Consent-As-A-Service, Part 3
Part 1: “Manufacturing Consent Is So Last Century. Now, We Offer Consent-As-A-Service.”
Part 2: “‘War’ Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry”
Ask a typical Democrat partisan about the John Birch Society, and they’ll smirk. “Extremists,” they’ll say. “Paranoid nutjobs.” “Conspiracy theorists.” “Wackos stuck in the Cold War.”
What no centrist Democrat partisan will do is notice how 21st-century Democratic ideology is identical to the John Birch Society’s and its jingo-cult kin’s. Democrats are hardly alone in that attitude; in the three-quarters of a century since the McCarthy era, the spirit of imperial arrogance and first-world persecution embodied by the John Birch Society has spread all throughout the American consciousness, as has the hyper-nationalist ideology of self-denying imperialism behind Cold Warrior politics. Right-wing activists have been the most aggressive in fostering that atmosphere, and Republicans have benefitted the most from the post-9/11 political climate of widespread consent for neocolonialist adventurism, maintained through endless multimedia fearmongering about traitors lurking in the civilian population. But as with every political issue, the Democrats are always rushing to catch up behind them. Progressively.
Commissars Without A Cause
Then and now, Liberalism judges both anti-establishment progressivism and right-wing reaction to be foreign elements corrupting Liberal politics' purity and rationality. 21st-century neoliberalism especially sees both as manifestations of the same irrational anti-freedom ideology being spread by the same malicious alien forces that Liberalism lumps all of the beliefs it is not capable of comprehending into. From that viewpoint fascism, anti-establishment Leftism, and even establishment reformism are equally threatening and equally anti-freedom. Liberal orthodoxy's stance that all other ideologies or ways of organizing society are faulty because they lack the rationality of bourgeois capitalist democracy -- the same fatal flaw in all of Liberalism's self-mythologizing -- makes adherents of Liberalism perceive everything outside themselves and their own self-belief as a rejection of Liberal bourgeois values. Because of this, neoliberal ideology and political strategy are constitutionally incapable of recognizing that fascism, imperialism, genocide, nationalism, and neocolonialist violence, habitually committed by their governments against the marginalized nations and peoples of the world in the name of ideological hygiene, are not foreign corruptions of bourgeois capitalist democracy; they are bourgeois capitalist democracy unleashed from all the polite indulgences and high-minded philosophical justifications. -- https://hometheaterofcruelty.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/how-to-fight-fascism-by-giving-it-everything-it-wants-and-then-complaining-about-it-part-2/
In response to 9/11, and everything since, Democrats have been increasingly desperate in believing themselves to be the embodiment of normalcy, tradition, and “real America”, by imagining the common masses as a foreign conspiracy of un-American saboteurs who want to destroy the nation on purpose with their disloyalty and degeneracy. No matter the world which Democrats resent for displeasing them is fundamentally different than the one that led to Bircher paranoia. Republicans have been — and still are — at the vanguard of American imperial arrogance and political reaction; yet it is the Democrats who have most internalized reactionary nationalist paranoia and neo-Kipling cult-of-positivity imperialism. The only meaningful difference in geopolitical perspective between 21st-century liberals and 20th-century Birchers is that 21st-century liberals are incapable of the self-awareness it would take to comprehend the idea that their nationalist paranoia, over the collapse of “Western civilization” to the Asiatic menace at the hands of traitors and terrorist infiltrators, could be anything but the truest expression of common sense, rationality, and moral clarity that transcend partisanship and ideology.
Whether domestically or internationally, the contemporary liberal consciousness decides everything through the ressentimental principle that the most-overrepresented, influential, and powerful on the world stage are the most oppressed; and that the most dominate nations and political, cultural, and economic entities in human history are the most threatened and ignored, always under threat of being destroyed by the all-powerful forces of foreign oppression and unhygienic badthink. The only essential feature of Birchism missing from the current Democrat consensus is the political savvy and self-awareness it would take for Democrats to recognize they have even less reason to feel persecuted than the red-baiting kooks of yesteryear.
The most absurd aspect of the ever-growing nationalist paranoia of the liberal base, the least-marginalized group of consumer-fan activists in the history of civilization, is that unlike the fringe actors of The John Birch Society and its Cold War brethren Democrats have no claim to being ignored or unappreciated by the political and cultural mainstream. Even during their Red Scare heyday, the genuine hard-right nationalists of the mid-20th century had reasons to feel marginalized and unappreciated by the establishment figures who claimed to represent them (as they deserved to be, then and now).
The John Birch Society in particular, far-right advocates for a global crusade against Communism and desegregation named after an American Christian killed in China, was a fringe group whose influence was tolerated by the political mainstream only so long as they were useful. Individual members of the John Birch Society sometimes held semi-important political positions, but only the ones who were already politically connected and played coy about their actual beliefs in public. Even at its most entrenched, the organization itself was deliberately marginalized by the political and media establishment. Birchers and their sympathizers were often trotted out by Republicans (and Democrats) to rile up the base with Red-baiting conspiracies and warmongering rhetoric, but only when doing so made the mainstream figures look reasonable in comparison — like a barrier to the kooks from the John Birch Society.
For as long as it was politically relevant, the John Birch Society was only treated seriously by establishment figures long enough to be used as a prop by mainstream politicians in need of a heel, even as those same mainstream politicians validated and encouraged the paranoid nationalism that powers the ongoing white middle class reaction against the rest of the world. No matter how much attention they got, the John Birch Society was always considered a fringe group of lunatic ideologues who spread conspiracy theories about Communist infiltrators using fluoride to brainwash people, in a time when that was something that kept people out of the American political mainstream.
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