Donald Trump and the critique of liberalism …

*Pic: From Boohoo HERE, Trumpism: The Apprentice with the Golden Arse

In my last article ( HERE ) on the phenomenon of Donald Trump, I introduced the idea that his rather crude attacks on liberals and liberalism reflect a very widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, of which liberal ‘Establishments’ are very much an integral part.

Liberals are not just critics of the social order, but deeply entrenched in the regime as its apparatchiks, with a record of their own to defend. And while their attacks on traditionalist ‘authoritarianism’ still get traction armed with a slew of quite effective negative stereotypes and keywords, their whole style has imperceptibly become increasingly ‘authoritarian’ in its own right; i.e., political correctness, where the meaning of freedom ossifies into the language orthodoxy, dogma, accusation of heresy, the naughty corner, and the use of entrenched institutional power and pseudo-scientific (conflation of well buried ideological assumptions and value judgements with ‘evidence based’ science) mouthpiecing in the education, health, welfare, media and legal systems, to bolster social and ideological claims and practices.

I suggested that the ‘Libertarchs’ (Orthodox Liberal Administrators) carry much of the role that the Medieval Church occupied within feudalism as both a regime critic and pillar. These ideologues and moralogians represent that always tense and conflict prone struggle between secular power and the keepers of its fundamental regime precepts and legitimizing gloss; in this case the tension between the axis of liberty and market power on the one hand and liberty and social power on the other; liberty being the modus operandi of capital and its claim to larger legitimacy.

I suggested that Trump is a populist opportunist who is exploiting the modern equivalent of fourteenth century French rebellions by rabble peasant ‘Johns’ (Jacques), who hate what is being done to them, but have no coherent analysis, vision or organization. Trump uses their language and attitudes and they love his shameless lumpen-proletarianness, but he will inevitably betray them, because beyond his tawdry badmouthing, he is a very smart businessman with axes of his own to grind. The modern ‘peasants’ are easily ridden down by ideological ‘knights’ and/or equally exploitable as grist in power struggles out of which they will get little or nothing.

In the former case, ideological knight/clerics like George Lakoff (https://georgelakoff.com/2016/03/02/why-trump/) do a sterling, if somewhat hackneyed job of cutting ‘the Johns’ down to size with all the usual stereotypes and put downs we have to come to expect from liberal mouthpieces, with some extra razor sharp ‘cognitive brain science’ for that decisive ‘scientific’ coup de grace.

In the twentieth century, the answer to the George Lakoffs would have been fascism or communism (‘scientific’ materialism) but both of these have mostly passed their use-by date as a result of some very toxic historical wear ‘n tear. Instead, in the twenty-first, we are confronted by the totally unexpected emergence of religious fundamentalism, which in the absence of a convincing new secular ideology maybe just the ticket for moving history right along and giving the ‘Johns and Joannas’ the existential grounding and rationale to become a very serious problem for libertarians of every description, market or social. They want to re-regulate the social and economic commons. And they aren’t going to be very fussy how it gets done.

More on that later.

And finally I drew attention to how figures like Trump become emblematic of the end of an age, where faith and reason no longer meet in the middle, such that faith becomes blind belief and reason becomes rationalization and excuse making. Reason is no longer needed for the construction of what is believable, just as faith no longer provides compass, honest agency and bottom lines against malfeasant opportunism.

If one wants to see a sure sign of a world order starting to crumble, the disintegration of its existential and social software is as good a place to start as any. It happened in the period leading into the Reformation five hundred years ago and was critical to the birth of modern times, just as the same process is now preparing us for their end. This software is critical infrastructure in securing the whole system from the grassroots to the pinnacles of power. And it isn’t just the Trump side of opinion that is suffering from loss of grounding and compass, which is a condition that finds its way into every nook and cranny there is, just as it does in any other ecosystem.

