Mindwarp Part 1: Who Hijacked the American Psyche

Trump's taking a second term. Does that mean conservatives won the culture war?

You’d be forgiven if you feel like the last time Trump got elected was only a few years ago. A lot of stuff that’s been happening seems to have curled the braids of time and distorted the natural sequence of events. But the fact that it was somehow a full eight years ago means that there are walking, working, voting-age Americans who might not remember it all that well (a twenty-year-old today was barely out of elementary school in 2016. Let that sink in…) And even those of us who are old enough to have been lucid back then may have forgotten some things about that time.

Something I remember well, was the fervor. The sheer, un-ending wall of noise that bubbled out of progressive spaces in every variety of media… News segments, op-eds, sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, lapel-pins, water bottle stickers, memes, public art… Social media was basically a constant roar of Trump-related nail-biting from 2016 to early 2020, before Covid kicked public discourse into a new kind of hyperdrive and transformed social media usage forever. I have no doubts that some of those patterns will reemerge this time around. But I’m also noticing how some things are already unfolding differently.

I’ve definitely noticed more despondence and general malaise. Progressives, at least for the last couple of months, appear far more jaded than they were last time. Which makes sense from a self-care perspective. The days ahead will be filled with divisive, noisy, and ever-present chaos. Yes, every single day. The top headline each morning is going to rain out of the Trump White House like sheets of cold artillery. It will be relentless and inescapable. So if you’ve granted yourself the permission to take some time away from the news cycle, I understand.

But that eye-of-the-storm we’ve been occupying for the last few months is rapidly closing, and before we dive headlong into another phase of the culture war and make some of the same mistakes that got us here, it seems appropriate to spend some time assessing exactly why are our politics exist in such a perpetual quagmire. I want to discuss what strategies might be useful to avoid further entrapment, but first I think we need to look backward.

Is the West Growing More Conservative?

The United States isn’t the only place where a recent election resulted in a Right Wing tough guy. This is actually part of a much larger trend. You might be aware of the rise of hardline Right Wing governments in countries like Hungary, Poland, Brazil and Iran, but the same pattern is occurring even in unexpected places like The Netherlands, Italy, Chile, France, the list goes on.

The reasons for this changing tide are complex, owing as much to deep-rooted isolationist paranoia as to recent military conflicts and a new crop of internet influencers. But a common theme in all of these instances is social unrest. Everywhere you see a breakdown in social harmony, uncertain futures, or economic stagnation, traditional Right Wing conservative values tend to strengthen. And it is always in these flashpoints of contention that the more extremist ideologies find fertile soil to sprout.

This isn’t because traditional conservative values offer more actionable solutions or noticeable benefits to its believers, but because they create a sense of anchoring and security that progressivism simply does not. Let’s put it another way; during times of crisis, humans generally gravitate towards large, cohesive stories with plausible themes and identifiable characteristics of good and evil. Progressive Leftists have their own version of this, sure, but for many, conservativism represents something more grounded, understandable, and ‘tried and true’. While both models are deeply flawed, they still offer a sense of safety to their constituents like two life rafts careening down the same river. We can all see the waterfall up ahead but the current is too fast, the canyon walls too high, and the rapids too fierce for us to meaningfully change course. Sometimes the most empowering decision one can make is to jump onto a raft with simple and straightforward structural elements, and hang on for the ride. Political dogma and religiosity find their way into the hearts of the struggling masses when strife is high, because they offer something tangible to grab hold of when everything else is out of their control. Remember the old aphorism: “There are no atheists in foxholes”. We’re all in an existential foxhole right now, but much of the country is still quite confused about why one of the rafts seems to be drawing so many passengers.

From Red Scare to Red Wave

Though the color “Red” may be expressly linked to MAGA at the moment, it wasn’t very long ago that the label referred to an entirely different group of people.

In the 1960s, change was in the air. A true dynamo of a decade, the sixties produced almost all of the iconic social movements that mainstream collective memory will recognize. Towering Civil Rights leaders, War Protesters, Second Wave Feminists, Psychedelic Freedom Advocates, United Farmworkers, you can picture them all. But for some reason, most people you ask will have a hard time naming any distinct individual or movement from the seventies, eighties, or any decade after. They can remember MLK, Timothy Leary, anti-war demonstrations on college campuses, and maybe even names like Cesar Chavez or Fred Hampton if they were paying real good attention the one day they were covered in high school social studies. But besides that, Leftist movements seem to be encased in ice: static, sanitized, and memorialized. What contributed to this amnesia?

