While doing research for my last post, I ran across an interesting juxtaposition. I was looking at postmodern philosophers, and according to Wikipedia, one of the most prominent American postmodernists was a guy called Richard Rorty.

So I thought that I should take a look at this Rorty guy if he’s emblematic of American postmodernism, the same philosophy that Peterson claims is simply Marxism in disguise and has a “death grip” on North American universities.

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty’s view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty’s critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty’s principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN and CP, are more richly developed in later works, … In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Richard Rorty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Okay, well that’s pretty complicated, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Is this the stuff that’s turning college students into Maoist Red Guards?

But the interesting thing is that I found that some of Rorty’s writings went viral in the aftermath of Trump’s election victory in 2016, particularly this passage:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Hmmm. Sounds pretty damn accurate, doesn’t it? It’s even more impressive that it was written back in 1998 during the Clinton administration, before even George W. Bush much less Donald Trump.

That quote is from this Vox article: Richard Rorty’s prescient warnings for the American left. I confess, I read this article when it first came out, but I had no idea who Richard Rorty–or Jordan Peterson–were at the time.

But the most salient part of the article is Rorty’s discussion of identity politics and change in emphasis on the Leftist tradition in America. Far from being a proponent of identity politics, this philosopher–who is considered to be one of the exemplars of postmodernist thought in America–issues a stark warning to the American Left about focusing on identity politics to the exclusion of all else. He also eerily predicts the politics of today, including the rise of Dr. Jordan Peterson and the alt-right more generally.

He begins be reviewing how the focus of the left in america changed due to the Vietnam war:

The focus of leftist politics changed in the 1960s. For Rorty, the left ceased to be political and instead became a cultural movement…The Vietnam War, more than anything else, set the left on its new trajectory. The war was seen as an indictment of the whole system, of America as such. Thus the broader anti-communist Cold War become a central fault line for left-wing activists. Led largely by students, the new left regarded anyone opposed to communism — including Democrats, union workers, and technocrats — as hostile… From [Rorty’s] perspective, the problem was the total rejection of pragmatic reform. The belief that there was nothing in America that could be salvaged, no institutions that could be corrected, no laws worth passing, led to the complete abandonment of conventional politics. Persuasion was replaced by self-expression; policy reform by recrimination. There was a shift away from economics towards a “politics of difference” or “identity” or “recognition.” If the intellectual locus of pre-’60s leftism was social science departments, it was now literature and philosophy departments. And the focus was no longer on advancing alternatives to a market economy or on the proper balance between political freedom and economic liberalism. Now the focus was on the cultural status of traditionally marginalized groups… And it did this by “teaching Americans to recognize otherness,” as Rorty put it. Multiculturalism, as it’s now called, was about preserving otherness, preserving our differences; it doesn’t oblige us to cease to notice those differences. There’s nothing morally objectionable about that. As a political strategy, however, [multiculturalism is] problematic. It reinforces sectarian impulses and detracts from coalition-building. The pivot away from politics toward culture spawned academic fields like women and gender studies, African-American studies, Hispanic-American studies, LGBTQ studies, and so on. These disciplines do serious academic work, but they don’t minister to concrete political ends. Their goal has been to make people aware of the humiliation and hate endured by these groups, and to alienate anyone invested in that hate.

Wow, that sounds pretty dead-on. Indeed, even Wikipedia notes of “Western Marxism”

The phrase “Western Marxism” wasn’t coined until 1953, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While often contrasted with the Marxism of the Soviet Union, Western Marxists were often divided in their opinion of it and other Marxist-Leninist states…Since the 1960s, the concept has been closely associated with the New Left and the focus on identity politics and the cultural domain, rather than economics and class struggle (this became especially prominent in the United States and the Western world).

Rorty explains that this focus on marginalized groups will enable a populist right to emerge in response to Americans (especially white Americans) believing their culture is under attack. This will distract them from economic issues such as the consequences of globalism and financialization. The left’s focus on cultural issues thus created an opening for the populist right, for people like Pat Buchanan, and later Donald Trump, who galvanize support among the white working class by exploiting racial grievance, cultural differences and economic anxiety. As Rorty explains:

While the Left’s back was turned, the bourgeoisification of the white proletariat which began in WWII and continued up through the Vietnam War has been halted, and the process has gone into reverse. America is now proletarianizing its bourgeoisie, and this process is likely to culminate in bottom-up revolt, of the sort [Pat] Buchanan hopes to foment.