No one is immune, least of all The Libertarchs, who now have a track record and standing that is as dry rotted and worn out as any of the others, and ripe for smashing by the forces of history. Trump and his followers may not be able to articulate this understanding, but they are straws in a wind that blows as ill for Indulgence Capitalism as it does for its ideologically liberal apologist/critics.

What Trump et al and his liberal critics lack is perspective as to how we came to this. Everyone is running the same old worn out clichés and counter clichés; the arguments of the twentieth century and much earlier. The evidence for that is the completely unexpected emergence of religious fundamentalism. Because it doesn’t fit anywhere in the modern pantheon as anything but a throwback piece of recidivism, there are no mechanisms for seeing it as anything else, such as reflecting serious weakness within the modern project which is bound to invite attack…whether it be by secular opportunists like Trump who are at least in part scooping up the Christian fundamentalist constituency, or the guys down at ISIL.

Religion is only very partly about cosmological belief, just as social science is only very partially about science.

Most of what religion does, when it is working properly, is provide for the building, maintenance and securitization of the social commons. It is critical infrastructure and large parts of our wealth lie there. One can be surrounded by the glittering prizes of the market place and be as dead motherless poor and dysfunctional as the picaresque characters who populate the garbage dumps at the bottom of the valley of the shadow of marginalization, where nothing works and everything is corrupted.

What capitalism has always been about, right from its beginnings, was the residualization and privatization of the commons in favour of individuals and markets, whether talking about the land enclosure movement that privatized common land to the control of individuals, or philosophical utilitarianism (the ideological justification for liberalism) whose agenda was to destroy the power of the social commons, privatize morality and shift the locus of social power to individuals.

While capital and its mouthpieces have always promised liberation as a goal, the industrialization and mechanization of the means of production meant there was a requirement to rid itself of onerous traditional obligations and capital intensive forms of slavery and/or feudal bondage, by privatizing them into more productivity intensive, more ‘economical’ (no labour capital cost, no noblesse oblige, no work no pay) and more ‘flexible’ (more disposable labour as there was no such thing as slave unemployment) individual contracts for labour hire, backed up not by the bailiff’s knout, but the threat of destitution and starvation.

For slaves, or those subject to feudal ‘bondage’, the prospect of ‘liberation’ into capitalist relations of production were very much a case of out of the fry pan and into the fire. Petit bourgeois intellectuals merely provided a moral gloss and liberationist mythology for the necessity to remove obsolete forms of economic relations that would slow down the transfer of capital from investment in labor resources (slaves who had to be fed, housed and kept healthy during good times and bad, because they were a valuable fixed economic asset) to investment in machines.

The civil war in the US was fought over whether the US was going to become the largest industrial economy in the world by 1890, or not. Persistent large scale plantation slave economy would ensure it wouldn’t, because it would have tied up too much wealth in expensive low productivity labour fixed assets and standing costs.

When the mechanized industrialists won (The Unionist Springfield armoury went from producing 20,000 rifles per annum in 1860 to 200,000 in 1865, whereas the southerners, who lacked mechanized industrial infrastructure, had to import), the northern petty bourgeoisie could celebrate the liberation of the slaves while the industrialists could celebrate a uniform labour force market that would work for a pittance and could be dumped without loss or liability during downturns, or if it got sick, or old, or died on the job.

The role of liberals within late indulgence capitalism have remained exactly the same as the economic goads of unemployment and survival wages were replaced by a much more powerful suite of positive reinforcement strategies designed to colonize and take over the parameters of desire, pleasure and giving in to its blandishments. Freedom was reconfigured by removing anything that smacked of responsibly constrained agency of robust citizen individuals and converted it into whatever-turns-you-on consumers, who could be manipulated to buy bottled water for up to four thousand times the price of perfectly good tap.

And the little liberal helpers, now nicely entrenched into the system of social administration, went out and duly demolished anything that could possibly get in the way of that, all in the name of civil liberty. Very nice…And so humanitarian….

