The intense reaction to Trump and the Republican party could be in part explained by the results of this struggle. Our culture and our demographics are very different now. It is no coincidence that much of the political vitality and mobilization behind Trump came through the Breitbart media empire. Though Breitbart's paranoid musings on cultural Marxism seem very bizarre and overblown at a glance, they are definitely getting at something deeper. The sentries on the right correctly detected a major push on an unprotected flank: though the left was largely defeated in the economic realm, it continued on to become dominant in the shaping of culture, which the right is now trying to counteract.
The problem that the right vaguely senses in its paranoid way has nothing to do with Marxism. It is that various identity groups on the left are gradually coalescing in their interests and coordination and are forming much more powerful blocs, which has been a project taking place largely in the cultural realm.
It is true that the failure of the Hilary campaign, in which these blocs were cynically courted, resulted in a general shift of attention back to the economic realm, but it is a serious mistake to dismiss the realm of culture and identity as frivolous or divisive. Different people achieve political consciousness in different ways, depending on the pressures and traumas pertinent to their lives. However as each pursues their own political pathways, they gradually progress to the points of resistance that concern everyone.
This is the real danger for the right. To maintain global capital, a general division has to be maintained. