Pondering Divorce

You can't simultaneously prepare for peace and war, says the old saw. So which one to pick?

Say what you will about DALL-E, when you have to choose two between Fast, Cheap, and Good, it pushes Fast and Cheap all the way to Free and Instant.

I regard my inbox as a barometer of the zeitgeist, tuned to a cluster of personal concerns. This is true even when Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, and Art Basel Miami Beach roll through the same week of the calendar and my inbox turns into an abject swamp of self-promotion. That too is a sort of signal.

One of those personal concerns is the idea of a National Divorce, which for several months has been kicking around with enough intensity to prompt me to propose a paper about it to my nigh-erstwhile professional organization. So it caught my attention when How the Next Civil War Begins by B. Duncan Moench appeared yesterday in Tablet.

[I]t now seems clear to me that America’s demise will be inaugurated by what has become our country’s pastime: a contested election. In two years from now, both parties will declare themselves the electoral victor, with neither presidential candidate conceding defeat; state electors will ratify two different presidents, according to their preferred narrative or conspiracy theory; the country will then fracture, legally and institutionally, along red and blue lines…. National breakup efforts will be coming and, if we’re being honest, they’re behind schedule.

Striking as that may be, what jumped out at me was this:

Like it or not, the United States is poised to Balkanize at some point. If anything, sustained independence movements are overdue. The 21st-century ascent of the critical-race- and gender-as-a-social-construct ideologies might not actually represent an effort to dismantle a “hegemonic white patriarchy,” as claimed. A better way to understand the tremendous popularity of woke thought among the bureaucratic class could be as an unconscious attempt to create the moral economy needed to forcefully keep the union together a second time. For, if the red-state voters and rural Americans are merely dens of “deplorable” “racist” “fascists” then there’s simply no choice but to deny them democratic independence when they inevitably ask for it.

Speculating about the aggregate unconscious, particularly that of them whose political tendencies you don’t care for, is dicey. But points go to Moench for originality, and I find the suggestion plausible. Moench didn’t mention it, but the priority of the Merrick Garland-led Department of Justice is right-wing domestic terrorism. In August a leaked FBI document revealed that the symbols of various patriotic and libertarian movements would be regarded as indicators of “Militia Violent Extremists.” This includes the yellow and black flag of anarcho-capitalism, despite the fact that ancaps consist almost entirely of economics nerds and are connected to exactly zero incidents of violence.

Conspicuously absent from the list are the symbols of Antifa or Black Lives Matter, which are connected to incidents of violence by the hundreds leading perhaps into the thousands. In September, Fox News reported that Jane’s Revenge had taken credit for eighteen attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers this year and the FBI had made zero associated arrests. Meanwhile, parents who criticize Critical Race Theory at their children’s schools are still classified as terrorists.

This pertains because Moench concluded that in a scenario of a Biden re-election, the administration will deal with the secessionists violently. If that’s correct, then the Garland DoJ has essentially spent two years organizing the policing effort that will escalate into a military assault.

My own idea about the tremendous popularity of woke thought among the bureaucratic class is that it’s the justification mechanism for the progressive postliberal autocracy that they would like to establish. This, as I have explained recently, is a scheme of command economics justified primarily by real and manufactured emergencies of climate and race. But Moench prompted me to realize that progressive postliberal autocracy is going to frame itself as a movement of civic rectitude. As much as it disdains the United States as a benighted product of trans-Atlantic slavery, it will nevertheless wrap itself in the Stars and Stripes in the name of preserving the Union. It will issue a lot of empty talk about defending democracy. If red states vote to secede, the autocracy will characterize that act of democracy as an attack on democracy. It may sound insane to say so, but that’s how Remain reacted to Leave in the United Kingdom. “Is this the end of democracy?” asked the New Statesman shortly before Leave prevailed at the polls.

All this was fresh in my mind when four emails later came the news from the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant that it had announced its 2022 grantees. $695,000 went to twenty writers, and as far as I can tell not a single one of them is a white man. The prior year they made an exception for Kriston Capps, a progressive in good standing with respect to progressivism. But as of yesterday white men were entirely purged from consideration.

Those not familiar with the program may need the clarification that it is not an express effort to promote women or minority authors. It frames itself as “support[ing] emerging and established writers who write about contemporary visual art,” adding,

We advocate for an inclusive community of writers and thinkers. With our open application, our jurors, and our grants, we make a concerted effort to support arts writing in its various forms, with the recognition of difference in gender, race, ethnicity, geography, age, ability, and experience.

This isn’t hypocrisy. The bureaucrats of progressive postliberalism would have us accept, or at least profess, that “inclusive” means that white men have been excluded from the community of writers and thinkers, and deem it good, or pretend to in public. Like their counterparts in the political machinery, they’re Stalinists who believe that they’re working for Abraham Lincoln.

One more thing happened yesterday: I sat in the virtual audience of an online interview with actor, comedian, and FAIR in the Arts Fellow Clifton Duncan. Duncan went down the lonely road of conscience, in defiance of the Biden Covid regime and progressive orthodoxy, because he learned in his theater training that if you get in the habit of lying to yourself, it becomes difficult to access the truth in yourself. Without access to the truth in yourself, as an artist, you’re nothing. Which prompted me to ask him: What of the institutions, led by people lying to themselves, requiring those they work with to lie to themselves, and finally degenerating into an incentive program to get people to lie to each other and the whole world with the vigor that they’ve long been lying to themselves? Like, for instance, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant? Do we attempt to turn such organizations back to their purpose, or give up on them and find our own tribe?

Duncan, to his great credit, admitted to us that he wasn’t sure. I’m not either. Fortunately, in a way, I have it easier because temperament compels me to find my own tribe and tell the institutional enforcers of progressive postliberal autocracy, putting it politely, to take a hike. That’s what’s going to happen regardless of what I should do.

But now I have another question: should our tribe be preparing for the swing of the pendulum back to center, or for the breaking of the pendulum in half?