American glasnost?

Yes and no. Managerialism will be an impediment to cultural renewal. What Netflix can teach us about the deep structures of en-shit-ification.

Politically, this feels like a moment of re-set that is more significant than any I have lived through previously. The victim narratives that have provided a core cultural logic for the last few decades have gone eerily silent. It is hard to imagine BLM eruptions happening next summer with any real conviction or energy. Likewise, one doesn’t expect another round of MeToo defenestrations to be carried out in the legacy press — our version of an Inner Party purge.

Narratives of oppression have long anchored what Hannah Arendt already in the 1960s identified as a “politics of repudiation,” in which the governing classes point to the rottenness of America and thereby release themselves from allegiance to the nation, and from the claims of the common good upon their conscience. This frees the establishmentarian Left to pursue projects that are deeply unpopular, and often harmful to the majority. Victimology provides the ultimate “permission structure” of progressivism.

Will this logic remain tenable? If not, the change will be seismic, as this stuff is at the core of contemporary politics. The phrase “American glasnost” keeps popping into my head, by analogy with the ideological thaw that immediately preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. It is hard to say if that thaw contributed to the collapse, was a leading indicator of it, or both. I don’t think the American empire is at risk of collapsing so precipitously, but the ideological thaw is palpable. The sense of being subject to an internal empire is lifting.

Writing in Tablet, David Samuels points out that over the last dozen years,

Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

He goes on to describe a “permission structure machine” that “Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party.” It succeeded in “bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval.”