Mindwarp Part 2: Can The American Psyche Be Saved?

The Left used to oppose power. Then something changed.

-JB

Part One of this piece looked through the lens of the past to uncover some of the ways Right Wing belief systems were able to win so many hearts and minds over the last hundred years. Conservative ideology has its own merits, so I should note that it’s not all a giant corporate-funded-government-enabled-psy-op. But as we’ve seen, that does have a lot to do with it. If you didn’t read Part One or you’re still just not clear on why the power-holders of the West were so committed to fostering conservative mindsets, here’s the crib notes:

The reason the Left was suppressed at every stage of the 20th Century was because they were Worker’s movements. Corporate powers—be they railroad companies, coal plants or textile factories—all had a vested interest in suppressing the Left because whenever the Left got properly organized, they raised wages, added safety regulations, and shortened workdays. That’s it. It’s literally that simple. We need to accept that is the primary reason behind everything I wrote in Part One. It wasn’t about communism, it wasn’t about religion, it was always about profits.

---

Knowing this, it might seem logical to a lot of folks that Left Wing ideology must stand in some kind of total opposition to this power structure, contrasting the authoritarian motives of conservativism with the organic sway of morality. I wish this were true.

Sadly, in the same way that the valid philosophical core of conservatism has been co-opted and transformed by corporate greed, so too has the soul of liberalism. Once again, both camps still have plenty to offer their constituents, despite their flaws. And though my last piece was focused on the ways conservative values were covertly injected into the American population over the years, it has to be acknowledged that the Left is not without blame for losing ground with the public. Many of the problems of the Left are completely theirs to own. Progressive institutions have bungled nearly every opportunity to gain favor with the public over the last forty years, with many of the most egregious examples being the most recent.

Leftist Power Struggles in the 20th Century

As time wore on, some Worker’s movements achieved what they were after. They got us 40-hour work weeks, child labor protections, and the Civil Rights Act. These types of wins occur because the corporate class has always had to accommodate the delicate balance of pacifying the population just enough to exploit them. Before we had algorithms deciding the price of your plane tickets, insurance premiums and rent prices, finding the maximum amount the public could be exploited for, while keeping them just happy enough to not revolt was a fine art. So every once in a while—when it was obvious that a given movement had a lot of steam and there’d be hell to pay if the bosses didn’t respond to the peoples’ demands—the corporations would concede. They’d grant a little worker’s concession here, a little extra liberty there.

Some of these movements gained notable political leverage. Unions were prevalent, jobs were good and paid well. It was always at these times, when wages and income taxes were high and profits were restricted, that the corporate class found ways to meddle in the business of other countries in order to scrape some extra revenue from the corners of the earth that didn’t enjoy the same protections. Usually in the form of a military intervention. Corporate handlers would convince the US government that they had to invade Nicaragua or Hawaii or Libya or Korea or Panama and this would eventually pave the way for them to set up a new resource extraction module and funnel the bounty back to the States. Accomplishing these resource extractions through trade deals is the preferred model nowadays, but back then it was almost always with guns, bombs and nerve gas.

When the press leaked these types of operations, many Americans would get upset, so the Left would once again have to organize but in these cases it was against the military industrial complex. And thus the cycle continued. Leftists would gain ground by setting up a successful union, but then immediately have to scatter efforts towards whatever bombing campaigns the US was getting into. This made the Left weak, not only because it constantly diffused their energies, but also because whatever cause they fought for just wound up exacerbating the other. Better wages for ag workers in Florida caused businesses to look south of the border to grow their tropical crops. All the corporations had to do was convince the President that Guatemala was a Soviet-sympathizer and violá: We’d send troops and soon enough, United Fruit Co. had all the cheap labor they could ever want. Do you see?

Making room for banana production in the 1930s

Nonprofits and Academia

Eventually, in order to compete with the outsized power of endless corporate collusion, the Left started to morph. First, it started to lose its unions. Fifty years ago, a full third of American workers were in a union. Today, that number is less than one in ten. But when a new structure called the 501(c)(3) tax status emerged (otherwise known as a ‘nonprofit’), Leftists quickly found a comfortable new home to pursue work outside the private sector. This new model allowed for businesses where profits were not the primary objective, which helped Leftists focus more on “theory and praxis”, than actual changemaking. Many nonprofits have done good work over the years, but sadly, one of their biggest design flaws is that it’s not exactly mandatory to deliver on their claimed goals. Without the same rules of accountability as a normal business, many of these orgs can float along for years without accomplishing anything, living on grant money and image alone. Given enough time, some of them ultimately grow to create their own industrial complex to serve their own interests without ever solving any of the problems they allegedly exist to address.