Buchanan, you might recall, was touting the “cultural Marxism” meme back in the Nineties, long before anyone had heard of an obscure Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson. This article from a right-wing news site (back in 2010!) gives an overview of Mr. Buchanan’s worldview:

“The United States has undergone a cultural, moral and religious revolution. A militant secularism has arisen in this country. It has always had a hold on the intellectual and academic elites, but in the 1960s it captured the young in the universities and the colleges. “This is the basis of the great cultural war we’re undergoing….We are two countries now. We are two countries morally, culturally, socially, and theologically. Cultural wars do not lend themselves to peaceful co-existence. One side prevails, or the other prevails. “The truth is that while conservatives won the Cold War with political and economic Communism, we’ve lost the cultural war with cultural Marxism, which I think has prevailed pretty much in the United States. It is now the dominant culture. Whereas those of us who are traditionalists, we are, if you will, the counterculture.” So states Patrick J. Buchanan in the opening scenes of James Jaeger’s new film, Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America. As always, Buchanan is outspoken and splendidly patriotic in his testimony on the present degeneration of our country. Many of us born before the 1960s and its shocking nihilism agree vehemently with him. We were raised in a land far removed philosophically from the America we are cursed with today, and this disturbing fact weighs heavily upon our hearts and minds.

Cultural Marxism and the Corruption of America (The Daily Bell)

I suggest reading the article in its entirety. These paragraphs, especially, sound eerily similar to the rhetoric of Dr. Peterson:

“Critical Theory,” the brain-child of Max Horkeimer, was the first and most important of these strategies. Under its auspices, every tradition of Western life was to be redefined as “prejudice” and “perversion.” And these redefinitions were to be instilled into the social stream via devastating, scholarly criticisms of all values such as the family, marriage, property, individualism, faith in God, etc. These criticisms proved to be quite successful in the aftermath of the world’s collapse into the Great Depression, which brought about widespread disillusionment with the traditional capitalist society that had evolved in the West since the Renaissance and discovery of the New World. The strategic criticisms were soon expanded by demarcating society’s members as either “victims” or “oppressors.” All who were economically successful were defined as oppressors, and all who were not successful were termed victims. Religious authorities became “witch-doctors.” Advocates of different social roles for men and women became “fascists.” Corporate heads became “exploiters.” Fathers became “patriarchal tyrants.” Families became “primitive clans.” The stream of criticism was relentless and extremely sophisticated in an intellectual sense. Thus it mesmerized the pundit class who then disseminated the criticisms’ fundamental content to the populace at large.

Compare to Peterson’s rhetoric cited in my previous post:

The postmodernists built on the Marxist ideology, Peterson said. “They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.”…“And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities,” he said. “It’s come to dominate all of the humanities—which are dead as far as I can tell—and a huge proportion of the social sciences.”…“We’ve been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization. And that’s no paranoid delusion. That’s their self-admitted goal,” …

https://www.theepochtimes.com/jordan-peterson-explains-how-communism-came-under-the-guise-of-identity-politics_2259668.html

Similar to Buchanan, Peterson believes that being responsible is the new counterculture: Jordan Peterson – Growing Up and Being Useful is The New Counterculture (YouTube).

All Peterson does is transfer the culpability for undermining Western civilization from the 1930’s Frankfurt School to the 1960’s French Postmodernists. Note that the idea that multiculturalism is an attack on “Western values” and that all of our major institutions have been taken over by socialist-minded elites imposing their views from above is a staple of alt-right thinking. It was an intrinsic part of Anders Breivik’s manifesto published right before his killing spree.

And Peterson wonders why they’re protesting.

Rorty’s prescient warning was that elites would emphasize identity politics on purpose in order to divide the working classes and keep them from coalescing around an economic agenda that would endanger elite power (unions, higher minimum wages, universal healthcare, higher taxes on unearned wealth, financial regulations, job creation, etc.):

By divorcing itself from class and labor issues, the left lost sight of its economic agenda and waged a culture war that empowers the right and has done little to improve the lives of the very people it seeks to defend. Rorty’s advice to the left was to pay attention to who benefits from such a strategy: The super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere – to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events…the super-rich will have little to fear. Big business benefits most from the culture wars. If the left and the right are quarreling over religion or race or same-sex marriage, nothing much changes, or nothing that impacts wealth concentration changes. Rorty is particularly hard on Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom he accuses of retreating “from any mention of redistribution” and of “moving into a sterile vacuum called the center.” The Democratic Party, under this model, has grown terrified of redistributionist economics, believing such talk would drive away the suburbanite vote. The result, he concludes, is that “the choice between the major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence.” Rorty’s concern was not that the left cared too much about race relations or discrimination (it should care about these things); rather, he warned that it stopped doing the hard work of liberal democratic politics. He worried that it’s retreat into academia, into theory and away from the concrete, would prove politically disastrous. Immediately after the now-famous passage about a future “strongman,” Rorty offered yet another disturbing prophecy: One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. If this were to happen, Rorty added, it would be a calamity for the country and the world. People would wonder how it happened, and why the left was unable to stop it. They wouldn’t understand why the left couldn’t “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed” and speak more directly to the “consequences of globalization.” They would conclude that the left had died, or that it existed but was “no longer able to engage in national politics.”

“Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet…” Er, holy shit, this is exactly what has happened! I mean, does this not explain the rise of the alt-right movement in a nutshell? And he wrote this back in 1998, before anyone had heard of 4chan, Reddit, Facebook or YouTube!!!

Who benefits from such a strategy? Maybe the same people promoting Dr. Peterson as “the world’s most important public intellectual.”

So, not only does this prominent postmodern philosopher NOT endorse identity politics, but he explicitly warns against it! Of course, this is just one individual. But it certainly argues against the fact that some shadowy, united cabal of radical leftist postmodernists is enthusiastically pushing identity politics and multiculturalism to undermine the West and turn us all into communists. Or that this strategy is successful.

Instead of identity politics and media shaming, what would be successful?. Rorty suggests:

…Rorty’s vision of an “inspirational liberalism” is worth revisiting…The first of his three lectures is devoted to John Dewey and Walt Whitman, both of whom, on his view, personified American liberalism at its best. These were pragmatists who understood the role of national pride in motivating political change. They understood that politics is a game of competing stories “about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.” The strength of Dewey and Whitman was that they could look at America’s past with clear eyes…and go beyond the disgust it invoked, beyond the cultural pessimism. They articulated a civic religion that challenged the country to do better, to forge a future that lived up to the promise of America. In Rorty’s words, they recognized that “stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” Both the Right and the left have a story to tell, and the difference is enormous: For the Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking, as utopian foolishness. The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved.

“[The Right] sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking, as utopian foolishness.” Well now, that’s a pretty accurate description of the heart of Jordan Peterson’s worldview as far as I can tell. To reinforce this point, Peterson deploys ideas from Darwinism, such as his now infamous discussion of lobster battles for hierarchical supremacy.

The Perplexing Mr. Nietzsche

Speaking of philosophers, is anyone more confused and misunderstood that Mr. Nietzsche?

In the right-wing article on multiculturalism cited above, Nietzsche is cited as an inspiration for the evil cultural Marxist conspiracy:

The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” in which the Mad Hatter’s world is instituted. Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, traditional marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personal honor, rising through merit — all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.

Yet, at the same time, Nietzsche is also a favorite philosopher of the alt-right:

In her recent book about the rise of the alt-right, Irish academic Angela Nagle discusses their obsession with civilizational decay. “They’re disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture,” she told me in a recent interview. Nietzsche made these same arguments more than 100 years ago. The story he tells in The Genealogy of Morality is that Christianity overturned classical Roman values like strength, will, and nobility of spirit. These were replaced with egalitarianism, community, humility, charity, and pity. Nietzsche saw this shift as the beginning of a grand democratic movement in Western civilization, one that championed the weak over the strong, the mass over the individual. The alt-right — or at least parts of the alt-right — are enamored of this strain of Nietzsche’s thought. The influential alt-right blog Alternative Right refers to Nietzsche as a great “visionary” and published an essay affirming his warnings about cultural decay. “Future historians will likely look back on the contemporary West as a madhouse,” the essay’s author writes, “where the classic virtues of heroism, high culture, nobility, self-respect, and reason had almost completely disappeared, along with the characteristics of adulthood generally.”

