9-11 - Present, the Era of Failure

Tl;DR

I was in my final weeks of secondary school, almost 18 when September 11th happened, meaning I'd barely been conscious and able to form recallable memories for a full decade. I had pretty much experienced nothing but the end of history, especially given Australia's remoteness from the Cold War, as such, September 11th marked the end of the end of history - a kind of post game wealth and freedom building vibe, illusory even then as the economic program of the time was the honeymoon period of a return to feudalism.

25 years later the honeymoon is very much over. To me, the bad actors are obvious, and do not require much reflection, just as - living in a state where it is impossible to find an entirely bulk billing psychologist, and the state approves 5-10 psychology sessions under a mental health plan, it is an incredible waste of resources to spend time reassuring a professional psychologist bound by patient confidentiality that you love your parents and your childhood was a happy one, before getting down to the productive conversation about how they fucked you up.

So too, I see it as an opportunity for my own catharsis to reflect upon the failure of the "good" actors, being people whose heart was in the right place, but owing to a 20th century pre-internet education, were not equipped or not motivated to try to understand what was even at stake, taking an intuitive and instinctive approach to their resistance that in 25 years, by my estimation, has not worked.

Below I use Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism as a scaffold to criticize the regressive illiberal left resistance. Useful and interesting to me, but loooong.

I feel the core merit of Eco's essay, is that fascism is likely intuitive, and I feel there's a simpler anecdote I can site upfront here:

"The heroes are the ones that are still changing, while the villains are the ones petrified and locked into what they are." writing advice attributed to Akira Kurosawa by Lawrence Kasden.

It has been 25 years of hyper-awareness of a everywhere war between left-right, and that for a long time was disorienting. By observing and reflecting, some of which was done on this blog, starting with the most obvious hypocrisies, I began to see a superimposed struggle, a pincer manuever being executed by two distinct but familial sides - what would help give me clarity was the word 'ideology' and the subsequent 'ideologues' being the discrete practitioners.

Before I understood the term, I had formulated my own construct of "infinite recourse to lack of commitment" to describe the people whose ideology simply could not fail, despite all the failures. I have friends who can testify as to how often I repeated my "any solution that requires everyone to voluntarily do the right thing is not a solution." 

I was sensitive, early on to watching the left hand behave like the right, and the clear gulf between me and a popular resistance that was the most people resourced - that were so petrified in the knowledge that left is the opposite of right, that they were borderline wilfully ignorant of the similarities.

A term I come across none in public discourse is "open societies" and a name I never hear is "Karl Popper" 

Those absences characterize the crucial failure of the resistance in the last 25 years, a failure to understand that life is not a game. People try to win games, which ends the game. Giving us the wisdom of the Italian proverb:

At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.

We generally want life to be as long as possible, and to go on for as long as possible, the alternative to ideology, is to aim for a world in which everyone is frustrated that not everything goes their way, and as such, there is no persons for whom everything goes against.

Below, in detail, is a post about the horrifying possibility that those who tried to resist the peppermint-fascism that now has taken hold in Russia, the US and Isreal post 9-11, were themselves simply strawberry-fascism, an opposite in flavour-only variety of their sworn enemy. 

Premise

25 years ago, something happened that deserved to be taken seriously. I think its a reasonable consensus that it was the end-of-the-end-of-history, 12 years or so between the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War and radicalized wealthy educated young men hijacked and flew planes into the World Trade Center towers. "The end of history" was a story of the archetype that rich people tell themselves with the effect of getting incredibly out of touch.

It was an also an event that has duel meanings to the expression "I was there" where historically the expression would be reserved for people who saw an event transpire with their own naked eyes - the Battle of Sekigahara for example, which defined the next 200 years of Japanese history, there were less than 170,000 people who could say "I was there" as many of the people who turned up died and couldn't say anything at all. The other sense, in which someone like me can say "I was there" of September 11 speaks to the greater event that was waking up, turning on the TV screen and seeing this monumental event, being in the moment and remembering what it was like to not know what the fuck was going on. In Iya valley on the Island of Shikoku news of the Sekigahara didn't reach Japanese villagers for maybe 200 years, they were sufficiently remote and isolated, they may not have known who the emperor was and failed to pay taxes for generations.

Many who were "there" in terms of being alive and sentient 25 years ago, may be reflecting on September eleven in any number of ways, rehashing debates that were had then and continue now.

The premise of my reflection then, may seem strange:

What if the Nazis weren't racist?

That's my premise, and it may seem strange. Why I'm not interested in say, reflecting on the War on Terror is because I think it is settled history - it was a disaster. Insofar as I need to reflect on it, it is only to keep in mind, many, broadly called "the left" or more fittingly "the doves" guessed it was a disaster then, and were validated.

What was not validated was the resistance. That is what I want to reflect on, and have been reflecting on, for 25 years.

If "power" is taken as the ability to act or do, then obviously George W Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard were much more able to guide the response to September 11 but that can lead many a moron into the trap of thinking that if you don't have the power to call in an airstrike then you are practically powerless.

The equivalent of thinking that if you don't own a boat with a boat on it and a helicopter too, then you are practically broke. 

What everyone who was "there" in terms of being alive at the time, had a very meaningful power to react with - the ability to choose between trying to understand and trying not to understand.

The Iraq invasion gave us a very concrete example of what I mean - if you tried to understand what the fuck Iraq had to do with September 11, you were likely to wind up on the right side of history. If you were trying not to understand you likely assumed their must be some spurious connection to Osama Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction and 911 times a thousand and bullshit like that.

However, where that is misleading is to say that trying or not trying to understand maps onto left-right perfectly. I was there, and not only there but bunkered down in a University with a near monoculture of the left, and as such I can testify that the dichotomy was independent - there were many left wingers dedicated to trying not to understand.

A big predictor, I feel, was if you came in already not understanding - particularly racism. Many on the left correctly opposed the Bush administration but subjected Muslims - particularly Arab Muslims to Orientalism.

And that was merely my first yellow flag, that it was not so easy to understand - this social dynamic was what would come to be labelled as "wokeness" or identity politics back there in 2002, 2003 even without a name. My girlfriend at the time was studying development and using this confusing barometer of "colonialism" and "colonisation" giving me as a business student, some insight into the underdetermined conclusions of the social sciences before they went mainstream. 

By 2016 I was in crazy town, and I've had 10 more years to try and understand. Much of the answers I felt came from Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism" essay, where he grapples with 'what is fascism?' having been there when Mussolini was in charge. And I think that Eco understood, and is writing with some urgency, that when fascism rises again, it is extremely unlikely to slap on the Swastika's again so someone with a high school education can see it coming.

He does not go so explicitly far as to ask though "what if the Nazi's weren't racist?"

Now imagine, as I do, how it would go over with many of my friends that leaned into identity politics, to tell them that they are racists. Not well, I suspect, yet I am confident I can soberly make my case. How much harder then, to tell someone who goes out to protest the emerged fascist regimes of Putin, Bibi and Trump, that they are, also, fascists.

And yet that is where for me the failure lies - you cannot fight racism with racism, and you cannot fight fascism with fascism.

The Name Calling Game

The anticipated obstacle, for me, of getting someone to even entertain the premise of this post - namely that the left got fascist, something that many a leftist ego I think, cannot tolerate and would require a thought stopping cliche STAT! 

Is to make an analogy, by asserting that an analysis of today's elite Neoliberal conservatives would reveal them to be Marxist without them being Communist.

Even a reductive understanding of Marxism can identify much of your (likely) employers play book - Exploitation, alienation, control of the means of production...as though Karl Marx described really well what they'd been doing unconsciously, allowing them to now communicate and subsequently train and implement it, formalise it into law and make the exploitation of workers people's literal job description, avoiding something that might hurt the shareholders like accidently not extracting the most labour for the minimal wage.

Having just finished Prof. Daniel Markowitz "The Meritocracy Trap" he even goes so far as to say todays elite meritocrats, the effective replacement to the aristocracy of yesteryear, now exploit themselves in the Marxist sense, whereas increasingly the proleteriat increasingly have leisure forced upon them - through Underemployment, bullshit jobs, unemployment and not-in-employment-education-or-training (NEET).

If you are revolted, literally repulsed by the idea that you spent a decade being Ur-Fascist, I invite you to just notice the feeling you might get from entertaining the notion that maybe the asset class, the neoliberal elites buying elections and eating the middle class, may themselves be functionally Marxist, simply not aligned with Marx' ideals, and ask yourself what if you could better understand your failures by just entertaining the idea, that maybe, just maybe, you made some of the same mistakes as Joe Public did in the early-mid 20th century.

Responsibility

25 years is enough time for people not born until years after 11th September, 2001, to have graduated with a bachelors degree. It is however, for those young people, a watershed moment in history that has informed the entirety of their lives, and these young people touched by the terror attack have largely been failed by those who were not just responsible for those attacks, but responsible in the sense of "able to respond" at the time, with obvious parties like George W Bush then president that wound up somehow in Iraq, Tony Blair then prime minister of the UK and John Howard then PM of Australia and I can't recall who else were in the "coalition of the willing" it wasn't a big club though.

Less obvious parties though, were the teenagers and adults of the time, the citizens of the "free world" who got this stark, shocking moment where we were confronted with the fundamental uncertainty that doesn't just permeate markets (as is the basis of much of Keynes' economics) but life. 

Many of those young people, myself included took to the streets and protested the Iraq invasion, there were politicians, political parties and even whole nations that opposed the collective response.

The opposition ultimately failed, and 25 years on, I don't think it's even particularly controversial to say we have fascist regimes again as a result of that failure.

No matter how small your life was, you were alive and had a mental life, and had a responsibility to try and understand what was happening. You had another response available to you as well which was to try not to understand what was happening, the why of which this was available to you was because emotions, understanding being too scary.