Similar to the evolution of academia (another institution primarily controlled by the Left), many of the operators within the nonprofit space became bloated and self-serving, only answering to their institution’s internal hierarchy of careerists. This created an environment where much of the goals and rhetoric of the Left got subtly rearranged to align with the financial goals of those institutions. Almost mimicking the corporate world. To combat this weird dissonance of being ‘mission driven’ but never truly challenging the status quo, an evolution of thought started to replace the missions themselves.

Where Leftists couldn’t make changes, they wrote papers

As liberal arts colleges veered further away from classical liberal studies and more towards softer social sciences, an abundance of new academic papers were written about every imaginable subset of things that rich, highly-educated Leftists were interested in. From “The Intersection of Quantum Mechanics and Metaphysical Poetry” to “The Semiotics of Fast Food” to “The Social Justice Implications of Pet Ownership”, it seemed that there was no hypothesis too zany or ungrounded for a post-grad to defend. As a teacher myself, I’m a huge fan of letting students off-leash to be inventive and make mistakes. But as you might guess, a few decades of this behavior did start to erode the foundation of liberalism in the public eye. Especially when the cost to do so became so high that families had to go into lifelong debt in order to send their kid to one of these prized beacons of prestige.

Today, academic liberalism and the sheltered ecosystem of nonprofits is more disconnected from the broader public than ever. The exercise of over-explaining and over-qualifying every exhaustive piece of minutia to puff up a 50-page dissertation in a specialized degree that no one’s ever heard of has taken a toll on the way the public perceives these degrees and the people who pursue them. “Women’s Studies Major” has become an epithet on the Right because the Right values things with visible, tacit usefulness. And it might even be possible for some members of the Right to see the usefulness of a degree like this, if they weren’t formally excluded by an in-group that has done everything it can to shroud their work in the most pretentious and incomprehensible language it can muster.

poignant? painful? both?

Some of these theories end up trickling down from elite academic circles, entering the public zietgiest in the form of NYT bestselling pop-sci books and pedantic twitter drivel. Small numbers of excitable identitarians take it upon themselves to circulate these notions online and push the edges of Leftist thought into new and supposedly improved territories each and every week. Some topics get stirred into the maelstrom of cable news discourse and online think-piece battles. Like Hallmark movies? Sorry, those have been deemed fascist now. Planning to showcase the work of white artists in your museum? Sorry, that now qualifies as racist. Didn’t add a trigger warning to your personal Instagram post? You clearly must not be an ally. Actually, now the concept of allyship is bad too. Do better.

“the capitalists are quaking in their little boots!!!!”

After residing in radical Progressive spaces for my whole adult life, I realized at some point that endless campaigns of Leftists canceling Leftists wasn’t noticeably improving society. In many cases, it seemed to be doing the opposite. Left Wingers’ knee-jerk response to condemn and cut ties with anyone who displayed even a minor difference in thought has led to what you might expect: a splintered, disjointed and ineffective group of people incapable of working towards coherent political goals. Over the years, some visionary stalwarts have offered up critiques of this behavior, but actually extricating it from Leftists’ culture has proven difficult. And what do we have to show for these public self-immolation rituals? Fragmentation. Distrust. Shrinkage of community. At no point was this more pronounced than during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Covid-19: The Great Separation

You don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it. At this point everyone’s already decided what they do and don’t believe about how things unfolded, and only willing to accept information that confirms these biases. But if we want to understand the current moment and the second rise of Trump, we need to take a look at the pandemic. Think back to where you were in the Fall of 2019. Think of your mental health, your love life, your job, your hobbies, the way you spent your money. But most importantly, think about the people you were spending time with.

More likely than not, each of these things have changed dramatically. When I think of all the friend groups and families that got ruptured in such a short period of time, it almost felt like people in my own network were being manipulated into toxic behavior via some modern rerun of the COINTEL-PRO playbook (though that program was allegedly shuttered in 1971, there are almost certainly more sophisticated versions of it being used to neutralize activists in the digital age). I can’t help but see how the countless lost connections and burnt bridges all add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. And how that reality seamlessly plays into the hand of the corporate elite.

There were a lot of strong reactions to the rollout of Covid policies. Which isn’t surprising when we recall Trump’s first term. Donald Trump’s White House made a public spectacle of denying and opposing nearly anything that came from liberal news media. This antagonistic relationship played both ways since the day he took office and ‘good faith’ disagreement had gone out the window. The press—and the rest of the liberal establishment—became reflexive about never agreeing with Trump, no matter what. The rift between Right and Left perceptions of the world grew wider every day, and by the time Covid hit, there was virtually no middle ground to stand on. This created a terrible environment to confront a novel global threat that demanded rationality, compassion, and acute sensemaking faculties from everyone.