Modern Conservativism: Partly Natural, Partly Engineered

Though agencies like the FBI and the CIA had formed before the sixties, it was around that time when they started putting their ever-inflating funding rounds towards more sophisticated projects (the FBI’s budget grew from $5 million to $100 million in two short decades, bringing them from humble Mafia-busters chasing down bank robbers in the 1930s to a full-blown global espionage effort by the early 1950s). The father of the modern FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, oversaw many different operations during this time but his most lasting influence was his commitment to tracking and suppressing communists. After WW1, almost every secret intelligence program was directly or tangentially related to confronting and disabling communists, and whether you know it or not, this anti-red agenda has defined the political climate in the United States ever since.

Today, people on the internet love to joke about ‘feds in the comment sections’, but the truth is that this meme was born from a long track record of real Federal agents tracking real activists and their associates—programs which eventually grew so large that it appeared practically any US citizen could land on a watchlist. For instance, while it might not come as a huge surprise that the FBI kept an eye on politically-active musicians like John Lennon, Woody Guthrie and N.W.A., even artists as innocuous as The Monkees and John fucking Denver wound up getting tracked by feds for “displaying subliminal, left wing and anti-US images”. The wholesale crackdown on anything anti-establishment began to truly bloom in the 1960s, and the ripples of these actions had profound implications.

Possibly the most impactful operation hatched by the FBI in this time was COINTEL PRO. The COunter INTELLigence PROgram was initially designed to quell what was seen as the ‘foreign influence’ of communism, but the results were so promising that it was ultimately folded into a handsome strategy to infiltrate and destroy virtually any grassroots organization. Many works of popular fiction—from Mission: Impossible to Men In Black to Fear and Loathing—have included the concept of ‘secret agents’ who invade a group to extract information or subvert the efforts of the group from the inside. COINTEL PRO is the actual program where this idea comes from. It formally created a framework for law enforcement to send informants into activist knitting circles, learn about the group’s weak points, and then aggressively exploit those vulnerabilities by stirring internal conflict, creating public smear campaigns, and sometimes even murdering group leaders.

Through the program, targets were wiretapped and bugged without warrants, saddled with bogus drug charges, and ladled with sophisticated psychological and emotional disturbances. These actions were almost always illegal, but what’s really crazy is that the only way we even know about them today is because the top secret files were burgled by citizen journalists and sent to newspapers to force an investigation of the FBI! Without this heroic document heist, the public may never have even found out about it! Bonkers, I know.

Sadly, the above summary barely scratches the surface of the true scale of heinous activity carried out under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and it only gets worse once you start to go down the completely separate, and somehow even more insane history of CIA debacles. The CIA has played a direct role in innumerable international corruption scandals, from installing a new government and forcing a capitalist economy in Vietnam [←incredible article if you have the time] to manufacturing drug epidemics to monitoring your smart TV and car navigation systems today, but these actions are not the intended focus of this piece.

The reason for this trail of evidence, is to point out how the modern shift toward conservativism has been strengthened by decades of disrupting Leftist movements at every possible juncture. Exactly how effective these disruptions were is impossible to say for sure. The true costs of destroying the Black Panther Party, knee-capping the American Indian Movement, and stopping the Young Lords from pursuing Puerto Rican Independence before they could gain large scale political momentum will never be known. But one thing we do know is that public perception of these groups has been lukewarm or entirely forgotten in the years since. Many people still don’t know anything about these groups and what they do know is usually tainted with bad information. This sets up a teeball for the modern Right to gain favor.

One of the thousands of images circulated by the National Association of Manufacturers in the thirties to equate social spending (roads, healthcare, libraries, and public schools) with not only communism, but Nazism

Psychic Warfare

So we’ve covered some of the more covert ways that the US government aided and abetted the rise of conservativism. But Americans—known for hyper-individualism and free-thinking—were going to need more than a few multimillion dollar activist-neutralization programs to be convinced of anything. When it comes to issues of faith and politics, people overwhelmingly inform their opinions based on their own peer group. We are tribal creatures, after all. And thus, it was learned that the most effective way to promote a certain ideology was through psychological operatives that could discreetly get people to think they’re thinking on their own. This is where the use of emotionally-charged propaganda becomes widespread.

We’ve all been subjected to a bedazzling array of propaganda tools which have influenced our beliefs. Yes you, yes, me. All of us. If you think you’re immune to propaganda, you’re not only wrong, but you probably have an even larger blindspot than the average person (sidenote: if you’d like to understand more about the mechanics of propaganda, I’ll link an essential two part podcast about the work of Alex Carey here and here). Throughout the early 20th century, the media had proven to be an incredibly valuable tool in generating public consensus around worker’s strikes and war support. The National Association of Manufacturers teamed up with the US Chamber of Commerce to paper the land with posters, newspaper ads, and radio spots to spread pro-war, pro-capitalist messages for decades. But again, this art really started to be honed and perfected in the 1960s.