I cannot hold people to account for their emotions, asking them to change the very things that motivate them to do anything at all, however let me present another suite of responses available to the responsible that I take from Mike Judge's 'Idiocracy' but are likely an actual military adage - you could lead, follow or get out of the way.

There were people who near as I can guess, where simply emotionally repulsed by the Bushite right-wing response to September 11. As such, their attempts to understand stopped prematurely, like knowing the answer to a problem can prevent you from ever understanding the problem itself.

Those people, intuitive enough to see Bush as a loser, I will hold responsible for not then opting to follow or get out of the way. But instead tried to lead, with no understanding, no insight, just passion.

What Sadly Cannot Go Without Saying

There's a large political pole, known as "the right" and there's just no hope there. These are the open arms certain people can rush to, if what your emotions say is try not to understand not only the event of September 11, but also the 25 years that have followed, the War on Terror, the GFC, COVID and more regionally Brexit. 

Just focusing for a whole moment and no more on the UK, we can kind of see the knight fork of how forked the right is, because there the right embodies both dead-ends - devotion to the Neoliberal policy that has ground people down to where they are AND anti-immigration.

Furthermore, this is a global phenomena in terms of "the right" whether it is the US, the UK, France, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador, Columbia, Brazil, Italy, Australia and New Zealand - its those same dead ends - a refusal to change the economic paradigms to reverse the declining condition of the majority of middle class citizens of the world and the growing inequality, and willingness to blame everything on immigrants.

So let me reframe the whole thing - the right cater to people who do not want to understand and cannot learn, like literally a country like Australia can look at the UK and the US and be like 'that populism is a fucking disaster' and there's people here who are like 'do we have any anti-immigrant populism?' 

And furthermore, I don't really fucking know any of them, in 2002 I met some US foreign students who were "rallying around the flag" I couldn't even say if they were pro-Bush. I had a Zionist friend in my University course who was a fan of Bush but was very Israel-centric in that fandom.

So this post is going to be about the failures of the left, people I know.

There Illiberal Left

I find answers in Eco's piece, sadly, because I just don't rate my friends understanding of like the Enlightenment or classical liberalism or history or anthropology for that matter. For all the talk of discourse, like people can't fucking discourse. 

The political equivalent of challenging whether...a brand, like the iPhone is better. Sure there's some who can make arguments about iOS, privacy protections in the ULA and whatever, they could argue who an iPhone is superior or worth the money over all the many perfectly functional Android phones at a lower price point, but most people just know that iPhones are better, they are my age or younger and have the same relationship to an iPhone as my grandma had to Telstra (Telecom, Postmaster General) and Channel 9.

Most of my left friends are vectors for illiberal left memes, but are not ideological, they cannot argue their case for two separate but important reasons 1) being competence, they don't know how to argue, even at an elite private school it is likely that only around 10% of the student body participated in the debate societies, and even in the advanced stream English class (what the US might call AP) like most classes class discussion is driven by one teacher and three to five students. 2) They cannot be persuaded because to be persuaded means to lose their social circle, they can't actually argue because if you convinced them say that it was okay to segregate bathrooms, they can't take that to their friends because they'll get kicked out.

I have friends that love Cabaret. For those who don't know, Cabaret was an Oscar winning musical starring Liza Minelli. This was a "text" many of us had to study in highschool, and unbelievably, apparently literary criticism is how Australian high school students are supposed to learn critical thinking.

I don't like Cabaret largely because I can't imagine any scene (not as in movie scene, but scene-scene) I like less than the Berlin cabaret scene in the lead up to the war. I don't like musical theatre, I don't particularly like the aesthetics of camp.

But I do think it is a good film, and particularly it has scenes that if you have an English teacher commenting while you watch it, that when a German aristocrat says "The Nazis are just a pack of thugs, but they are useful in getting rid of the communists" to comment that this was a common view at the time, and the myopia of "who'll get rid of the Nazis?" Or, to have a scene where a Hitler Youth stands up and sings "tomorrow belongs to me" and everyone stands and joins in except for the old man who is old enough to remember the Great War.

Like, my point being that it is a decent text that allows you to study and discuss how fascism took root. Particularly in terms of the little people just believing what they read in the newspaper and so fourth.

Furthermore, we were also assigned the Holocaust memoir "Night" by Elie Wiesel, and texts by George Orwell that could help us understand the other major calamity of the 20th century being the totalitarian regimes of Russia and China. We were assigned texts on Vietnamese refugees, resettling in Australia such that even if you didn't do History as an elective, I'm pretty sure me and my cohort were taught about the human folly of the 20th century that we were witnessing an end of.

So anyway, I was sitting in my favourite Chinese restaurant with a friend sometime probably in 2015 maybe 2017 and told them how I had friends that were self-censoring their opinions on social media, for fear of being dogpiled on. My friend insisted it wasn't happening, to which I said "I'm telling you, it does." to which they retreated their position to "well the people who are self-censoring, their opinions aren't worth hearing..." or something like that.

Now, understand, that my lived experience, my overwhelming impression, is that I need to write: "Now, understand, this was shocking to me." I didn't know what to make of it, and initially the shock was not centred around any political ideology, but that this friend an exemplary student who reads voraciously was proof positive that education doesn't work.

I already was persuaded that education was not efficient, but this was someone who was graded as highly as it is possible to be graded, and they did not understand Free Speech 101, and its crucial role as a bulwark against not just fascism, but fucking feudalism. 

Not to pick on them, but the awokening would only pick up steam from there until it mostly fizzled out at the end of 2024, the rise of the illiberal left, and I would get the impression more widely, that most people on the left don't understand not only free speech, but fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism etc. etc. which I've written about before.

This was the illiberal left that I feel has contributed considerably to the mistakes of the past 25 years. And I think there are many, many answers in Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" which will be the body of this reflection.

Umberto Eco is Dead, and I am not him

So obviously, Eco doesn't endorse my views I'm not claiming ownership of him, I'm just going to use his framework of Ur-Fascism, what is "Ur"? you ask...good question. 

"Ur" is a prefix defined by Cambridge dictionary as 'original or earliest' and Umberto's essay is not a long read, it probably even went viral among many of the people, my own people in some sense in standing against racism, bigotry, theocracy, nationalism, nativism etc. and very other to me, by virtue of their illiberalism.

So let's begin the framework, before getting into the detail.

We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

The premise of Umberto Eco's piece doesn't come at the beginning, the piece though is intended as a prophylactic:  

In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.

This is where the Ur-Fascism or "Original fascism" is coming in, how I would translate it, is pointing to what I feel, is the very real risk that if fascists aren't a bunch of white Europeans in black or brown shirts, with armbands adorned with a Swastika, how will we recognise them?

Many of my cohort, who when presented with the unfathomable moment of the second plain hitting the second tower on news broadcasts, faced with the responsibility to try and understand would reveal that they didn't understand and found a kind of workable plurality that quickly forgave them trying. I can safely reveal that I do not understand the world we live in, but so many declined to even try. 

They had firm footing in taking to the streets and protesting the Iraq war, I was there, I still remember a CFMEU worker in his hard hat at the big anti-invasion protest in Melbourne dancing through the crowds in steel capped boots shouting "yeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh blow up Parliament bring on AnARChy!" in a profoundly unserious way. I remember the speaker who lost the crowd by trying to pivot the purpose of the speechmaking to campaign for student union membership.

All these people, including myself, acting out 'cultural habits' 'obscure instincts' and 'unfathomable drives' had firm ground in opposing the incompetence of the leadership of the response to nine eleven. On those grounds alone, we were safely on the right side of history, that Iraq would be an unmitigated disaster was obvious and painfully so.

But a decade later, that ground was gone, trying not to understand would first bring left-wing naive optimism, with Obama literally campaigning on "hope" and the viciously misleading "change we can believe in" which was not the change anybody wanted. That burst in 2009 with the GFC, that the Obama administration literally fucked up the response to as gravely as Bush fucked up the moment that was September 11. That as a continuum of a base trying not to understand was about to bloom into left-wing illiberalism.

1	2	3	4
abc	bcd	cde	def

Eco uses the above table to set up Ur-Fascism further:

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

In the rest of this post, I am going to assert that 1 'abc' is in effect 'the left' and 4 'def' is in effect 'the right' and point out the family resemblances that so characterise our collective failure.

I have been discombobulated for over a decade, immersed in the illiberal left, but alienated also by their reactionaries, who by-and-large strike me as closeted far-right, timid cowards unable to push past their cognitive dissonance and say the racist thing so they can be disabused of their popularism. 

Polarisation has given people with their cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives, space enough to resemble each other to a degree I find shocking, and when I told a friend that I felt David Pakman and Alex Jones were basically the same, he was shocked too. Of course one is left-wing and the other is alt-right. Of course one is much worse than the other. 

But I was pointing out, both had appointed themselves news anchors, and journalists, and possessed few qualifications beyond enthusiasm, the were both activist faux-news programs in the way that Oxfords and Volleys are both ultimately footwear.

Freedom from Rhetoric

 I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

Let me give the concrete example: "Super straight" a short video published for better or worse by (I presume) a teenage boy on TikTok, who says he is inventing a new sexuality he can declare himself that is "super straight" and that means he is only attracted to people assigned female at birth, in the parlance of the time (though he uses the term "born a woman").

Why would a teenage boy make such a video? Probably because he was struggling with rhetoric. The video itself is quite contextless, so I can only imagine he could be acting upon hearsay upon hearsay of some discussion where someone argued, that if a guy is heterosexual then he likes women, trans women being women, he therefore likes trans women, if he has a preference for cis women and against trans women then that is transphobic.