Over the period since the Second World War, consumer based indulgence capitalism put together the final pieces of this process of privatization and marketization to the extent that human software was reduced to helpless egoism completely at the mercy of desire and any product or service designed to sate it. All that was left were the production drivers and consumption responders of people reduced to work drones and shop troops. All the nasty repressive constraints were systematically removed.

The total war production economic model which had been run by military machines was re-jigged into production war by marketing and sales machines. And the mass mobilization that had characterized warfare was now imported into the peacetime variant using the same motivational and propaganda psychology as for war. The siphoning of resources out of civil society that total war required continued and accelerated as society as an organism became increasingly colonized and taken over by economic forces of overproduction and consumption..

Society can withstand that kind of abuse for a while, but whereas military wars have limited duration, protracted production warfare doesn’t. So gradually, ‘society’ was systematically eviscerated in favour of markets. Ordinary socialization gradually disintegrated in favour of the Pied Pipers of Cool, as seen or heard on…. Adolescence replaced adulthood as the main social template. Families lost much of their capacity to either control or mentor their children; something that the great totalitarians of the past tried to impose, but failed.

Children somehow or other got human rights without having to learn respect and obedience to basic social norms first.

And resistance was met by systematic outflanking that rendered the ‘obstructor of progress’ into a mystified dorkasaur, who wasn’t listening hard enough to the magical forces of ‘spontaneous’ and apolitical ‘change’. If the parental ‘paper tigers’ didn’t ‘get it’ fast enough, they would be marginalized into figures of mockery and/or ‘unpopular’ boo hiss villainy. And if the ministrations of media based ‘attitude adjustment’ and or peer group ganging up didn’t work, well bring in the welfare officers!

Modern market totalitarianism doesn’t need traditional state security police when a combination of vast marketing resources, education and welfare bureaucracies and humanitarian laws can do the same job. The masters of business administration and their little Libertarchic helpers take over the traditional functions of The State and The Party. And the whole process is so silent running, it can operate right under the noses of mass populations without any of them having the slightest idea how colonized and software vacated they have really become.

And the main key to the enormous success of this strategy has been the way market freedom has been conflated into the social variant, and its meaning reversed into a totalitarianism more thorough going than George Orwell or Aldous Huxley could have possibly imagined. The third generation shop troops know absolutely nothing else because they have been so effectively memory wiped they cannot imagine life without smart phones.

The transformation of the autonomous individual into a vulnerable consumer ego matches the transformation of freedom into disinhibition, which expands discretion while removing constraint and controls that might slow or disrupt spontaneous responses to sales and marketing. The transformation of rights which imply some kind of obligation and responsible agency into indulgences, deliver unconditional entitlement which matches the slogan that the customer is always right.

Whole slabs of the language becomes similarly colonized, propagandised, blurred, conflated and bowdlerized. Thus it gets hard to tell even the most elementary differences between ‘repression’ and discipline, ‘equality’ and creative equivalencing, ‘judgementally’ and judgement, ‘abuse’ and toughness, chastisement and battery, ‘whistle blowing’ and treason/betrayal, ‘prejudice’ and belief, ‘authoritarianism’ and firmness, ‘inclusion’ and imposition, ‘discrimination’ and critical judgement, ‘victims’ and ideological clients, ‘compassion’ and a soft touch, ‘justice ’and sectional interest, ‘fairness’ and special pleading, excuse making and honest accountability, ‘compromise’ and being compromised, ‘flexibility’ and weakness ‘violence’ and political struggle, ‘race’ and cultural impunity, ‘homophobia’ and reproductive consciousness, ‘disadvantage’ and dysfunctionality, ‘bigotry’ and intolerance of unacceptable beliefs or behaviours, political ‘incorrectness’ and heresy, ‘conformism’( observing social standards and obeying rules) and ‘conformism’ (hyper responsiveness to sales and marketing prompts)….