Nietzsche is also frequently cited by many white nationalists:

“You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.” That’s how white nationalist leader Richard Spencer described his intellectual awakening to the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood last June. “Red-pilled” is a common alt-right term for that “eureka moment” one experiences upon confrontation with some dark and previously buried truth. For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that dark truth goes something like this: All the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, universal suffrage — that’s all bullshit. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths. Nietzsche says the world is in constant flux, that there is no capital-T truth. He hated moral and social conventions because he thought they stifled the individual. In one of his most famous essays, The Genealogy of Morality, which Spencer credits with inspiring his awakening, Nietzsche tears down the intellectual justifications for Christian morality. He calls it a “slave morality” developed by peasants to subdue the strong. The experience of reading this was “shattering,” Spencer told Wood. It upended his “moral universe.”

The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too (Vox)

“There is no capital-T truth? All modern pieties are bullshit? Stifling the individual? This seems like exactly the sort of stuff Peterson regularly rails against in his attacks on postmodernism.

Peterson’s embracing of Nietzsche is also troubling. Nietzsche was, of course, associated with the Nazis, mainly through his sister, who was a fan of the movement and intentionally distorted his posthumous writings to reflect that. But pinning Nazism on Nietzsche would be as disingenuous as pinning the crimes of Communism on Marx. Yet his promotion of order as being a “masculine” phenomenon, (Logos) and chaos being a “feminine” phenomenon strike me as vaguely authoritarian. Peterson claims he is actually anti-authoritarian, and an avowed enemy of “extremism” of both the Left AND the Right. But it’s hard to get that from his metaphysics. An obsession with “order” and “masculine virtues” are both staples of right-wing thought. So is an obsession with “civilizational decline.” According to the right, civilizational Decline comes about when feminine ‘chaos” triumphs over masculine “order.”–the same affliction the alt-right claims is weakening society.

Much of Peterson’s philosophy is responding to Nietzsche, and it does so in two ways: He agrees with Nietzsche that life is hard and will inevitably involve enduring misery. To survive, one must be prepared for this. But for Peterson, preparation does not involve defining one’s own truth and reality, as Nietzsche said. Instead of assuming the world will conform to one’s own will, Peterson advocates the importance of taking responsibility for oneself and living in accordance with the objective reality of the world around us. For Peterson, there is objective truth and reality, and we cannot simply transcend all moral frameworks and create truth for ourselves…To deny these constraints leads to chaos—internally, interpersonally, societally. This is the main point of Peterson’s recently released Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, wherein he lays out a moral framework that he believes will help people live life to the fullest—however unavoidably tragic life may be. Rule Eight: “Tell the Truth—or, at least, don’t lie,” addresses the Nietzschean, post-modern axiom of the subjectivity of truth head on. Peterson contends that we intuitively know what truth is, and that “lies make you weak and you can feel it . . . you cannot get away with warping the structure of being.” …Similarly, Rule Seven — Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient — also defies Nietzschean nihilism and corresponds with Peterson’s understanding of an objective reality. “Meaning is what we do to buttress our self against the tragedy of life … our pursuit of meaning is an instinct. Perhaps our deepest instinct… meaning is the antidote to the malevolence of life.” To deny meaning exists, to pursue happiness instead of meaning, or to seek meaning in the wrong things will lead to chaos. But Peterson borrows from, in addition to criticizing, Nietzsche. Both men rail against the “last man,” the human type that seeks to shirk risk and responsibility in favor of comfort and safety. Like Nietzsche, Peterson’s view offers an “ideal human type” that lives by a superior code. For Nietzsche it was Übermensch that lived by a code of his own creation— a “master morality” of “might makes right,” also popularized by Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato’s Republic. For Peterson, the ideal is a mode of existence wherein one lives within the preordained structure of the universe and nobly grits the challenges that life throws their way.