In two paragraphs, there is so much rhetoric to unpack, that the blog post could get out of hand. This was a single meme 5 years ago, between 5 years ago and here, I never met anyone who ever identified as super straight or even discusses their sexuality, I haven't been to dinner parties that debate trans etc. I know more people who have had gender reveal parties than use the term 'gender assigned at birth' etc.

Intellectually, this doesn't justify constructing a new sexuality exclusive of trans women. Heterosexuality has never meant that a guy is attracted to all women, it typically simply indicates an attraction to no men. Keeping in mind, this is a teenage boy trying to navigate his own life, either he believed or directly experienced (both are plausible speculations) that a social order was emerging where inclusion/exclusion was putting pressure upon him, via rhetoric, to date trans women or pretend openness to it to avoid being labelled 'transphobic' as though there were an appropriation of the movie trope where two people pretending to be a couple are made to kiss like they are in love in front of witnesses, and now teenage boys are being badgered into 'proving' they are heterosexual or not transphobic by kissing a trans woman.

Likely what was taking place, was two teenage douchebags had an argument, and a kid made a TikTok of it, overconfident.

I am not anti-rhetoric per se, it has its place, deserves its respect and is a whetstone that can keep an earnest pursuit of truth sharp. 

Eco's statement that freedom of speech means freedom of rhetoric is not so easy to parse. He could mean it in the same sense as swimming in an indoor pool at an aquatic complex might make one realise that "freestyle swimming means freedom from great white sharks." As in: a world without rhetoric. 

But I think freedom of speech by necessity means there has to be a safe haven from a world of pure rhetoric, a public domain, a world of facts that can be debated and discovered. 

A right to clarity in the domain of communicating ideas and opinions, and sincerity when communicating emotions.

I have given one concrete example, of the rhetorical soup that was the air breathed by the illiberal-left, the rest I will just appeal to memes of the woke - platforming, deplatforming, call-out-culture, emotional labour, privilege, intersectionality, equity, cancel culture etc. etc. Whatever scholarly foundations these concepts have, the great mass of left-wing people, young people didn't know those foundations, could not argue them, it was received wisdom touted for status and that was a mistake. 

Contemporary to these memes, thanks to the sheer volume of internet, there were many commentators much better and more sober than I, breaking down and analysing the incoherent rhetoric that literally if taken seriously would most likely be met with "it's not my job to educate you." 

This was a massive mistake of overconfidence, often invoking another incoherent meme "the right/wrong side of history" based on the first chapter - the Iraq invasion, itself based on rhetoric as the absence of WMDs established, to lead people by 2014 to opt for affiliative righteousness on the left, rather than a founded, coherent, clear and principled position.

In fact and practice, all those latter adjectives were actively defended against, via what Greg Lukianoff describes as "the perfect rhetorical fortress" and so against the spirit of rhetoric let me be clear.

My reflection is, that if you are for future societies being less characterised by caste, bigotry, prejudice, hate and subsequent violence, and more characterised by equity, inclusiveness, diversity, justice, opportunity, creativity and subsequent flourishing then this embrace of rhetoric was a mistake.

1. Cult of Tradition

The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages — in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. 

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

 So much to unpack, in this looong excerpt from Eco's first feature, and I'd hoped to grab less. However as a reflective exercise I think it does manage to not only convery an aspect of "Ur" as "original" but brilliantly highlights how difficult it is, I imagine, for most people to find something in common between being a "progressive" in 2014 terms, and being a cult of tradition.

How can the side that campaigns for same-sex marriage, and progresses to "marriage equality", transitions seamlessly, tirelessly to trans-rights, whose elders were veterens of the first global protests against a war before it broke out (Iraq) considerable progress from the Vietnam/American war etc. etc. a "cult of tradition"?

Well, the trap is Orwellian, for those who've never read 1984 because they heard Brave New World is 'better' or some shit:

“Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs."

2010s progressivism, was an anti-enlightenment movement, insofar as it was organised and coordinated at all. Let me give a concrete example: "trigger warning" was a sufficiently visible phenomena that one of the enduring anti-woke podcasts named itself "Triggernometry" and their tagline which they tellingly abandoned "where we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts" was an appeal to enlightenment values. (Replaced again tellingly, with "honest conversations with fascinating people" abandoning not only a restrictive requirement that guests have expertise, but the self-imposed restraint of not pretending to be experts which co-host Constantin probably considers his main occupation now).

Trigger warnings were a meme my friends appended to posts, later becoming "content warnings" or simply "tw" or "cw" and it was usually the prefix on a social media post to a shared op-ed aka rhetoric, about self-harm, sexual assault, suicide, suicidal ideation, child abuse etc. etc. 

Returning to Eco's feature, trigger warnings were an emergent meme that had no evidentiary basis, a superstition. The psychology and neuroscience was in - trigger warnings become secondary triggers as people begin to not only 'activate' physiological states like panic attacks when exposed to the content - the trigger, but activate when exposed to trigger warnings themselves, they diminish people's capacity and increase the burden of their recovery.

They existed, for some time, and residually still do in some cultural cul de sacs, as a folk wisdom, a received wisdom. Usage likely was mostly engaged as a form of social signalling of both tribal affiliation and social status, however they also explicitly signalled a commitment to not understanding. 

What can also be observed in the concrete example of trigger warnings is that transative resemblance of 'abc' to 'def' for in the left wing 'abc' we can see lesbian feminists using trigger warnings and content warnings to 'protect their women' from the violent males of the outgroup, and over on the far right 'def' we can see white christian nationalists obsessing over 'illegals' and segregated bathrooms to 'protect their women' from the violent 'males' of the outgroup.

And this is a common fascist tactic, using empathy and sympathy with victims of crime and violence to drum up a chauvinistic ingroup fervour to purge their territory of enemies within and without.

Trigger warnings required a rejection of evidence, it was a revealed wisdom, intuitive, literally a custom a tradition that emerged that was defended vigorously without argument because it was incoherent.

There were greater but less visible memes beloved of the regressive and illiberal left in this time, who once insulted by Bush's administration, and twice by Obama's response to the GFC, embraced this death spiral and these were "other ways of knowing" which persists residually in the academy regarding indigenous advocacy, and "privilege preserving epistemic pushback" my favourite absurdity but unfortunately the most obscure of the left wing memetic excesses - which disparaged using sound epistemologies to invalidate misinformation and disinformation in the service of social justice.

The left's regression to a cult of tradition, I feel was understandably born of impatience, since the 1960s Star Trek had shown us what the future should look like - diverse, post-scarcity, integrated - the left became a body that had all the answers, but did not have the time to justify them. 

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

2. The Rejection of Modernism

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism...The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. 

Umberto Eco's book "Name of the Rose" is an absolute banger, easily one of the best books I've ever read and it is a postmodern text, intertextual for sure, its protagonist William of Occam and his sidekick Adso are Holmes and Watson in medieval monk form, it does not follow a heroes journey, it is a book about a book, tropes are deconstructed, there is a whole chapter about a dream that is just a painting or a poem reinterpreted, even the title of the novel itself was chosen to be a completely neutral title.

In the domain of arts and entertainment, I am thrilled to be living in the postmodern era. How much it would have sucked to be alive when the most popular music genre of my ancestors was marching band music, or the art world moved rigidly through schools and when it was stuck on the Academic school that the impressionists eventually rebelled against with their Salon.

However, to move to a concrete example - the pay gap, the pay gap was prosecuted disastrously. Now I have to be careful here - the pay gap is a real phenomena, so the word doing the work in the proceeding sentence is 'prosecuted' a real phenomena was prosecuted as a social justice issue under the auspices of irrationalism by people on the left trying not to understand.

One of the most bizarre applications, was the gender pay gap as a synonym for patriarchy. 

In 2025 I was interviewed for a job and asked about my salary expectations, we went through a haggling process for me to be offered the same pay as another man who had the same job as I was applying for, furthermore our wage was the award wage for that profession across the industry.

The fact that this is asked is simply confusing to me, and as an Australian it has long confused me that career coaches etc. train people how to answer 'the salary question' in job interviews, I was told the correct answer was 'market rates' which indeed, is what I got, but I was also warned that some interviewers would insist on a number.

A little later in 2025, I finally learned that up until recently in the US it was not required that employers advertise a salary range, and some conservative employers were so incensed with the new legal requirements they passively aggressively posted meaningless ranges like "10k-800k" presumably so their recruiters could still do this dance. I listened to a podcast on how to answer the "what is your minimum required salary expectations?" 

So this was the context which, in 2009 or whatever I first started hearing about the pay gap, as it became part of the zeitgeist, I didn't deny it, I accepted it, but was rationally confused as to how women could be paid 80c for every $1 a man earned.

Job ads in Australia have, for my entire working life, included the salary on offer, I knew from my experience as a male, I was not offered and never have been offered a 20% premium on the advertised salary for being a male. Nor do I feel it is legal for women to be offered a 20% discount on salary for being female.

The gap then, had to arise over the course of a career - through payrises and gender disparities in time off like maternity leave. It didn't occur to me, nor appeal to my sense of justice, that one might compare a female realtor with a male actuary. I can recall when I first learned of the profession 'actuary' in a VTAC guide, then a small directory handed to secondary students detailing all the jobs, the qualifications that lead to those jobs and the expected starting salary. We could use those guides to figure out that if we wanted to be a marine biologist, we needed to study Marine biology at so-and-so university that had a prerequisite of a study score of 25 in English (a pass) or equivalent. Nothing there said an actuary or aerospace engineer had a prerequisite of dick and balls.

In other words, because I don't want to write a post about the pay gap, you have to try and understand the pay gap, and many of its fiercest advocates of the past 25 years prosecuted it without understanding it. Becoming incensed and outraged over a easily digested, but entirely contextless statistic like "80c for every $1 a man is paid."