One could go on and on about the totalitarian takeover of political language/keywords by so called libertarians…

But all this would be trifling if it didn’t have such disastrous outcomes in the middle to longer term. Once we start to see these values and practices pan out over several generations, to the extent that the latest one has no cultural memory other than the libertarian consumer paradigm, then sustainability issues arise; the same ones that apply to the larger ecological issues that are now starting beset us.

What happens to a society where systematic disinhibition has eaten away the boundaries of human behaviour? What happens when rights become freebie entitlements for which one no longer has to subscribe to any social values or observe any standards of conduct, or get any training before we get them, or reach a level of maturity of judgement sufficient to be trusted with them? What happens to people when the only social software they have left are production drivers and consumer responders? What happens when the language of discourse closes down critical thinking in favor of keyword rich Orthodox stereotyping and sloganeering, and corporate publicrelationshpeak.

The short answer is that it is a bit like bulldozing all the extant rainforest and planting it out with oil palms; an unstable disaster waiting to happen, because all the support structures, reality checks and balances that orchestrate the relationship of an organism to its surrounding ecosystem have been demolished in favour of a single behaviour matrix. It creates a huge ecological vacuum that any opportunistic entity will fill at the first opportunity. And inevitably, it won’t be benign because any infrastructure that might have contained and disciplined it, has disappeared.

The poorest, most under pressure, marginalized and most easily deprived of securitization of any sort, that have already fallen into the valley of the shadow of marginalization, are the first and most dramatic victims. Indigenous Australians, with no paternalist and missionary backstops to administer even the most minimal external damage control or moral badgering were laid waste immediately in what has become a hideously dysfunctional free-for-all. And while the human rightsie crowd have done an admirable job at blame shifting, covering up and denying their egregious incompetence, inter-cultural malfeasance and false hopemongering, the results of their appalling mismanagement are there for all to see in Chapter 4 of the Northern Territory report on sexual interference with children in aboriginal communities, ‘The Little Children Are Sacred’ report, if you have the stomach to read it.

And wasn’t the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s ‘Bringing Them Home’ report an exquisite example of Maoist ‘Speak Bitterness’ campaigns in China to publicly hang out the local landlords to dry, or the earlier Stalinist ‘show Trials’ designed to blame shift to party veterans associated with policies the regime wanted to distance itself from?

And wasn’t it a particularly brilliant methodology to get away from awkward questions about their own performance as ideological mentors to their aboriginal ‘poor helpless thing’ clients who can never recover from the bad old days no matter how much money or effort is sent their way? How totally bulletproof is that?

Massive imprisonment rates? Our fault. Massive rates of assault on women requiring hospitalization (about 80 times that of non Aboriginals in the NT). Our fault. Massive truancy rates from schools that might save the children from being just like their parents? Our fault. Chronically poor health and short lives as a result of rotten health choices? Our fault. Housing and surrounds more trashed and filthy than Third World slums? Our fault. Sit down money forever and no questions asked, ever, because we owe them. Our fault.

A whole sorry history has been constructed to provide more excuses than money in the Cayman Islands. And no one is allowed to question this wobblesomely vulnerable construct, because if they try, they must be suffering from a psychiatric disorder, wilful idiocy, or they are in league with dark forces. And they get to be accused of the Big-Daddy-Wicked-Heresy-Of-Them-All; racism; a cast iron, can’t lose bludgeon. No training required, just add high dudgeon…

And sure there was an invasion and yes there were massacres, far more numerous than were likely to ever be recorded out on the lonely edges of expanding modern agriculture and grazing. Even a disorganized rabble of armed farmers could clean up aboriginal communities if they clashed over land, because unlike the Maori, aborigines had no military traditions, organizing capacity beyond hunter gathering, no economic surpluses to buy muskets, powder and munitions, nor the artisans to maintain them, nor the keen desire to learn as much as possible from and about their enemies, so they could meet on slightly more equal terms.