Why Jordan Peterson Is the Last Gentleman (Law and Liberty)

https://youtu.be/FTxmKc80wUw

Ignoring the real problem

Is the “radical Left” really the biggest problem in the world today? If Postmodernism is a philosophy that rejects all truth and universal values and defines reality as whatever one chooses it to be, isn’t that more compatible with right-wing politics in America today? Consider the quote of a Bush administration official:

The phrase [Reality-based community] was attributed by journalist Ron Suskind to an unnamed official in the George W. Bush Administration who used it to denigrate a critic of the administration’s policies as someone who based their judgements on facts. In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Suskind wrote: The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’. The source of the quotation was later identified as Bush’s senior advisor Karl Rove, although Rove has denied saying it.

Reality-based Community (Wikipedia)

“Create your own reality?” Sounds pretty postmodern to me. And from the very next Republican administration:

“Alternative facts” is a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer “utter[ed] a provable falsehood”, Conway stated that Spicer was giving “alternative facts”. Todd responded, “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

Conway’s use of the phrase “alternative facts” to describe demonstrable falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized by journalists and media organizations…The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian. Within four days of the interview, sales of the book 1984 had increased by 9,500%…

Alternative Facts (Wikipedia)

It doesn’t get more postmodern than that does it? Create your own reality? Alternative Facts? The world has no objective order or reality. It is up to us to define our own truth, purpose and reality for ourselves. Consider this quote from Peterson:

18:06: Among these post-modernist types, man, they don’t give a damn for facts. In fact, facts for them are currently whatever the current power hierarchy uses to justify their acquisition of power.

Sounds like the trump administration to me. And is it the Left who is really anti-science?

The Washington Post recently reported that officials at the Center for Disease Control were ordered not to use words like “science-based,” apparently now regarded as disablingly left-leaning. But further reporting in the New York Times appears to show that the order came not from White House flunkies but from officials worried that Congress would reject funding proposals marred by the offensive terms. One of our two national political parties — and its supporters — now regards “science” as a fighting word. Where is our Robert Musil, our pitiless satirist and moralist, when we need him (or her)?

In fact, this article makes the case that Trump is our first postmodern president:

[Postmodern] writers describe a world where the visual has triumphed over the literary, where fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking, where nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) has replaced historical consciousness or felt experiences of the past, where simulacra is indistinguishable from reality, where an aesthetic of pastiche and kitsch (Trump Tower) replaces modernism’s striving for purity and elitism, and where a shared plebeian culture of vulgarity papers over intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism. For Baudrillard, “the perfect crime” was the murder of reality, which has been covered up with decoys (“virtual reality” and “reality shows”) that are mistaken for what has been destroyed. “Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath our excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information—the sign and reality sharing a single shroud,” Baudrillard wrote in The Perfect Crime (1995). The Trump era is rich in such unreality. The president is not only a former reality-show star, but one whose fame is based more on performance than reality—on the idea that he’s a successful businessman. Although his real estate and gambling empire suffered massive losses in the early 1990s, and Trump’s “finances went into a tailspin,” he survived thanks to the superficial value of his brand, which he propped up though media manipulation. In Baudrillard’s terms, Trump is a simulacra businessman, a copy of a reality that has no real existence. All sorts of simulacrum and decoy realities now flourish. Consider the popularity of conspiracy theories, evidence of a culture where it’s easy for fictional and semi-fictional narratives to spread like wildfire through social media. Trump loves spreading conspiracy theories about his enemies, and his enemies love spreading conspiracy theories about him.

America’s First Postmodern President (The New Republic)

To me, the most tragic thing about Jordan Peterson is that not only does he recite right-wing talking points to his audience of impressionable and hurting you men, he advises them to get with the program and grin and bear it. Do not challenge or question a social order that is crushing you, just master it. And that narrative certainly benefits a certain group of people.