One of the earliest rhetorical slaps I got, was from one of, if not the most intelligent feminist friend I've ever had, my go to for understanding that which I don't, however even she employed the pay gap as a non-sequitur (a fallacy where one thing does not follow from the other, they are unrelated) where I had cited an example of positive discrimination, an op-ed where a westerner who wears a hijab was comparing the discriminatory cost in the form of jeers and harassment, with discriminatory benefits like Muslim taxi-drivers refusing her paying a cab fare. My friend who was not, and as far as I know, is not a convert to Islam nor wearer of a hijab argued that "as a woman I am only paid 80c for every dollar a man earns, so if I'm offered a free cab fare I'm taking it" in the moment it impressed me, but in that nagging way the non-sequitur unravelled later, unravels even now - as Cory Doctorow a rational leftist, truly anti-fascist has said in recent interviews about "AI" taking jobs "nobody has ever said the words 'as rich as a taxi driver'" 

I was (trying) to make a point, that if you want to get rid of outgroup discrimination, you are probably going to have to sacrifice ingroup discrimination like it is just rationally impossible to maintain the benefits of your ingroup and eliminate the costs imposed by the outgroup, you just degroup, to say nothing of the right to freedom of expression that involves freely choosing to wear a headscarf.

The non-sequitur likely becomes more obvious when you say "I was paid 80c for every $1 a man earns, so I defrauded an old male pensioner whom I've never met of $20,000" no, that's not restorative justice it is as close to entirely unrelated to the structure that caused that pay gap as is likely possible.

The bigger picture, that was the failing of the left and the fascist family resemblance, was to take an idea I don't quite know the providence of, but certainly an example might by Michel Foucalt's "Madness and Civilization" particularly regarding the Modern era treatment of the mentally ill, and one of Foucalt's concepts was "powerknowledge" a concept that became resisted by the left particularly in the 2010s essentially being interpreted as the rational restrictions that prevent the marginalised from arriving at the conclusions they desire, a source of friction that impedes progress.

I would distinguish this from the works of for example the feminist school of economics, of which I am not only a fan but a beneficiary of where the use of sound epistemology is a source of friction that creates traction for progress - where we can observe how wicked the problem of the gender pay gap is, where for example - as a profession becomes more populated by males it becomes more prestigious and better compensated (like computer programming, which was originally women's work see "Hidden Figures") and the opposite occurs when a profession becomes more populated by women, losing prestige and compensation suggesting a reverse causation.

But the rationality was largely shoved aside for irrationality, the left abandoned argument, even description and definition in favour of assertion and asserting very abstract ideas like patriarchy and equivocating very passive unconscious processes like 'systemic racism' with very active conscious phenomena like 'overt racism.'

This was a mistake, almost a full decade of the left parroting elite academic jargon for no visible benefit to the causes it served, and becoming indignant if asked to rationalise their assertions in anyway.

Last year I did night school in Political Economy, the introductory course covered a new school of economics every week (including old ones) and in an almost perfect example of the need for feminist economics, only the feminist economics tutorial was burdened by a 30 minute debate (instigated by a woman who objected to a slide in the lecture that week dedicated to defining gender) on the definition of a woman, meaning the school that examines the economy through a feminist lens has a distinct 'culture war' tax of identity politics that the Austrian school, the Marxist school, the Georgist school, the Neoclassical school does not.

3. The cult of action for actions sake

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake...Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism...The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Taking a moment to appreciate that Eco's features build one atop another, while doing the hard work of describing something that is by its nature incoherent and inconsistent. 

We can of course see this intellectualism in the Trump brand of anti-intellectual military interventionism in his pointless war of choice against Iran. Literal action for action's sake that was pushed through, not around, over or under critical attitudes.

Here the resemblance between far-left and far-right is much clearer than 'abc' and 'def' it is more like 'abc' and 'cba'.

Another word doing a lot of heavy lifting is "modern" in Eco's excerpt, this is the part that is easy for "progressives" to miss. Left-wing Ur-fascist intellectuals also mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed _____ values. I expurgated 'traditional' here because I think, even with the previous section focused on how Eco describes traditionalism, I feel the neuron fusion in most people's brains pictures Stepford wives when they read traditional. 

So in an Australian context, the best concrete example of this would be "acknowledgement of Country" statements, known more globally (as an Australian export) as "land acknowledgements" where at the top of a gathering a chair or speaker will kick off proceedings by reading a statement acknowledging that the land we gather on is the traditional Country of the x people, that sovereignty was never ceded and we respectfully acknowledge the elders past, present and emerging. 

The wording often varies, who you acknowledge depends on where you are obviously, this is a campaign actioned with much success. Admitting the limits of my own availability heuristic, 99% of the time I as an Australian citizen experience an acknowledgement of country, it is in a room full of non-indigenous colonizers and immigrants to the colony under the authority of the colony. 

I mostly experience this action now, as a kind of collective cognitive dissonance, hard to reconcile with the 2023 failure of the "Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Voice to Parliament" referendum, one of the most resounding failures of the left in the last 25 years, with the Yes23 campaign outspending what could charitably be called a 'No' campaign something like 10:1, and though I live in an electorate that voted some 60% in favour of the referendum, conferring with friends that lived in electorates where the vote failed (the vast majority of electorates) the consensus was that the No campaign was a rounding error, excluding (which should not be understated) Australia's right wing media.

That referendum is objective, very well documented data from a free and fair voting process. There are however other causal explanations, a large one being the withdrawal of bipartisan support by the opposition party after the referendum date had already been set, that coincided with support collapsing in the polls.

I will now turn subjective, and you should be aware of that, and I will also only disclose my personal experience. In my lifetime pre-9/11 there was much action taken that raised my awareness of Indigenous peoples that likely more broadly explain the support for reconciliation and treaty among my generation. Triple-J the then peaking national youth radio public broadcaster celebrated Naidoc week, Yothu Yindi won an ARIA award for their anthem "Treaty", Kevin Sheedy then coach of Essendon was long a supporter and promoter of indigenous athletes in the AFL pretty much the state religion growing up. A petition for reconciliation was circulated in my school, and I remember signing it with the comment "there's nothing stopping us" to which my History teacher who had shown me the excellent and publicly funded "Babakiueria" mocumentary where the colonization was reveresed commented that my comment was "exactly right" this was something that was present in my education and in youth culture, and likely a movement that had been snowballing since the Whitlam government finally made it legal for an Aboriginal woman to own her own home in the the 1970s. Finally gaining the full property rights of every other adult in Australia's legal system.

At some point the action of "acknowledgement of country" no doubt also contributed to raising awareness, and I can say it was likely in the post 9-11 past 25 years that many Australians through this action and others, learned the name of the indigenous group that had traditionally lived in the lands now colonised. For example, I know that I am currently residing on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri, however I could not tell you off the top of my head, whose lands my hometown was on, because it wasn't a done thing before I left there.

However, the action has in my direct personal experience, long transitioned from raising awareness of whose lands I occupy, and instead served to raise my awareness and constantly remind me that none of the current occupants of the land are particularly serious about reconciliation or treaty, including the leaders of the Yes campaign sincere in their emotion, yes, but not serious in their approach. I think institutions and the individuals charged with the acknowledgement of country would like to be, with all sincerity, but acknowledgements of country are about as emotive as confirming the minutes of last meeting.

It would however now, not only be taboo, but a disciplinary issue in many contexts to omit the acknowledgement of country. Even as it plausibly does most of the action in fostering resentment of people subjected to a gesture hollowed out by repetition, by unserious people.

Where confusion can set in, I have seen this action devolve into a more Ur-fascist traditionalist action of saluting a hat on a pole, or a flag, or bowing to a statue. For example, I have been at an event where a scheduled, official acknowledgement of country was performed, then the next presenter established a precedent by also reading an acknowledgement of country, causing a cascading farce where each presenter fears to be the only one to omit an acknowledgement of country. A musician friend of mine, reported to me (so hearsay) they had heard of such an event in the arts scene and compared it to where nobody wants to be the first to stop clapping, (this was actually an anecdote made famous by Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago" about Stalin's 10-15 minute standing ovations) now nobody is being sent to a gulag however, event organisers may need to implement a kindred solution to Stalin's USSR whom installed a light to indicate when the audience was permitted to stop clapping - making the acknowledgement of country proceedings very well defined for an event.

Action for actions sake here, in this context is the mental laziness of more = better, the infinite recourse to lack of commitment. What I feel qualifies it as an example of left-wing action-for-actions-sake is that this consciousness raising ritual expanded out of a concentrated period like NAIDOC week/month or special formal events like school commencements, graduations, opening of parliament, annual general meetings etc. to meetings of four people to discuss the budget of stocking the break room with biscuits and coffee pods on Zoom, and began appearing in email signatures to declare the digital data originated from x Country.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.

For my ATSI friends, I feel almost compelled to report to them, that in their absence, Acknowledgement of Country has become a mindless, thoughtless action taken without any reflection, apart from those who grow to hate it. where they are prolix, most presenters speedrun them for any%. I for the record, do not hate it, though the pedant in me gets annoyed by the concept of 'emerging elders' I have not unpacked for myself yet, but something to do with letting elders get old first, and if not old, at least senior - otherwise it's like Marty asking me to pay respects to his elder status and I can be like "I paid my respects 20 years ago" but I digress.

What I do hate, is the Ur-fascist action for actions sake that surrounds the acknowledgement of Country, such that I could get in real trouble if I suggested that it would be more meaningful if done less, and where I was not reportable to HR I anticipate people squirming at the optics of walking the repetition back knowing that bad actors will seize upon it to denounce them.

More broadly than the concrete example, is the pervasive uptick in Activism post 9-11, beginning with the global protests against the Iraq war and President Bush, Occupy wall street, BLM and the George Floyd protests. With the exception of Occupy wall street, in the past 25 years I've noticed a distinct migration of protests from productive-to-counter-productive going from ignored by leaders like Bush, Blair and Howard to now serving as propaganda grist for right-wing media as activists become increasingly active before AND without any previous reflection. 