Modernization has been tough and brought brutal lessons, especially on people who have been thousands of years of the pace. But everybody who tried to resist the modern paradigm copped a hiding at one time or another. Muslim rebels in the Sudan who had overwhelmed the defences of Khartoum in 1885 and killed General Gordon, had another go at glory against a British military force armed with Maxim guns, breech loading artillery and ten shot Lee Enfield repeater rifles. Their front on medieval style charges at the British resulted in 25,000 dead to the British 500. Now that was a real massacre.

Muslim generals repeated the mistakes against the Israelis in 1967 and against the Americans in 1991. Some of them have learned the lessons, read their Sun Tzu and Mao Zhedong, have worked out how to minimize casualties against modern defence systems, and use ridiculously inexpensive and fabulously disruptive terror tactics against the soft underbelly of big modern cities. Very Nice. Justice…?

The fact has been that the advent of modern times has been really tough on almost everybody. At some point almost everyone has been forced into a non-negotiable journey into the future with only as much cultural baggage as they could reasonably carry and still make it to journey’s end.

And while for aboriginal society sixty thousand years of doing the same old same old is going to make that break with the past particularly difficult, indulging the ultra-conservative and change averse cultural instincts of people still sentimentally stuck in their history, only serves to further disable and destroy them, and further turn their out-of-time hunter and gatherer ‘culture’ into dysfunctional mush, because that is the price of of being tardy, for anybody.

Modern times have been characterized by their insistence on transformational change and adaption. If you failed to step up, you floundered and got a real hiding until you got the message. And the more you tried to hang onto a past that no longer had any traction, the more things fell to to pieces, which is what happens to any world view that no longer lines up with the realities on the ground.

No one gets to keep anything that they cannot defend against someone or something that would take it from them, whether it be a marriage, a job, an enterprise, a technology, an industry or a country. And if the US navy hadn’t been able to prevent a military invasion of Australia in 1942, Europeans would be the servant class, except that by now, some might have achieved a second class imperial citizenship as graduates of Japanese educational and military institutions.

Aboriginals held Australia by no virtue of their own other than the entirely fortuitous facts of geography and isolation. And unlike the hunters and gatherers of Europe who would were gradually overrun and absorbed by early village agricultural populations, Aboriginals were the victims of an instantaneous five to ten thousand year time hike. Bad luck. It doesn’t pay to have too long a holiday from the rest of history.

And the time has come to face down and call the bluff of the do gooders and well meaners. They are ripe for it as are aboriginal communities, for a bit of multi-cultural assimilationism that puts them on the same footing as Somalis, Lebanese and Chinese; a broadly embracing suite that integrates diverse demographic elements into a single modern economy that distributes them across the entire workforce according to their demographic size and talents, from labourers to corporate leaders. And no buts….

The Libertarch administrators of this everyone-else-is-to-blame system make a virtue of incompetence, fecklessness, fake morality and dysfunctional behaviour on all sides. What a fabulous misere trump hand! The chutzpah and cheek of the libertarians is so out there as to be beyond ordinary reckoning. Everyone else in the world has had to make the extremely uncomfortable journey into the modern world, but we can’t let that happen to our indigenous brothers and sisters because without the race card to wave around, our human rightsie friends would become a shadow of what they once were….

Disinhibition and Indulgence!

This awful libertarian disease that has afflicted aboriginal communities just makes them mine canaries; a dreadful warning to everyone else. The better off have had a bit more time before it has hit them because they have had a bit more fat in the system to insulate them, for a while. But life without boundaries hits anyone in the end. And while Aboriginals ‘communities’ only stand to screw themselves and their children up, the better off and more powerful can do a lot more damage on the way down, because they have leverage.

Inconsequential, unconscionable and bizarre behaviours are no one’s monopoly. The rapacity and greed of supposedly respectable bankers almost destroyed the global financial system in 2008. The Panama Papers reveal a whole class of people who think the world owes them a living and that they don’t have to pay for the fabulous first world infrastructure that they use and abuse for almost nothing, and then have the breathtaking brass to demand that the nation state ‘live within its means’.

