The "Molochian System" is what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. The Libertarian Right hate it, and in its heyday so did the New Left–and for good reason. I think that what many among the Left intelligentsia today, those in media, in the culture biz, in the universities, don't understand is that they've given up on Utopia and made peace with the Molochian System that they now manage. They think of themselves as edgy and rebellious because they drop f-bombs in their speeches and display BLM posters in the coffee room, but they are so only in their imaginations.They have become the establishment, the "system", or what guys like J.D. Vance call the "regime" and Curtis Yarvin calls "the cathedral". These guys on the Right are not wrong to hate it; it’s just that their cure is worse than the disease.
But I don’t know if Liberals understand this: The only space to be rebel these days is to be a culture warrior on the Right. Lefties, you are no longer cool and edgy. Your schtick is as conventional today as Norman Rockwell’s was in the fifties. You come across as a bunch of moralistic prigs. Own it.
These cultural Left institutions are now run by a new generation of "organization men", a new managerial class that requires conformity from everyone in their regime according to the most recent trends in the left liberal moral canon. I'm not saying that the substance of that canon is wrong, but I am saying that because it has become the ethos of the "system", it has become associated with what makes people feel oppressed by the system. It's hard for people to separate what's right in those values from the way it feels when they are being forced to conform to them.
The Left's emancipatory program no longer feels emancipatory; it feels like a demand for obedience–or else. Watch your prounouns or the next thing you know you'll be reported to the language police and given the boot. It happened to one of my colleagues at the university where I work, a garrulous, funny, friendly guy–you know the type–who inadvertently let slip something that someone found offensive.1
So part of what the Left needs to understand is that Donald Trump is a big, extended, rebellious, middle finger to the system that they run. Many of those who voted for Trump did not do so to say Yes to Trump, but to say No to the Liberal "system" that they find so oppressive and that they long to be "free from".
It's stupid and adolescent that they did so, but we as a society celebrate stupid and adolescent. Nevertheless, it is a foolishness that they will soon come to regret once they realize that their vote has put Caligula on the throne. Oops. My bad.
Note
1. In the late 2010s, I was called into the dean's office and told that a student had complained about me. I learned that I made this student uncomfortable because I was "culturally insensitive" in chatting with an international student in my class during a break. My offense was that I asked this student where he was from. The student I was speaking to did not complain; it was another student sitting nearby eavesdropping who did. I had no recollection of the conversation, and so I asked if this student reported anything else "offensive" that I might have said. The dean said, No. It's just that I made the complaining student uncomfortable because he/she felt that the student I was speaking to might feel self-conscious about talking about his country of origin. I told the dean that he couldn't be serious, and that I found it hard to believe that this warranted wasting his time and mine in calling me in for such a frivolous complaint. He agreed, but said that new rules required that he follow up on every such student complaint. He said his main reason for calling me in was to warn me that I needed to be careful. That's just the way it is now. A few weeks later I learned that the above-mentioned colleague was fired for something culturally insensitive that he had said. I haven't been in touch with him, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he voted for Trump.
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