Again, the difficulty being that Left-wing Fascism is a contradiction in terms, but Left-wing Ur-Fascism is not, and "emasculation" being inappropriate to the illiberal left, we lack the gender neutral equivalent to the disdain and hostility towards defending actions taken.

4. Can't withstand analytical criticism

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

As one of the shortest features of Ur-Fascism Eco reflects upon, I have copied the fourth characteristic in its entirety and feel it barely needs an example.

This light sub-section then, is maybe a good time to pause and reflect on Eco's thesis in Ur-Fascism:

behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.

If Fascism was/is bad, it's because it is a terrible regime to live under. In this sense, fire cannot be fought with fire, or rather the left cannot (and did not) fight the rise of fascism by behaving like fascists.

The rise in anti-woke podcasts, and their success from Joe Rogan to Triggernometry to the Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic, all of which are themselves worthy of, and recipients of analytical criticism, I nevertheless feel are in whole or part explainable as a symptom of it simply being unsafe to embody the critical spirit for most people during the 2010s, with wokeness never polling as popular, in any demographic it was nevertheless intimidating and I suspect many people completely alienated by it sought out these podcasts just like the resistance to fascism sought out British and French resistance radio transmissions - shit as all my cited podcasts are, I can testify to the medicinal value of being able to tune in and simply not feel alone in an insane world for a little while. 

Ironically, one of the most common rhetorical strategies of the illiberal-left, a meme-widespread for dogwhistling treason was "this conversation is making me feel unsafe" or more often "I'm uncomfortable with this conversation" immediately after 9-11 the book promotion event was an atheist vs a theist debate, populating Youtube in the phenomenon known as "New Atheism" a term I still would criticize as Atheism is older than Christianity and probably prehistoric being that its a conclusion that can spontaneously crop up in any human mind anywhere due to a lack of reliance on scripture and transmission. 

More recently, debate has resurged and expanded beyond atheism vs theists (though this was maintained as a livelihood by figures like Matt Dillahunty through the interregnum because people who actually live in Christian communities, still very much need it "New Atheism" was mostly a reaction to 9-11 by the secular global community who were shocked to learn that people still took religion seriously) with Jubilee, and personalities like Destiny and Adam Mockler and such, the left is becoming more liberal and reprogressing back from the regress of cancel culture and deplatforming.

Perhaps a concrete example is the rhetorical tactic of affixing the prefix "internalised" to an "ism" or "phobia" an example of which being Coleman Hughes, who testified to a senate committee or congress as a black man, against reparations for Slavery and Jim Crow, in contraposition to Ta Nahesi Coates.

Coleman's criticism was analytical, and conceivably an argument for reparations can withstand such a criticism, but not the illiberal-left, who while having rhetorical memes like "lived experience" "my/your truth" "alternative ways of knowing" "standpoint theory" etc. where the ability to speak with authority is conferred by immutable characteristics (in contrast say to an earlier debate on reparations between the White and English Christopher Hitchens arguing for reparations, and the Black Neo-Classical economist from the hood Glenn Lowry against reparations) but only insofar as the tradition is upheld, if someone like Coleman Hughes is black and against reparations, then his differing opinion simply confirms he has "internalised white supremacy" he was/is a race traitor, and I recall from the time, black youtubers calling Coleman "C**nman." 

Coleman has gone on to produce very crappy content post Oct 7th and I believe is at this point an employee of Barry Weiss, Zionist non-journalist charged with running CBS news into the ground.

What was revealed to me post 9-11 and confrontingly quickly, was that most of my friends would be horrified to learn they are racists even to this day. Of course, this varies on your definition. And many of my racists friends would under safe conditions label themselves racist as part of 'doing the work' but would not understand themselves to be racist in the terms of Said's Orientalism, a fundamental inequity in having double standards for the outgroup, indeed what became discomfort in 2002-3 for most lefty's my affinity group, was outright hostility to 'colorblindness' by the mid 2010s.

"If you don't see my blackness you don't see me." ~ The Hate U Give (2018)

I recommend the film by the way, it is much more nuanced than a fragile anti-woke snowflake might fear, for example that line is followed up by the white Chris assuring Starr "hey, I see you" and Chris' delivery is allowed to be sincere. And again, most on the illiberal left, by 2018, certainly 2020 didn't understand colorblindness and couldn't because that Ur-fascism had closed off analytic criticism. Thinking was intolerable, treason. 

5. Disagreement is a sign of diversity

Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Boy not even really a segue, I feel the end of the last section already made the point, most of my illiberal-left friends who failed to resist Bush, Howard and Blair, then wall street and Trump, Johnson, and too many conservative loser PMs in Australia to name, fun though nicknames like ScoMo and Dickhead are, are racist but the pungent irony being that the left-wing racism was entirely founded on a failure to understand racism in the first place.

Hence like I make no bones, the most difficult thing for me in those 25 years, was watching the left resurrect racism. 

Realising, the Ur-fascist revulsion at self-reflection, let me go all parable. There's an episode of sitcom "My Name Is Earl" where Earl seeks to make amends for ruining his dad's political campaign years ago. To make it up to him, he registers him as a candidate for a forthcoming election, and surprises him with a news crew to announce his (involuntary) candidacy, which makes his dad irate and he ends up exclaiming on local TV "I only ran because I wanted to change the flight routes so we didn't have to hear the planes overhead all the time but we all got used to it!" causing everyone to become conscious of the airline noise again and resurrecting his campaign.

I will not deny the statistical realities of inequities along the construct of race. I even believe in the strategy of an equitable society. At the operational level though, the left-failed. It adopted an approach likely as a response to the emergent fascism/nativism of Trump's MAGA base in 2016 - itself a symptom of the failed GFC response that was a continuation of an ideology that transcends race, what the left embraced from Crenshaw, Coates, Di Angelo and Kendi was the equivalent of what I used to do as a teenager which was ask perfectly calm people minding their own business why they were upset and angry, persistently, repetitively, intrusively until they became angry and upset at the constant insistence.

Suicidally, the illiberal-left assigned allies to the vision to the opposition. The first move was the appeal against intruders. 

What's also hard though, above and beyond the left's ability to reckon with it's own racism, is how a group so strongly associated with a meme like "DEI" can seek consensus and reject diversity. 

In 2023  Antoinette Lattouf was dismissed by the ABC over a social media post that accussed Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war in the Gaza Strip. The dismissal was the result of extensive lobbying against the national broadcaster and Lattouf would eventually win substantial compensation in her unfair dismissal case.

Around the time it was getting coverage in 2024, out of curiosity I watched Lattouf's TEDx Sydney talk where she advocates for diversity and inclusion, citing a recent Delloitte study, I am struggling to track down that study that I found at the time, Lattouf's presentation slide doesn't reference the source, but in the past I had - importantly the Delloitte report specified 'divirsity of thought' that likely positively correlates with ethnic diversity, but it is an important equivocation to confuse demographic diversity with psychographic diversity. 

(I think it is also worth noting, that Lattouf's quoted statistic 35% shows up earliest in a report by McKinsey management consulting, which is like quoting the old testament to argue for marriage equality. I believe this statistic is now suspected to be 'dubious')

The Ur-fascism of the left, was colorblind, something it has over the nativist, nationalist fascist right that is now an obtuse reality of 2026, is that anybody can join the Ur-fascist left movement provided they adhere to the consensus and help enforce it.

And fuck, I saw men attack women for posting videos by Jordan Peterson, white people attack people of colour for dissenting on woke (albeit, more covertly) for a while there it was really bad, particularly shunning and ostracism.

And for all the passion, all the vitriol we have, the Ur-fascist left has collapsed, and has left us with its fascist opposition, a very real reality. And this intolerance of dissent and disagreement was just manifest trying not to understand.

6. Social Frustration

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.

The frustration of the middle class has been underway since the 80s. Yes, in economic terms, the 80s truly was peak before the economic project shifted to a return to feudalism. Ironically the book held up by Margaret Thatcher when she stated "this is what we believe" was titled "The Road To Serfdom" - 9-11 however, for many was a moment of explicit impotence and not in the sense of phallic objects destroying phallic objects, but disempowerment.

The likely dilemma of the human condition, is that you can't fortify and live your life. But the past 25 years have gone beyond that, in the present moment for example, many are concerned with the threat of "AI" failing to take any consolation that "AI" is a money burning machine and to contextualise it in the long string of failures silicon valley has produced since cloud computing maybe 14 years ago now.

Similarly, mighty though the US military is, many fail to contextualise it in its almost complete lack of successful campaigns post WWII - Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu was a contemporary of George W Bush and as the "great survivor" and has not fundamentally changed in the last 25 years, reinforcing the middle class impotence of the reponse to war on terror. 

In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

The middle class, the petty bourgeois, do not go to war, and with some justification - historical state vs state war is not the way to fight terrorism, terrorism is a police matter. But from September 11, 2001 thru October 7th, 2023 unto now, the middle class have had to watch impotently, frustratedly as those with ultimate responsibility enter a symbiotic relationship with terrorists.

I am obsessed with an idea, that very often you do not even have to injure someone merely insult them and they will destroy themselves, if they do not have control of themselves.

My feed on youtube is currently showing me the thumbnail for a video stating "Deplatforming works, you cowards" by Carlos Maza which I will not link because I have not watched it, maybe in a few days. I mean I don't disagree that deplatforming works, but the "You Cowards" I feel can be reasonably construed as Ur-fascist, the aforementioned "thinking is emasculating" sentiment, described by Eco.