And their indulged brats are terribly vulnerable to a drug culture that will destroy them just as readily as anyone else’s. Being the CEO of a major multinational is no protection against losing children to ice, or heroin or alcohol. Their spoilt and neglected consumerbabelets have all the money and time they need to abuse themselves with. Mummy is too busy of on her social rounds and daytime dalliances, while Daddy, the ghost, is just a chequebook father who no one ever sees except on Sundays, sometimes, if he can spare the time off from his golf round.

And the miserable laissez-faire values that they pick up on their way through prepares them well to become totally self absorbed characters like their parents, unconscionable money launderers and tax avoiders, opportunists, responsibility evaders and moral skaters who think that anything goes if one can get away with it, which they generally can….

The libertarian disease strikes hardest at the very heart of us; our system of reproduction that produces the most valuable product any society makes; its children. If it were an industry it would be trading while insolvent, having abandoned all regulation or accountability, product design integrity, proper capitalization and administrative supervision and quality control, or training and mentorship, to produce a product that is dangerous to itself and others, vulnerable, unreliable and liable to break down and/or collapse under pressure.

And the libertarian sexual revolution that was supposed to break women away from the shackles of history liberated homosexuals instead, because it was never about the difficult reproductive politics and everything about sexuality and the sexistentialist (I am my sexuality) baloney that comes with it. Women, who are the front and centre of our system of reproduction were ‘liberated’ into sexual availability-on-demand, seeing themselves plastered all over the digital space as vacant sexual-objects-for-consumption and left with the baby and housework on top of ‘a real job’ in the lower echelons of the paid workforce; lower end because they cannot find partners who will do their fair share at home or take a rain cheque on their career if the woman of the house has the talent to go further up the slippery pole of promotion than them.

Women were screwed literally and metaphorically and somehow the feminist challenge to change the way men and women did business together never really eventuated, except at the margins, because beyond the self indulgent pleasure principle that embodied the consumerization of our culture, there was absolutely nothing else going on.

All that is going on to ‘liberate’ women these days is being organized by brothel madams and pimps, to turn prostitution into a legitimate career, helped along by the liberationists down at Amnesty International. Very nice and viscerally emblematic of what has happened to ‘the liberation’ of women.

The lamentable male violence, sexual malpractice and instability that has leaked into family life as a result of laissez-faire values and life-without-boundaries, is treated as if it were just some kind of male aberration, rather than a symptom of a completely chaotic, dysfunctional and grossly unfair sexual politic that has done absolutely nothing to protect our system of reproduction or change the attitude of men. The kind of free-for-all that has all but destroyed parts of aboriginal society is making its way into the mainstream, and destroying it too.

And just to add insult to injury, our homosexual brothers and sisters have seen their opportunity in the smashed up state of our reproductive commons, and not content with benign toleration of their off message sexuality, are, with the aid of their little libertarian helpers, inserting themselves like ideological cuckoos into what is left of our reproductive nest. Some people are just congenitally incapable of telling the difference between ‘inclusivity’ and invasion.

Today’s well meaners are no different from their ecclesiastical forebears. They have their aspirational side, but the political realities are that they are part of the regime and part of the problem. Ironically, the trigger for The Reformation that was led initially by Martin Luther was a protest against turning religion and salvation into a consumer product that could be sold. The instrument of this abuse of the integrity of religion was called ‘an Indulgence’, where one could buy time off from purgatory, for a fee.

The fact is that no one can buy salvation, whether that is buying off the wrath of God as the Catholic Church tried to pretend to do in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, or buying consumer indulgences now, in the hope this will somehow produce an existentially coherent life and robust character capable of mentoring something forward.

Indulgences aren’t just fools’ gold, but an actively corrupting influence, because the only way to salvation of any sort is doing the hard yards of making virtue a model of being and behaving that will be an exemplar for others to follow. Modern salvation and immortality is now the intergenerational legacy we leave behind for others to carry on.