And we’re living in a time eerily similar to that which saw the rise of right-wing regimes around the world in the 1930’s. And once again we see illiberal regimes rising around the world due to the economic circumstances. We see extremist parties rising because the mainstream parties have lost their ability to effect change.

Peterson never tires of telling us about the millions of people who died under Communist repression. His house is apparently decorated wall-to-wall with Soviet propaganda art. He even named his daughter after Mikhail Gorbachev. But consider what is happening in Russia right now:

Now a museum, Perm-36 is the only part of Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that still survives. The network of brutal labour camps was where Soviet Russia sent its political opponents, as well as many criminals and kulaks – wealthier peasants. During Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, millions passed through the system. Hard physical work on meagre rations in extreme weather killed vast numbers…The museum at this site was founded by historian Viktor Shmyrov in the 1990s as post-Soviet Russia opened up to the world. “The Gulag was a huge phenomenon but there are practically no traces of it left,” he says. “That’s why Perm-36 needed preserving.” The country opened many archives then too, revealing the scale and details of decades of political repression. But the desire to dig deep into that past has been fading. In 2014, Perm-36 was taken over by the local authorities and the museum’s founder was removed. The new administration then tried to soften the museum’s focus, says Shmyrov. “The dominant idea now is that the Gulag was necessary, both economically and to bring discipline and order.” One member of the new team admits there were changes. “There was a lean towards justifying the repressions, maybe three years when the museum wavered,” historian Sergei Sheverin says, standing by rows of barbed wire. At one point, the Gulag museum’s own website defended Stalin’s imprisonment of scientists – to force them to work for the state. Sheverin suggests the museum was a stain on the “Great Power” narrative of Russia that’s now led by Putin. That approach has seen Stalin rehabilitated because of his role in the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. “The policy from above is that we shouldn’t remember the bad things, only the good,” says Sheverin. The museum’s founder Viktor Shmyrov suspects there was an additional reason for his removal. Perm-36 used to host an annual forum and music festival that attracted thousands. In a place where free-thinkers were once incarcerated, Shmyrov says the festival had developed into a “freedom space”. “Not one person there could say a good thing about Vladimir Putin of course,” he says. “We used to have a powerful civil society. Now they’re bringing order and control.” The attempts to dilute the historical message at Perm-36 sparked opposition from human rights activists and the independent press…

Does Putin’s Russia reject the West? (BBC)

But not, apparently, from Jordan Peterson who was busy fighting the real enemies of freedom: Candian politicians attempting to protect transgender people and the Ontario Education Association.

Meanwhile, in China, the president has removed limits to being president for life:

Last week China stepped from autonomy into dictatorship. That was when Xi Jinping … let it be known that he will change China’s constitution so that he can rule as president for as long as he chooses …. This is not just a big change for China but also strong evidence that the West’s 25 year long bet on China has failed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West welcomed [China] into the global economic order. Western leaders believed that by giving China a stake in institutions such as the World Trade Organization would bind it into the rules based system … They hoped that economic integration would encourage China to evolve into a market economy and that, as its people grew wealthier, its people would come to yearn for democratic reforms ….

Economists Shocked That China Invalidates Their Pet View That Economic Liberalization Producers Political Liberalization (Naked Capitalism)

As Rorty predicted, the elites are using cultural issues to keep us divided against one another as they consolidate power and engage in a new enclosure movement. Peterson is just the latest arrow in their quiver.

Without prompting, he raged, with operatic scattergun anger against postmodernism, Marxists and—his favourite bogeymen—“social justice warriors.” It was the day after the U.S. presidential election, and I was still reeling from Trump’s victory. Peterson was unperturbed. He said Trump was no worse than Reagan and that the Democrats got what they deserved for abandoning the working class and playing identity politics. I was initially surprised—someone who spent a lifetime studying tyranny wasn’t maybe a tad worried about a president with such undisguised autocratic ambitions? But then I remembered that Trump, too, has long blamed political correctness for America’s ills, and reflexively used the phrase to dismiss any criticism he faced—everything from his treatment of women to his proposed immigration ban on Muslims. And, among many Trump supporters, “social justice warrior” is a favourite epithet used to disqualify his critics.

The Pronoun Warrior