My feed also on the same day, today, was filled with posts about Ed Sheeran kicking Macklemore off his US stadium tour under pressure from the Pro-Israel owner of the NE Patriot's campaign to have Macklemore removed, and other examples including Susan Sarandon being dropped from her label, pressure placed on Mark Ruffalo by Paramount studios, Bella Hadid, Javier Bardem, Kneebone, Australian national treasure Mary Kostakidas etc. etc. are all subject to deplatforming campaigns.

Keeping in mind that I am disagreeing with the thumbnail, not the video, the thumbnail depicts as examples Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and some other guy I don't recognise, I'd throw Charlie Kirk who was not deplatformed but assassinated as another example of the effectiveness of silencing people as in the year since his death, nobody has really replaced Kirk, just as nobody has ever really popped up to replace Abraham Lincoln or Steve Jobs. Public figures are not as redundant as you might assume.

Yeah it "works" but Jones and Tate while they were deplatformed, I think the bigger factor is the due process exerted by the court of law - Tate being arrested and Jones being sued out of Infowars.

The problem with any paralegal deplatforming - action for actions sake is that you end up with some variation of Ur-fascism, and its bad because it is unstable and inhumane. I don't know much about Mussolini's Fascist Italy, but the Nazi regime deplatformed like there was no tomorrow, and it "worked" a consensus was enforced, but everything I've seen from analysis by historians is that the great majority of German citizens were non-ideological the foundation for the nation they became post-war which nobody had to worry about until relatively recently.

7. Obsession with a plot

Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country...Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.

Here again, I feel the particularly worrisome aspect of the illiberal left is its blind-spots. Hence my belaboured reflection - my social environment is mostly composed of meritocratic elites, though not exclusively. I feel they are less sensitive to the fact that their political views can be greatly explained by where and when they were born. 

Every election we get this fact shown to us on maps - people who live here vote this way, people who live there vote that way. Few absorb the scary implication however that if they were born the child of American Christian Nationalists, they would likely be Christian Nationalists. 

Concrete examples abound for the illiberal-lefts obsession with plots: Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Zionism, though this has to be tempered with an appreciation of the employment of Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical strategies - best examples being the "systemic" prefix, which describe an institutional means by which marginalisation and oppression happen without conspirators needing to be present, but the passion with which the systemic-oppression is denounced betrays a likely equivocation with an actual plot.

Research what patriarchy is, and you find something highly disorganised, boys and men seem to spontaneously talk over women with confidence and dominate physical spaces.

Linguist John McWhorter, to many a race-traitor, proposed a simple substition diagnostic with cancel culture - simply sub out the accusation for "witch" deplatforming and cancel culture were absolutely paralegal witch hunt compains obsessing over the enemy withing - again high profile right wing figures that were "cancelled" like Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, eventually Tucker Carson were cancelled on the strength of legal cases with due process - something we would more accurately describe as being fired, but being firmly in the bosom of the far-right O'Reilly and Carlson at least, are doing fine financially without Fox, Ailes was old enough to retire anyway.

By contrast, cancel culture was much more concerning if you were inside the left, if you were an academic and an ally, it seems you were much more likely to be unfairly dismissed, and though legal battles could be won, you could never really work again and too often were assigned to the welcoming bosom of the far-right.

Unlike fascism, which asserts that the nation exists in the blood of the people - the true people, the left's failure to resist the rise of fascism, being Ur-fascist, was a failure to recognise that their support of marriage equality, multiculturalism, feminism etc. was too often received wisdom not earned wisdom. Hence the illiberalism, the number of left wing people who revealed by deed that they do not understand John Stuart Mill.

Recently a guest on the daily show made the analogy of the legal argument for overturning some race protection legislation as arguing that an umbrella isn't necessary because we are dry.

Moral progress came from understanding, socio-economic progress as a subsequent does too. Many people are simply born into freedom, born dry and don't understand the work the umbrella did to get us here - which was the ability to assemble and to speak.

By deed, far too many of my cohort on the left, misunderstand freedom of speech to be the freedom to say good things, but to offend or even discomfort and disquiet is going too far. Freedom of speech is your freedom to be offended.

8. the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

And here explicitly Eco gives a reason for the failure of fighting emergent fascism with Ur-fascism via the illiberal left. 

In 2007 I was hanging around a Veronese guy called Marco, an entertaining guy that would crop up randomly on a train my sister was taking in Spain. He talked about how Berlesconi was an immortal vampire who would not die. The Ur-Trump or one of them as many pointed out that Trumpian figures were all over Europe, but Berlesconi was one of the first to enjoy electorial success.

In the same way, Trump is discussed by the left as a demented, decaying bloated walking corpse. I have some sympathy with this view, however I do also see it as the "too weak" part of Eco's equation. 

My subjective evaluation of the force of the fascist 2nd term regime of Trump would be akin to Taleb's "a restaurant is fragile, but restaurants are anti-fragile" to say that the Republican party is a coalition of the weak and the stupid that isn't antifragile, but somewhat robust. I think it is an institution, a cult of personality that can, and has, succeeded to power, but that it can't, and doesn't perform.

But another concrete example is the meme of the "mediocre white man" which I'm under no illusion that the world of superordinate workers is filthy with male mediocrity. However, subordinate workers are also filthy with mediocrity, such that many a radical feminist in my experience simultaneously overestimates the social good (as distinct from impact) of replacing mediocre men with mediocre women, and underestimates the difficulty of the dismantling project by neglecting the instances of non-mediocre men aka competent position holders that keep the whole patriarchy going, systemically speaking who are themselves not necessarily sexist.

Patriarchy, of which Trump could be considered an avatar becomes this almighty oppressive force of bumbling idiots. I can see why, but it is also a condition of Eco's Ur-fascism, and a condition of the illiberal left.

9. pacifism is trafficking with the enemy

At this point, Eco's 9th, I want to take an opportunity to flag that by looking at Eco's essay and using the illiberal-left that has arisen in ineffectual resistance to the largesse of the populist-right in the wake of 9-11, that Ur-Fascism, as a construct is overdetermined in my view.

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.

This Ur-Fascist sentiment I can immediately recognize in the writing of Ibram X Kendi, a restating of Mussolini's "you're either with us or against us" bogus dilemma, repeated by most of histories losers, up to George W Bush:

“The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.” ~ Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

A concrete example might be what Belgian historian Anton Jäger calls "Hyperpolitics" doing a history of the mid-2010s upto publication at 2023, publishing before the 2024 US presidential election that I feel has had the largest chilling effect on identity politics.

I haven't read Hyperpolitics, but based on the synopsis, it certainly covers the 'life is lived for struggle' sentiment in a neologism, where a barista screwing up your coffee order becomes part of the hyperextended omnifront war it is incumbent on every individual to battle.

Where instead of fighting the ruling world order, intersectionality permitted infinite sectarian discourse within political movements so we could fight among ourselves.

I have perhaps, even oft, in posts compared intersectionality to the logic puzzle "the pirates game" whereby a crew of rational pirates inevitably wind up voting for the captain to keep 98 per cent or so of the loot, because the crew rationally screw themselves over.

A concrete example I have shared before was a photo I took where a feminist activist of ambiguous trans inclusivity put up some posters around Smith St Fitzroy, a suburb in Melbourne where people frequent to come all over their own faces in full view of the truly marginalized and vestigial working class. The poster made some point about a woman working all day to come home to do the "second shift" of unpaid domestic labour and be rewarded by their husband with orgasmless sex or something, genuinely an unenviable and I'm sure, statistically substantial lifestyle, and somebody had then come along to deface the defacing posters with "trans exclusionary feminism is blah blah blah..."

That I assert, is "life lived for struggle" your complaint is invalid because your complaint doesn't go far enough. Another example of hyperpolitics I can think of is a friend left of me posting to social media a meme featuring surfer Mick Fanning in the news cycle who punched a great white shark to scare it off during a a competition in South Africa, the meme had the caption "Chuck Norris never heard of her."

This post got called out by another friend wo said "right because there's nothing more humiliating than being a woman." Which made an indelible impression on me, evidently not because I think that criticism of the implicit sexism is wrong, but because I was struck by the battle not being worth picking.  

The news story is a decade old. The meme was shared by someone who I'm confident network analysis will determine commanded largely an audience of middle-class meritocrats, characterised generally by their left-wing progressive politics, and at worst, economically conservative. Sharing a topical meme is also generally, simply trying to be relevant, by not creating their own content, it is hard to credit with someone being a thought leader. In essence I am asserting that this was a milder, less direct way to assign an ally to the enemy.

The news story allows me to confidently date the incident to 10 years ago, 2 years into the rise of left-illiberalism. 6 days ago, to contextualise the efficacy of hyperpoliticization, a different friend shared this to facebook in my feed:

I support a mosque being built anywhere in the Australia , I think it should be the goal of every Australian to be tolerant regardless of their religious beliefs. 

To promote tolerance, I would also propose that two nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque. We could call one of the clubs, which would be gay, The Turban Cowboy and the other, a topless bar, would be called You Mecca Me Hot. 

I share only enough of it to give you the general flavour, it goes on and I hope that I don't have to point out to anyone who has read this far into a post using something written by Umberto Eco as its backbone how fucking stupid what I've shared is. 

I suspect this same friend has come exactly nowhere from where they were 10 years ago, or for as long as I've met them. Yet, polling data in Australia indicates that what may have changed is that they can now vote for a racist populist party in the form of One Nation, where they once likely would have voted for the Australian Labour Party, being economically marginalised. This was a guy I met who was 5 or so years senior to me, and after 2 years in that job, he applied to the same job I had held when I starter - so an entry level position, as a better career opportunity than the position he held.

It's my preference, but I feel there is more to gain by not calling out someone whose lived experience is so starkly different to my own, and how different our social makeup is, than to call out his problematic and racist views. 