The Left found itself in a tough spot. Though classically anti-establishment and trained to question authority, they suddenly had to choose between pre-ordained corporate narratives and the Bad Guy Who Is Never Right About Anything. And though the story started out straightforward enough (‘this is a bad disease that naturally spread around the world and we need to take basic precautions to protect ourselves’) Leftists quickly had to jump from one strange truth-loop to the next in order to effectively dodge any information coming from conservative sources.

A lot of people picked up slogans like “trust the science”, apparently forgetting that science is full of coercive incentives to publish misleading papers and plenty of untrue assertions about health and safety are widely accepted by science for years or decades before being corrected. But this was a scary time. I get that. We all remember how stressful it was to live through an unprecedented moment in history. But a lot of terrible outcomes could have been avoided if the cultural binary hadn’t been so stark. A 55-year-old republican with respiratory problems who didn’t take precautions seriously and died because of it, is just as sad as a teenager who committed suicide after enduring eighteen months of isolation due to heavy-handed school closures. Both were victims of politicized science and safety protocols, and while we were all preoccupied with their stories, the largest transfer of wealth in human history was taking place right under our noses.

Liberally-minded folks were of course quick to defend public health overreach because the stakes were high and it seemed smart to be cautious. But the problem with the pack mentality of the popular Left is that everything about Covid protocols got turned into political symbols early on, and people refused to update their views as time moved forward. Whether it was evidence that lockdowns might’ve caused more harm than good, or studies from credible doctors saying that masking may not have been that effective, or the 140,000 women who reported menstrual irregularities after the vaccine… Any new information that didn’t support the sanctioned narrative got the immediate kibosh from liberal circles without a second thought. Discussing alternative theories was not only socially discouraged, it was heavily censored from online spaces.

Whether you were posting how Vitamin D boosts #natural immunity, sharing a study from a reputable research journal, or simply pointing out the conflicts of interest between corporate stakeholders and the agencies supposed to regulate them, Meta was on guard with a barrage of Orwellian censorship strategies

I know many readers will take issue with this retelling, but I hope you can see why it all connects to the larger picture. Seeing updates about the virus’ laboratory origins or how the public was lied to about Gain of Function research and the efficacy rates of the vaccines, it’s hard to deny that crucial information was suppressed and carefully controlled in a way that appeared genuinely fishy to people on both sides of the aisle. And this refusal to openly discuss what was going on in a transparent public square played a dramatic role in shifting voters out of liberal circles and into the MAGA zone. I can count many Obama-voting, anti-war, pro-choice, climate change believers who’ve gone full-on Trumper in the last couple years, based solely on the Dems’ rank-and-file Covid response. I can’t say that I know a single person who went the other way around. The disastrous blunders of other progressive orgs like BLM during this time only compounded the feeling that Leftists did not have their shit together and could not be trusted. People were leaving the party in such large numbers that pundits started giving it names like the “Crunchy to Alt-Right Pipeline” or “Conspirituality”.

Now, I’m not asking you to change your beliefs about any of these things, because I know you’re comfortable where you are. What I am doing is pointing out how massive information suppression campaigns are a recipe for destroying trust. This is the same thing I wrote about when Kamala lost. Restricting peoples’ free movement of thought is never going to end well. This traces back to why the boogeyman of ‘WOKEISM’ is such an easy punching bag for conservatives. Liberal thought-policing is a real thing and it’s repelling people by the millions because it reeks of elitism and exclusivity. And if the past few paragraphs have given you the sudden urge to post “wow didn’t realize this was an anti-vax page. Unfollowing” then you are exactly who I’m talking about. Stop the purity politics. Stop doing the FBI’s job for them. You cannot build coalitions this way.

Moving Forward

The modern Left is in a tumult right now. And if you’ve read this far, it might feel like there’s no way to fight back. But it’s time to address the subtitle of this piece. Can the American Psyche be saved? What can we possibly do to unfuck this mess?

Well, first off, the soul of the Left—meaning the principles that draw people to it in the first place—can never truly die. In fact, they self-seed wherever authoritarians reign. This is because the causes that the Left was built on—human rights, personal freedom, social safety nets, and nonviolence—are natural responses whenever greedy power structures exploit vulnerable peons. When things get bad enough, people always assemble into resistance formations, regardless of if they know what to call themselves or if they’ve ever read Marx. Leftists are made in response to Empires. Human civilization has a way of maintaining equilibrium like that.