The libertarian humanists’ agenda is ineluctably tied into the consumer revolution. They are part and parcel of its social administration. They have tangibly and recklessly contributed to a world order that has stripped human beings and their society of any defences against a world that prospers by eliminating internal controls that would interrupt the maximum consumption of anything that can be sold to them. The language of liberty has become hopelessly conflated into the economic ambitions of capital, which is to suck the life out of everything, existential, social and ecological, until there is nothing left.

The libertarian agents of capital, whether they are The Corporazzi or The Libertarchs, are as corrosive and corrupt as each other, only The Libertarchs are worse, because they pretend to be do gooders.

They are nothing of the sort.

The ecclesiastical language they have developed to justify their values and vast pretensions is designed to empower not their clients or humanity in general, but their own power and influence, which is why ‘political correctness’ is coming to be so reviled. People know, even if they cannot articulate it, that liberalism is a hypocrisy and falsification of reality for which it and its social agents should never be forgiven, any more than the Church was, when the Protestants came after it.

Liberty, if it means anything at all must be capable of delivering responsible agency that comes from not being free. Individualism is nothing if not bound into a vibrant social commons because without one, it is just a gross egoism. Nothing is for free because everything costs. Freedom is one of the most expensive artefacts on the planet because it is not just about me or you, but us. Freedom is not about having so much as being. The empowerment it delivers isn’t so much rights as the integrity that comes from meeting obligations first, meeting their standards, knowing what those are and why, knowing how much servicing they require, being properly trained to understand these things and the accountability to others that that involves.

Rights are not an end in themselves. Their value is emblematic of the enormous personal and community effort that goes into the infrastructure that supports them. And people who appreciate what they really are, are very sparing with them, because they are so precious, so hard won and so hard kept.

The libertarian idea has become as much a garbage artefact as the consumer economy itself. And its ‘clerics’ are just as tawdry as the corporates who drive it.

Trump and his minions have only the vaguest understanding of this and would hardly give a damn if they did. His followers can see a world order crumbling in front of them, but have only the vaguest understand of why it so and why the libertarian myths are so vile and disabling. But the guys down at ISIL intuitively know this stuff, even though their language is seventh century Prophetspeak. They have a powerful informing ideology, strong organization, considerable intellectual and financial resources, and they are willing to die for it, because they actually believe in the saving grace of what they are doing and its capacity to win in the end.

And while they are mortal enemies and must be fought, we must be prepared to admit that it is we who have lost our way, not them. Their strength and dynamism is mirrored by our weakness, pusillanimity and feckless humanism. And if we are ever going to beat them, we must find it again….and fast. While their ideology is absurdly obsolescent, it is remarkably robust and they are going to have a field day amongst the existentially lost and disabled, because we have all but destroyed the ‘industries’ that produce that kind of grounded security.

The problems that western security agencies are having suppressing this movement’s appeal are very likely going to get much worse. Globally, Islam is ‘tightening up’ at all levels and putting pressure on its more secular ‘sophisticates’, because it senses the degraded vacuum beyond its ideological borders, and the opportunities to reverse the verdicts of the modern period that so marginalized it for almost half a millennium.

And for exactly the same reasons, we need to refuse to listen to or countenance the pretensions of libertarians and call their bluff, because this is an excellent start on what will undoubtedly be a difficult, arduous, sometimes bloody, but absolutely necessary journey on the road to another era. Business as usual is coming to an end and that is what it is like; what the end of an age is always like.

Climate change is just one of the symbols of how much trouble we are already in. Religious fundamentalism is another. And when aboriginal Islamists start to work their own community, kick arse and clean up their act, it will be the turn of their communities to put a bit of the hard word on us, about mending our ways, meeting some standards, being accountable, and refusing to tolerate the execrable white well meaners…

Very nice …