Yet that was a good 6 years of the left's effort, and had I the technical capacity to mine the data, I'm sure we would see patterns of the most passionate leftists supporting justice, liberty, equality, inclusion, diversity, an end to sexism, racism and religious bigotry envisioning a safer, more equal and more productive world founded on a sustainable economy - purging their personal networks of impure allies and enemies within until they become disillusioned with social media in its entirety and suspend, abandon or shut down their account. 

10. Popular Elitist Contempt for the Weak

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians.

It is hard to give a concrete example without naming someone. What comes to mind is a quote from Simpson's episode "Scenes from the class struggle in Springfield":

Homer: You kids should thank your mother. Now that she's a better person, we can see how awful we really are. 

Here I guess I would say, that the illiberal-left definitely attacked enlightenment values - ironically diversity, John Stuart Mill was fucking nowhere that whole time when the left were shutting down speech left, right and center. 

The project of being left, was one of optimisation, not distinction, and I watched people who scrambled ever higher for the status of the "correct opinion" subordinate not just their peers, but friends and families in the process, feeling ever greater contempt for them as their status grew.

It definitely played well into meritocracy, the intellectual obesity that was fostered in my formative years and giving me a well-meaning left-leaning social environment then and now. While I can no doubt be accused of spending much time living in the past, I do not think of high-school as my glory days, and I am not still trying to ace the test so I can "get in" somewhere. 

But many of my friends are still trying to ace the test, and like the high-achievers in my high-school cohort, come to feel contempt for anybody not trying, because they fail to share some fundamental value.

There is also very much, what I likely reductively think of as the Leninist bent, Lenin being the Russian appropriator of Marx's communist vision, one of the first to conclude that the working class were basically too stupid to achieve communism, Lenin felt that the weak needed strong intellects like himself and the rest of the Bolsheviks, to be the elite vanguard of communism, to impose it on others until the other realised how much they loved it.

My feeling is that Lenin's insight likely predates him, that the leaders in history that held a conceited contempt for those they rule probably goes all the way back.

11.  Everybody is educated to become a hero.

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm.

Everytime I expect one of these characteristics to fail to describe the behaviour of the illiberal-left, and since 9-11 there has certainly been an explosion in activism. By the time I was going to my first big-city protests against the invasion of Iraq, protesting had in some part been institutionalised and certainly globalized (not in the conspiracy sense, but in the neoliberal economic policy sense of globalized markets) where in the absence of social media platforms, slogans like "no blood for oil" could spread across continents via broadcast photos of protests in newspapers and newsprogramming.

"The Socialist Alternative" was well organised and offputting, branded and coordinated they could bring numbers to protests that could encourage more spontaneous individual solidarity to decide to stay at home.

For this, I like to think about "activism" the word itself - an ideology that suggests you move people of no particular qualification to move from a passive role in society to an active one. I have some sympathy for the idea, particularly after Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics is for Everyone" video where he makes the point that almost everyone feels entitled to an opinion on something like medicine, but not so much for economics. It dovetails with my personal experience that many people are functionally cowed by appeals to the economy, and I do believe the widespread economic illiteracy is an existential emergency where for example - democratic voters will punish an incumbent government (like Biden's) for high inflation and high interest rates, and vote in a Trump administration that was brazenly campaigning on introducing tariffs, a literal inflationary policy, and has only exacerbated it with the war of choice against Iran and cuts to affordable healthcare.

However, let me give a concrete example moreso of a symptom of the illiberal left - taken from Clementine Ford's "How to Fight Like A Girl" very much a thought leader in 2016:

"Clementine Ford’s 2016 book Fight Like a Girl looks at the ways those who identify as women can combat the deep conditioning of patriarchal social systems – not as ‘men with a defect’, as women are often framed, but with the tenacity, compassion and collectivism that makes women uniquely powerful." ~ from a review by Leonie Hayden

"combat" and "uniquely powerful" I'm not going to pretend it's easy to avoid war or martial metaphors when talking about change processes, but I'm confident a canvassing of not only the books like "Fight Like a Girl" "How to Be An Anti-Racist" "White Fragility" etc. etc. will find appeals to structures and systems (patriarchy, white supremacy etc.) and recommendations of individual action - activism.

What I think was scary by 2017, 2018 etc. was the omnipresence of this secret police, everywhere educated by Op-eds and Reddit posts, Tumblr memes and armed with rhetoric looking for their moment to take a glorious stand. 

A meme that went round in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020 was the "Pyramid of White Supremacy" that was so offensively stupid I've previously written a post about how dangerous the broader phenomena of activism was - it argued a slippery slope fallacy, that ignoring your uncle's racist comments at thanksgiving lead directly to genocide, therefore our educated hero seeing two friends - one white, one asian greet eachother with "what brings you here a sale on rice?" "you got that right you here for the sale on potatoes?" and our illiberal-left hero seizes their moment to exercise their racism by completely neglecting their social intelligence to read the irreverent familiarity that allows two close friends to abandon all civility, and instead they are somehow fighting genocide.

I got some bad news, then and now, you are not fighting genocide. The distinct thing about a pyramid, is that if you remove enough bricks from the bottom such that the compressive force of the upper levels crushes what remains you are left with...a pyramid. Even the metaphor was wrong, suggesting that wholesale genocide is independent of microaggressions like "where are you from?" And it probably is. 

Genocide is likely far better predicted by the phrase "can I see your papers?" 

LH: I got my first private message calling me a fat, ugly troll the other week and genuinely, my first thought was ‘I’ve made it! I’m just like Clementine!’

CF: I’m glad of that because there has to be a reason why I do it. If that’s one of the consequences then that’s amazing. It sounds weird to say “this thing I’m doing is empowering women all over the world.” Whatever, you’re just yelling at trolls on the internet.

But I also know women take comments about themselves to heart and it can be so destructive. When they see someone, whether it’s me or someone else, doing that, and calling people out and not giving a fuck about their stupid comments about weight, they think ‘I can do that too! I can just laugh at them.’

The contrast to activism, I don't really have a word for, probably the best I can coin right now is "competencism" which my spellcheck informs me is indeed, not a word. To elaborate then, I believe the concept resides in a domain specific common-sense - if you are being sued, best to get a lawyer than represent yourself, if you are running a small business with employees, best to engage the services of an accountant than try and teach yourself book keeping.

There are domains where people recognize a smart play in deferring to somebody who has met some competency threshold. It will have its issues, like the "expert problem" where for example, people who are financially illiterate are more likely to engage a financial advisor that rips them off, doesn't take into account their best interests etc. or getting a public defender who is more eager to clear their case load by getting you a plea bargain than to have you face no consequences at all on the grounds you are not guilty.

Likewise, for all the problems with activism, especially under hyper-politicization where you can just go to war with the internet as a keyboard warrior finding innumerate opportunities to martyr yourself at the hands of a 4chan thread, there is certainly a domain in which I'm all for activism - typically where its a domain you cannot help but be an expert in - like how something makes you feel, and the action required is making your voice heard.

Wicked problems like the entire history of patriarchal socieities and status and wealth inequity are less likely to be solveable by the activation of "common sense" in joe nobody, but require the seeking of exceptional thinkers to determine and design possible structural solutions.

 In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm.

12. Turning to Sexual Matters

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This would probably be the most controversial and the hardest to see. One concrete example has been alluded to - the "super straight" meme, of which despite the slog of writing this post I can still remember an argument not from a reactionary teen to "wokeness" but a commentator on that video 'if you are heterosexual and will only date ciswomen, then that is not an orientation but a preference, and that preference is transphobic.'

 But on top of this was the large uptick in interest and practice of open relationships or 'polyamory' of which I've participated as a third party. Given that getting into a relationship is hard enough for most people, I cannot testify as to polyamory being practiced so much as discussed. 

Eco's essay goes on to say:

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality)

However, it is ambiguous as to whether Eco simply cites machismo as an example of Ur-Fascist will-to-power on sexual matters, or if it is the criteria he believes to be inevitable.

Either way, it is worth considering the adjacent concept of feminismo, which might imply both disdain for men and intolerance and condemnation of standard sexual habits, from monogamy to heterosexuality.

We might even consider the long standing, somewhat Freudian stereotyping of women as accepting, and the widespread misconception that acceptance is a passive act (part of the machismo disdain for women) rather than an affirmative act. 

Certainly, I learned of the orgasm gap at this time, and what "g2g" means in a dating profile (give to get, meaning an orgasm is owed), I heard, but did not really encounter, arguments that pansexuality was "the only ethical sexuality" 

In my home turf of Australia, the Australian Sex Party sort of kicked off as a legitimate response to a rising influence of religiosity in Australian politics following September 11, and the brief moment where the Howard government was beholden to "Family First" to include "family impact statements" on any piece of legislation, family first being an ambiguously named Christian conservative party who benefitted from our senate electoral process.

Memorable was the Sex Party's "Jerkchoices" campaign video, which was liberal and inclusive - Anti-fascist including anti-ur-fascist. By 2023, there were (paywalled) articles about local entrepreneur* Janine Allis questioning her teen son not only about wearing a condom, but whether he satisfied his partner.

*(For international viewers, Australian-entrepreneurship generally involved going on a holiday somewhere, noticing a successful business in a larger market, and then opening a knock off, or even a franchise, here.)

Whatever I think about the orgasm gap, that's a hard campaign to run. Personally I'd like to give out more orgasms, and would be personally in favour of more foreplay.

Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Eco is going into weird places now, though I do think some of the most idealogical of that time period, did get some artificial inferior substitute via social media to a kind of phallic weapon they would 'fuck people' with.

13. Selective Populism

For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People...There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

In 2023 Australia went to the ballot box for our first referendum in a while, the second in my lifetime and the second to fail, in my lifetime. In my opinion, the reckoning for this failure was weak - I'd guess the most cited reason was the then Dutton lead opposition referred to in Australian media as "The Coalition" withdrew support - the argument ends shortly after with a kind of statistical argument I find unsatisfying - that in history no referendum has passed in Australia without bipartisan support.