If you came to this piece hoping for a how-to guide on How to Fix The Country in Ten Steps, I’m afraid that I’m about to tell you what you already know: It’s not going to be easy. There is no guide book because we’ve never been here before. But if there’s one thing that does feel possible to predict, it’s that the world is only going to get crazier, which all but guarantees new Leftist movements. Tech companies and war pigs and autocrats always overplay their hands, and that’s exactly why some form of authentic, grassroots Leftism will rise again. Attempts to exploit the working class are already becoming unbearable. How bad it gets before large enough numbers of people can force a stoppage is just a question of how well they choose to organize.

Remember this when the Next Big Thing gets politicized and the messaging gets really heated and you’re forced to pick a side. Just like Covid, the Next Big Thing isn’t going to be something you’re prepared to respond to. It’s going to be a new kind of threat, like civil war or alien invasions or AI robots. You won’t have time to form rational opinions. You’ll be expected to spring into an emotional reaction. In this theoretical but sadly very likely future, don’t do what liberals have done for the past eight years:

Don’t take to social media to recycle and reinforce the propaganda. Don’t fall into the trap of attaching your identity to a single political symbol, and at all costs, please try to maintain connections with your family and friends! Don’t divide yourselves! Next time you feel called to eject someone from your life based on a political position, ask yourself if it feels like something COINTEL-PRO would have wanted.

Instead, find solidarity. The culture war is a tool that keeps you fighting your neighbor instead of fighting the company stealing your town. Identity labels and other ‘isms’ can be good if they help you contextualize your experience in the world. They are bad if they give you reasons to hate your neighbor. Do not fight people within your own class! Reserve your energies for punching up. The Left will regain power if it returns to a worker’s party. There are enormous numbers of disgruntled proles on both sides of the aisle. If you figure out how to speak a language that unifies them, we can win our country back.

THIS IS NOT A TEST

THE WORLD NEEDS YOU

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL

WE ARE STRONGER AS A TEAM

With that, I want to end with an incredible quote from the script writers of the 42nd President of the United States, Slick Willy. It goes like this:

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America." - Bill Clinton, 1993

Regardless of what you think of the man, they knocked it out of the park with that one. Maybe if we all embody what it means to be ‘what’s right with America’ good things will happen.

This has been the 9th installment of the PhaseShift newsletter. If you like what you see but haven’t subscribed yet, I’d love for you to come along for the ride. You’ll have an option to pay but it won’t be mandatory to read the posts at this time. If you feel like sharing it to your networks, that may connect it with precisely who needs to see it most. The essay text is rich with links and I hope you clicked a few. If you’d like any more resources, inspirations and recommendations, here’s a short list:

- If you’d like a really excellent example of contemporary organizing, take a look at

Jon Jon Wesolowski

’s work with Strong Towns. Watch all his IG videos. They do an incredible job of explaining problems, advocating for real systemic change, and making points that resonate across political divides. It’s a case study on how to fight for a Leftist cause without relying on identity tropes or using othering language. More of this!

- I know I said there’s no ten-step guide on How To Fix The Country. But this came from an organization called Choose Democracy and it’s actually really good stuff. Full of hope and practical strategies: “Ten Ways To Be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Won”. Bonus material: Can Nonviolent Action Defeat A Dictator? This Data Says Yes

- This is a very digestible document about action steps during a political power grab. Plenty of ideas to work with if you want to integrate them into your local circle of influence: Resistance Guidebook

- This is similar to the above document, but in video lecture form. Short, digestible chapters covering different aspects of civil resistance “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder

- Change Here Now is a book written by my good friend Adam Brock. He dives deep into the interpersonal systems that make for a healthy society. By applying permaculture principles to social design, he discusses concrete ways to find the right people to organize with, and how to set norms within those groups to make meaningful impacts without burning out.

- Recapture The Rapture by

Jamie Wheal

is probably the best book I’ve read in the last 5 years. An enlightening rumination on our culture’s spiral out from spirituality and towards scientism. Studies how our beloved fundamentalist institutions are being replaced by extremism, and makes a solid case for reclaiming a religion of our own making before other forces do it for us. It’s not for everybody but it is an original and creative romp through the future of the End Times.

- Unfollow Me by Jill Louise Busby isn’t really about politics but it is about performative progressivism and how to center the self inside a world of toxic online expectations. If you’ve spent time in a hyper-PC nonprofit spaces, this book will speak to you.

- Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta is a work of quiet genius about the colonial forces that have shaped the Western mind, and how to un-glue the rational fibers that bind our false notions of separation and materialism.

That’s all. Your attention is appreciated. See you next time.