could there be a left without progress? Could there be a right without capitalism? Or is this all just noise? All of the political categories we tear each other apart over are products of the Machine age. None of them have altered the course of a world in which technology is the driver of all change. The Machine absorbs all challenges to its ascendancy. Liberals want to direct history’s arc, conservatives want to stand athwart history yelling ‘stop’, and leftists want to break history altogether and start again. But history rolls on regardless; the Machine’s metaphysics are independent of all of our struggles and notions.
The Machine-fuelled culture of inversion changes all of our parameters. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not ‘who should own the means of production?’ or ‘should we privatise the health service?’ They are ‘what is a woman?’, ‘where should we implant the microchips?’, ‘how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?’, and ‘what do you think of my new killer robot?’ The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: neither side of the French assembly has a clue what to do with any of it. Whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.
When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I will write about in depth in the third and final part of this series. I saw it represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.
This is the tradition of reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither left nor right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.
Perhaps we could think of this as facing the post-modern world with a pre-modern mindset. But if this is a useful way of seeing - and I think it is - it’s important to emphasise that it is not a political project. Political solutions are for political problems, but the origins of our culture’s crisis is much deeper than the surface level on which politics operates. The culture war is not, in my view, about politics at all. It’s not even about culture. More on that next time.
You can find the full list of my essays on the Machine here.