It is similar to the well known NBA statistic that no team has ever come back to win a postseason best-of-seven series after falling to a 3-0 deficit. 

Now most of everyone I know voted 'Yes' to the proposed change to the constitution. I may be the only person I know who voted 'No' and I documented my rationale elsewhere on this blog. As such, what little insight I have into the abject failure of the Yes23 campaign, is at least still insight.

I bring it up here because it is most definitely a failure, failing in some 45 minutes of the polling stations reporting in a gut punch to those hoping for the referendum to carry. But it was also the literal creation of a select group of citizens to create a Voice for a people.

I was at a far-left friends house one year for Christmas Carols, in fact I know the year, it was 2016 so a month into Trump becoming president elect. My friend made a speech that left an indelible impression on me, about how we would have to stick together in the dark days ahead. 

It struck me as odd, given that we were in that moment situated in a gentrifying neighbourhood displacing the working class, in a room populated almost entirely (like 99%) of white people who had just come together to sing Christmas carols which when you are handed a song sheet with lyrics, you can appreciate just how many of those carols are about celebrating the coming of the Christian conquerer king who is going to take over the fucking world.

I feel the explanation for such phenomena, is in meritocracy's tendency to produce wealthy elites who are socially progressive while being economically conservative. Think of the New York socialite organised charity galas, spending thousands to raise millions for some starving children elsewhere.

Cynically my mental shorthand for these suspicions of mine are 'voice of the voiceless' and it has occurred to me too many times in my life in Melbourne, at gigs, exhibitions (I've likely done it myself), corporate retreats, board meetings etc.

Championing marginalised groups whose populations are too small to enable them to be present wherever they are championed - the Indigenous, trans, immigrants, refugees. This is not to call their causes and concerns disingenuous or fake, but rather those who appoint themselves the various Loraxes poorly regulated.

And an easy example is to look to the Chinese Communist Party of the "People's" Republic of China, or North Korea. The ruling parties speak for themselves, not their people.

I guess the other thing to be alluded to here, was the bizarre phenomena of what came to be known as "woke" politics, where a white man could wind up being able to speak on behalf of women, where a woman of colour could not via the rhetorical trick of "internalised misogyny and/or racism" where one did not gain a right to speak for oneself by virtue of having the immutable identity signifiers and the lived experience of them, but only by virtue of speaking the party line.

So yeah, the illiberal left absolutely went all Ur-Fascist on this characteristic.

14. Speaking Newspeak

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

One of my first sensitivities triggered was the sheer amount of jargon that social media produced. In the aforecited Clementine Ford interview, (or perhaps another one for the same book) Ford talked about getting her break on a Fairfax media group feature and talking about the work they did to introduce terms like "rape culture" and "slut shaming."

I also vividly recall my visceral reaction to many "Last Week Tonight With Jon Oliver" segments that while intelligible themselves came across to me with this unintelligible undertone of 'now we've told you this, that's the way it is' in constantly redefining what was required of progressives.

I find the Newspeak of the illiberal-left often just a good memory exercise to try and recall all the memes I can: trigger warning, safe spaces, your truth, mansplaining, manspreading, gaslighting, emotional labour, trauma, shadow texts, reactionary, pay gap, polyamory, pronouns, kink shaming, patriarchy, internalised misogyny, non-binary, gender non-conforming, etc. etc.

Much like the proliferation of charity days - something that likely started with Red Nose Day as a fundraiser for Sids, was followed by the MS Read-a-thon and Jump Rope for Heart, Jeans for Genes day may have been the last before the whole thing collapsed under the sheer volume of medical charities.

If you go to national today you will likely get a list of at least 6 things the day is of. On the day I write this sentence it is apparently National Police Remembrance day in Australia, a day I've never been aware of until right now, as well as being national coffee day, national biscotti day, national goose day, national starbucks day and somewhat fittingly - national awareness of food loss and waste day.

The point I would emphasise though, is that while an argument can be made that much of the illiberal lefts jargon was taken from esoteric academic output and disseminated into the public, and therefore can be asserted to be an exercise in 'enriching' vocabulary rather than impoverishing it, and raising consciousness to improve discourse and critical debate, I don't think such an argument holds up in practice.

Again Lukianoff's "Perfect Rhetorical Fortress" provides plenty of examples of how it worked in practice:

Barricade 9: Did the speaker violate a “thought terminating cliché”? This one is simple: If you’re found guilty of breaking a rule of left-wing discourse (whether the rule makes sense or not, whether you’re aware of it or not, or whether you actually broke it or not), such as “dog-whistling,” “punching down,” “being on the wrong side of history,” or “parroting right-wing talking points,” no further engagement with you is required.

Conclusion

My reflection is almost done. But really what I want to direct people to is Umberto Eco's piece as but one, albeit potent, stimulus for self-reflection.

My experience of the past 25 years, has been that of societies generally more concerned with which side one is on, than any earnest effort to accomplish a strategic goal.

I am reminded of an anecdote, (though not who told it) of a US citizen visiting Belfast during the troubles, where they were pulled from their car and asked "are you protestant or catholic?" to which they replied "I'm a jew! I'm a jew!" causing a moment of consternation in the aggressors, who then asked "But are you a protestant jew or a catholic jew?"

I am for the open society, and it is based on a very simple observation - there is nothing for everyone, there is no sport, not even dodgeball, that every kid loves playing, there's no holiday destination everyone wants to go to, there's no restaurant everyone likes, there's no pizza that is everyone's favorite.

The far-right is more susceptible to turning overt-fascist I suspect because they tend to idealise an imagined past rather than the far-left's imagined future. That makes the illiberal left's fascist tendencies harder maybe to spot, because the nation they are trying to create and make dominant is asserted to exist in the minds of certain people, not in the blood of a pure race. 

It is similar insofar as most act as though minds cannot be changed, like opinions are as unchangeable as the DNA that permeates every human cell. Purging is advised rather quickly upon discovery of impure thought.

What impresses me most about Eco's essay, is that I feel it identifies intuitions that do not work well in a post-industrial shrunken world, that fascism is something built from common intuitions that will allow it to crop up anytime, anywhere and that should include the political left. 

And one of the reasons fascism is bad, is that it cannot succeed, and Eco makes the case by going through its many internal contradictions and impossibilities. It is doomed to fail and only a question of how much of a toll it can impose on those who survive it.

It is as such worthy of active resistance. However, something that cannot succeed, only cause pain and misery, should not be fought with something that cannot succeed.

In 2026 I live in a world where the three main fascist regimes - Putin's, Bibi's and Trump's are simply not performing. They are in fact, dazzlingly incompetent. They are inflicting a lot of hurt and harm in the process of failing, and I heard something today quoting the old Soviet Union as something 'that would be there forever until it suddenly wasn't' and it is worth remembering that much history is revisionist, with analyses carried out that leave us now with the impression the USSR's collapse was inevitable, predictable, when contemporary accounts have it collapsing as a complete surprise that caught "the west" off guard.

Resistance is not however futile, I do not believe that, resistance has been prosecuted with futility however, for 25 fucking years. 

Post-Script: The Incredulity of Self-Sabotage

Right does not make might. It is a stupid idea, that nevertheless, through word and deed, the left have hubristically acted out for 25 years now. 

What I am calling the left, and you can infer what you will, can laugh at Michelle Wolfe's unfamous sketch of a corporate active shooter training video, where Lutz of 30 rock at one point is instructed to fire his handgun blindly at multiple armed men who have taken a hostage, knowing the purity in his heart will ensure he only hits badguys.

Cipolla defines a "stupid person" as someone who harms others at no benefit and often costs, to themselves. Lose-lose is the simplest way to put it. A simple example being a husband who not wanting to go through the burdens of divorce, kills his spouse ensuring that rather than reclaiming his bachelor lifestyle, puts him in prison for 25 years.

Bibi and Hamas are another example, their symbiotic relationship producing the lose-lose situation for Isreal and Palestine, though obviously Palestine is getting the absolute shit beaten out of them, whereas Bibi has merely sent Israel backwards in its standing in the world.

Another example being the Democratic Party (and with far more correction, UK Labour under Keir Starmer) where an electorate desperate for change came to them and were like "we are so desperate we will vote for you no matter what" the Democrats and UK Labour both opted to take power without burdening themselves with the cost of the change demanded by the electorate who are growing increasingly frustrated with Neoliberal economics.

Bringing us to the lay-left, who can be commended for opposing genuinely bad things, and supporting good things, but cannot be commended for being effective, nor being competent.

It is my experience that people are overly credulous of saboteurs, espionage, spies false friends. Most often this credulity is a violation of Hanlon's razor, at least in my experience, where an organisation refuses to acknowledge that they might be shit at what they are trying to do.

This defence mechanism is in itself, an act of self-sabotage, because it can really prevent organisations and institutions from self-improving.

In my experience people are incredulous that they might somehow be counterproductive, and I think this has been a big part of the story for the last 25 years.

An interesting case in point being, that were I able to lead the campaigns against the devestation of the Gaza strip, I would have insisted on driving a wedge between Bibi and Israel, and avoided like the plague equivocating them.

I know the UN found Israel as in the nation, guilty of genocide and I respect that. I can only assume they are holding the citizens of Israel responsible for either failing to exercise their democratic constitutional rights to prevent the genocide, or for becoming depolitisized and this is an area where I think the playbook of Israel was readily understandable and perfectly predictable that Bibi would point to any protests and say "look, they are against you, so stand with me."

Perhaps the most consequential act of self-sabotage so oft repeated by the illiberal-left - the suicidal act of assigning good-faith people to the enemy.