No. The left dominates the outward facing parts of our culture. The left controls the inculcation of what passes for ‘culture’ for every new generation.

Sadly, they won’t recognize the comparison I made above when the subject of antifa comes up. That would be destructive to their operating systems.

They criticize the right, in the US of the past 25 years often with cause, for crudity, strawmen, baiting, etc. They will not recognize the same in themselves, nor that we have all bathed in their versions of it for over a generation.

Once you’ve heard basically anything right of centre called racist and neoconfederate, and in some cases struggled to see the connection being drawn to race, it’s hard to take it seriously. When you’ve heard boomer cons or neocons or W Bush assessed as racists, it’s hard to take anything else seriously. It’s harder yet when the critique throws those terms at some vaguely capitalist-ish, libertarian-y spending policy that might be appalling but can’t reasonably be called “fascist” or racist.

When you notice how far the balls have moved, or how much academic Marxist [Critical/Structural/Poststructural] analysis has escaped into the wild and begun to be treated as a branch of the natural sciences on the left, it’s hard to identify even the most moderate American progressive today with “liberalism”, JFK or even LBJ. More like an ever so slightly refracted Woodrow Wilson.

I don’t know what to make of it. I recognize the confusions I have seem to exist on their side of the line. That’s why I don’t understand why they don’t understand they are seeming to make no attempt to understand anything, or words to that effect.

Most of Trump’s base would be satisfied with things that would have seemed bipartisan in the 1990s.

I sort of understand why the left might not consider itself omnipresent and ascendant. They mostly see “capitalism” when they look at tech and media, without as much regard to the content those sectors are framing. They see many things as normal, normative, and natural that the right sees as them pushing a point of view. They can still criticize “McCarthyism” [slapping an ism on things is still a magic power] and the blacklist without irony because it’s just different. And so on.

As to the last para or so, remember when the left “loved science” and materialism and ‘reality-based’ policy?

I sometimes figure I would be willing to let them sweep away my civilization if I could but get a commitment to terminological exactitude.

1. One argument long beloved among segments of the trad and liberal right was that the Nazis and Communists were the same- revolutionary utopians out to remake the world according to their ideals. The Nazis were the more radical and the less pragmatic. I suppose they were more like the Trotskyites than like the Stalinists in the scale of their ambition.

This gets the back up of people like the Spectator columnist a few months back who did critique communism but practically screeched on the page that ‘the fascists chose evil’ while the communists were trying to do good. This represents a preemptive assumption about the motives of both and a bias for the goals of the latter as “good”. The worst of both camps chose to create a new society and a new humanity from a selective rootstock, and the devil take the rest. All other distinctions are operational or preferential.

I am less sympathetic to this model of history than I used to be. But leave aside- even that is preferential. As an observation of the two ideologies, I have seen no better conclusion.

I am also reminded of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Who asked anyone claiming Hitler was a conservative to demonstrate one thing he wanted to conserve. A witticism, sure, but not without merit.

Leave aside Kipling’s idea of civilization. I know he viewed the Germans as industrially-equipped barbarians genuinely akin to the Huns, on some level, and while I am sympathetic to him on that I don’t wish to travel that far down the anti-teutonic road.

There’s something in Kipling’s worldview on that. Somewhere in my office I have “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” lying around. Which I first discovered in one of Jerry Pournelle’s anthologies in the 1980s, as it happens. He did me a lifelong service with his editorial choices.