I feel like I just witnessed the end of Western civilisation

Something inside me died when I saw a D-list actress PsyOp the world that she could have prevented war by hugging Putin.

On Thursday night, I witnessed what felt like the fall of the West. 

Right before bed, I absentmindedly checked Twitter, and there it was: a blonde actress I had never seen before announcing to the world that she could have saved Ukraine, if only she had been Vladimir Putin’s mother and given him lots of hugs when he was 4.

And that was the moment when all the decadence, self-regard, narcissism, vacuity, and childishness of our once serious Western culture narrowed to one single, crystal-clear image. 

This image — the face of a pretty blonde woman born in 1987 who thinks she can fix geopolitics and KGB-trained Russian strongmen with good vibes — is the creation of the liberal left moral order. And that order is dying. 

We live in a time of definitional collapse, as Freddie de Boer recently put it. The terms left and right have, indeed, completely lost their original connotations and now seem to exist mostly as free-floating terms used to inflict harsh moral judgement on an opponent.

Nonetheless, there is still a large block of people who hold fast to the idea of being liberal left because they think it’s the side of the good guys. 

I need to tell those people they are wrong. Not just wrong, actually. They are on the precipice of moral culpability for whatever disaster is upon us, because they insist on remaining aligned with a highly damaging ideology.

This is awkward for me, because I am of the liberal left. My family and friends are all of the liberal left. I am a creation of the liberal left. I exist, in a literal sense, because of the liberal left. My parents met when my mother was visiting Dublin as part of a Trotskyist summer camp and walked into an artsy, leftie pub. There she found my father, a working class boy from Belfast who, thanks to the welfare state and free education, was eking out a living as poet. When I was little and my parents would tell me the story of my name, they would tell me it was because of the connection to Karl Marx’s wife Jenny, and Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie. Marx: defender of the working class. Churchill: slayer of fascism. I am the embodiment of the liberal left.

So for me to find myself not just in disagreement with the socio-political culture of the liberal left, but in deep and hostile l opposition to it is, well…it’s tricky. Being an apostate is very tiring. The cognitive dissonance really gets to you. It makes hanging out with family unappealing. 

The sad reality is this: all the virtues that I was taught were integral to the liberal left have disappeared. Fairness, standing up for the little guy, speaking truth to power, rational thinking, tolerance of thought and open-mindedness, pluralism, humour and satire, rejection of dogma and racism — all gone. In their place are a stinking morass of control-freakery, hypocrisy, child abuse, lust for punishing dissent, megalomania and — most surprising of all — dumb and blind faith in authority. 

Surely at this point everyone who is not brainwashed sees this dismal reality? but in case anyone needed a new example the Ottawa trucker debacle provided it. An actual working class movement, protesting extreme government meddling in the lives and livelihoods of blue-collar people, ignored or mocked or defamed by their erstwhile defenders.

How on Earth did it get to this?

My working theory has nothing to do with politics, it’s more of an up-close observation of how the people around me seem to be processing things. The liberal left got used to seeing itself as the good guys, the virtuous ones, the smart ones. They were comfortable in this position of moral superiority and it can be argued that they had a point. At least this was my experience of it from the 1980’s (when my consciousness was really being formed) through the first decade of the 2000’s. 

I began to perceive cracks in the facade around this time. There were a couple of signals that had me realising something was changing. For one, it began to seem like all the arguments on the liberal left had not changed to reflect early 21st century reality. Everything coming from the Democrats and the UK Labour types still sounded like it was the 1960’s, or the 1980’s. It was always the fault of government cuts or the patriarchy, and I felt like this sloganeering did not come close to addressing real problems.

But the more the world seemed to reflect how much the liberal left was out of touch, the more insistent and shrill the liberal left became. They, and they alone, understood how to fix everything. This despite of the fact that they had enjoyed a total cultural and academic and media and bureaucratic dominance throughout my lifetime, and yet had somehow not managed to fix anything. All they ever seemed to do was complain, while simultaneously being in control of so much.

For a couple of years, I thought that perhaps I was becoming a conservative, or — GASP — right-wing. 

Nope. Despite the fact that I have been called this, and worse, by deranged liberal lefties, I’m not right-wing. I’m just not emotionally attached to my political opinions and the social status those opinions confer. I’m not blind to the glaring failures of the people the liberal left continue to call their leaders. 

Neither Biden nor Clinton served in Vietnam. That brutal work was left to the proles. George W. Bush may have been the devil incarnate back in the early 2000’s but now he is firmly nestled in the warm bosom of liberal left approval, as is Liz Cheney, the daughter of the Dark Lord himself Dick Cheney. As is the former spokeswoman to that administration Nicolle Wallace, now a highly favoured MSNBC talking head. 

Despite this obvious solidification of the corporate oligarchical uni-party, the Co-Exist bumper-sticker brigade, Blue State voters and Guardian readers are still swallowing the propaganda spewed out by the Big Pharma funded media. The same media who claimed last week, before the Russian invasion, that inflation is the result of unrest in Ukraine. And what about the security establishment, surely we can rely on them to be the grown-ups in the room in this time of Eurasian peril. What are they up to? 

This madness rests at the feet of the liberal left, who were willing to accept obvious incompetence, corruption and malfeasance because it was covered by a fig-leaf of fake virtue posturing. This allows the upper-middle class, white collar, liberal left to go back to a life of comfort while truckers freeze and Ukrainians are bombed by Russian fighter jets. As long as no one gets misgendered!

A few days before the invasion of Ukraine, I watched a moving video by Hotep Jesus, a black political thinker and Bitcoin tech guy. He was lamenting the fate of the Ottawa truck protest, and how the liberal left had accepted the lie that it was a movement of white supremacists and misogynists. He said something that I thought was very brave and also very wise, about his fellow man: 

“I don’t really care about people being racist, I hate when the state is racist, that’s my problem.

It’s us versus the state. It’s not white people versus black people, that’s the trick.”

This sums up to a T the core problem with the liberal left. It’s not my business what a fellow human citizen thinks. But it IS my business how the state acts. It IS my business how the state thinks. Because I am a shareholder and partial owner of that state. Or at least I thought I was.

The liberal left, however, sees it the other way around.

This feels like a moment of great peril. Brought to you by the liberal left.