Cultural Renewal in a dying empire Part II

The anti-establishment subculture Post WWII to present day prospects

Cover Other Worlds February 1953 found on the internet and used without permission :-)

This is the second part of my two part series on America’s anti-establishment resistance. Special thanks to new contributor @darrylrendell and for the ongoing support of @phistosobanii

I the new anti-establishment 1950- 1990

When we left off in Part I I noted that anti-establishment culture saw a dark period in America between the world wars. This would soon change, many people were not enjoying the stultifying conformism of post WWII life in the suburbs. The two most obvious currents of anti-establishment thought would come from the John Birch society and “conspiracy theorists” on the right and the beats who later became the hippies on the left. At first glance these groups couldn’t be more different rock rib conservative anti-Communists and dirty dissolute Bohemian poets and artists. What could they possibly have in common? Quite a lot under the surface it turns out, they both hated the “progressive” east coast professional managerial class that had arisen in the east coast establishment post WWII.

Both Jack Kerouac of the beats and the founder of the John Birch Society Robert Welch put a great deal of stock in the ideas of Oswald Spengler, a man who didn’t see history consisting of linear progress but of cycles of decline, fall and re-birth.

“Welch’s view of history is based on the writings of Gibbon and

Oswald Spengler. Spengler, a twentieth-century positivistic

philosophy of history, wrote a two volume study, The Decline of the

West. He saw history as a succession of self-contained cultures that

follow one another like the seasons of the year.

From a 1966 graduate thesis, “The Ideology of the John Birch Society”

Max P. Peterson Utah State University

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9125&context=etd

In a similar fashion the beats saw Spengler as the antithesis to the dreary life of 1950s establishment dominated America that they hated.

“Inchausti centers his argument around the idea that a central text that influenced the Beats, especially Kerouac, was Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West. Spengler (1880-1936) believed that cultures begin as cults, or spiritual enterprises designed to convert the “zoological struggle for survival” into a pursuit of high ideals. As cultures age, they decline into civilizations: “Mechanical operation replaces idealistic zeal,” Inchausti summarizes. “Altruism gives way to the practical life. Everyday existence becomes less a heroic adventure and more an ‘irreligious’ routine.”

https://lawliberty.org/the-beat-generation-and-the-decline-of-the-west/

So we can see that both the John Birch Society and the beats followed Spengler in seeing the west as being in decline which is the antithesis of the progressive establishment view that technical, economic and political progress was going ever upward.

The conservative establishment immediately saw “the Birchers,” as a threat to their plans for elite managerial class rule and had their operative William F. Buckley Jr. an ex-CIA man purge the Birch contingent from his new magazine National Review.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr.

This was arguably the start of Neo-conservatism which would become one of the pillars of establishment thinking to this day.

The path of the left anti-establishment took a different course and being more literary and artistic the establishment’s reaction rather than expulsion was to try to co-opt the beat anti-establishment world view and turn it into a harmless consumer lifestyle of beatniks and later in the hippy and rock era teenyboppers. Since the left counterculture had an ambivalent view of progress (which is essential to the establishment word view) the establishment did it’s best to cultivate people in the left counterculture who were friendly to the idea of progress. This attachment to the idea of progress was so crucial to the establishment that they were willing to even encourage anti-business Marxist views as long as the views were congruent with their view of the inevitability of eternal progress and rule by the managerial class. In the 1980s this means the establishment was surprisingly friendly to political correctness, as “p.c.” was actually compatible with corporate and state managerial oversight of society as it emphasized rules for speech and behavior and downplayed the romantic individualism and anti-establishment views of the beats and early hippies. By the end of the 1990s this p.c. subculture had infiltrated corporate HR departments, and would become the ideology of large corporations, the state department and other branches of the Federal government. This became what we now call woke today, and though it is based on a pretense of “radicalism” it is now a part of the establishment and fully compatible with professional managerial class establishment rule.

This brings us to near the present day. While there are some details I have left out like the rise of social media and the expansion of the establishment to the west coast of the U.S. and around the globe leading to globalism, the populism of MAGA and Donald Trump, and Covid and “the new normal,” the players however currently are the ones I have described, of a neo-con and woke establishment, and a populist paleo-con, dissident right and Libertarian resistance that can trace it’s roots to the John Birch society and the unassimilated to woke faction of the cultural and political left that can trace its roots to the beats.

II Anti-establishment 3.0 what comes next?

Since in this section I will be engaging in speculation there will be fewer footnotes and more of a fast and loose Gonzo writing style. Sorry if this is jarring, but I think it’s appropriate to the material.

So here we are in the present, our doddering senile hair sniffing Ur-establishment President seems to be lurching towards a global possibly nuclear war with Russia while embracing the horror of “trans children.” All resistance seems scattered between everything from the dissident right, to the slim remains of the true left like “black in the empire” and Jimmy Dore. Wut do? To be honest I think we need to take a postmodern view of anti-establishment resistance, and rather than seeing it as one unified thing instead see it as network of nodes in a Deluzian rhizome pattern. This means if you are a radical anti-establishment artist organizing pop up happenings and encouraging people to leave social media you should see someone writing against Biden’s War in The American Conservative as a friend and ally in anti-establishment activity and not a foe just because they dress differently than you and speak differently than you about superficially different subjects. Movement politics with marches in the street is the establishment now, the realm of the boomer and the woke. This would get us nowhere anyway playing on the establishment’s played out turf and would only lead to corporate media condemnation as the media is part of the establishment now. As anti-establishment rebels grounded in the earlier anti-establishment transcendentalist and populist movements that stressed self reliance and romantic individualism we don’t want unity anyway, we want a diversity of ideas to be juxtaposed to the woke’s diversity of skin colors and sexuality and dull conformist uniformity of ideas.

IMO we should be both looking backwards to America’s decentralized New England town meeting style politics and small individual yeoman family farms, and forwards to local meshnets rather than the internet, to 3D printers, and thinking beyond the large scale structures of machine age technics. Monsanto and other GMO agribusiness corporations, the Federal government, and the internet are the establishment now. All are ruled over by establishment’s professional managerial class. As disparate anti-establishment players our one uniform theme should be rejection of tools and techniques that make us reliant on the professional managerial class. Depending on our allegiance whether it is paleo-con small town, or radical neo-left urban Bohemian artist, our strategies of resistance may take very different forms, but this is actually a strength IMO as it makes us unpredictable and hard to fully eliminate as our connections are underground and implicit, rather than explicit as part of some known coalition or populist front. We may perhaps gather for celebrations, or to talk amongst ourselves, and then afterwards vanish back to our tribes.

In this 5^th generation of warfare there will be no bombs, or manifestos, simply living our lives as disparate people not compliant with our professional managerial overseers, WEF spooks and other assorted cronies and flunkies will be our resistance to play out as we see fit as individuals and small communities secretly in the know that we are part of something bigger.

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