Back then, most people who had a platform were strictly traditionalists. The evening news was for everyone, and pundits generally spoke right down the middle. They had commercial incentives backing their programs, sure, but reporting was much more neutral in tone than what we’ve come to expect from today’s news brands. Talk show hosts like Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson had their own political leanings, (Cavett towards the Left and Carson towards the Right) but their views were hardly detectable on their programs, which sought not to alienate their diverse audiences.

Then, in then late sixties and into the seventies, a niche in the market started opening up. Voices like Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, and a new crop of academics from the Chicago School of Economics (primarily Milton Friedman) gave rise to what we now know as the ‘public intellectual’. These individuals began doing talks and writing books and hosting their own broadcasts and, with time, something like a conservative “brand” started to develop. Capitalism loves brands, so there were many exciting opportunities for innovative deliveries. A man named Richard Viguerie started publishing Conservative Digest magazine in 1975 and soon pioneered the ‘direct mail’ strategy for political campaigns, considered extremely innovative in its day. The NRA organized its first PAC in 1976 which quickly earned them one of the most influential positions in American lobbying. This, along with the social disruptions and erosion of trust occurring throughout the seventies (assassinations, urban decay, drug epidemics, oil embargos, Watergate) created the perfect environment for a charismatic leader with a knack for public speaking to take center stage in the eighties.

Ronald Reagan had a career in Hollywood and almost no political experience when he started to make waves. He energized audiences and changed what it meant to be a statesman. He laid the groundwork for communicating with disaffected white voters and in turn helped unify the most powerful voting bloc for generations to come. Despite being the most secular President in history, he collaborated with Christian Evangelicals to create a new center of gravity around the subject of abortion (believe it or not, abortion actually used to be a very private, almost apolitical issue. It wasn’t until Reagan that abortion would become a primary focus in republican campaign rhetoric). And aside from all the new policy and wholesale deregulation committed under Reagan, these years marked a turning point where the role of an American president began to blur with ‘celebrity’ more than ever before.

Time went on, and the ball continued to bounce back and forth. Republicans would have it for a little while, then democrats would get to play. Then back again. But ever since the iconic Left Wing movements of the late sixties, the two-party political machine started to congeal, both sides resembling each other more and more year after year. Populism was dying, and movements for worker’s rights, anti-war, and environmentalism were permanently hobbled. The new name of the game was neoliberalism, and the true structure was ‘By Corporations For Corporations’. Both parties were happy to get a slice of the pie. So not only did the Right move to the right, but so did the Left.

The Current Hour

Between conservative talk radio, Man-o-Sphere podcasts, YouTube holes, and a hyperactive TikTok serving up content from tradwives, survivalists, finance bros, and from-the-cab-of-my-truck confessionals, there’s no shortage of life-affirming media for today’s right-wingers to sink their teeth into. Conservative media moguls like Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro have turned their eye-watering viewcounts into hugely profitable membership-based subscription programs, private WhatsApp groups, and entire online universities catering to Right Wing thought.

This is a positively booming industry. And despite many Leftist’s flailing attempts to reduce this boom to mere stupidity and racism, it’s important to recognize that the conservative flank of this country has grown quite diverse in recent years. As I’ve covered above, it’s easy to see the innumerable ways that conservativism has been coercively aided over the past hundred years to dominate the American Psyche. But there’s more to it than that. Something about this ideological encampment is speaking more effectively than its competitor. And if you actually want to improve upon the various shortcomings of the Left, it’s going to become necessary to adjust your strategies. Part Two of this piece is going to take a look at some of the ways the Left grew and changed over this same time period, and started to become counterproductive all on its own. I’d like to offer some criticism and hopefully begin clearing a new path forward. It’s not 2016 anymore. The disorganized fervor of that moment did not pan out for us back then, and I certainly don’t think it’ll work now.

With love. Talk Soon

This has been the Eighth Installment of the PhaseShift Newsletter. You are invited to freely respond with comments. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts, reactions, or critiques. If you like what you see, and see some potential in it, then please feel free to subscribe. You’ll have an option to pay but it’s not mandatory. If you feel like sharing it to those in your network, that could help connect it to precisely the audience who may need to see it most. Part Two coming later this week.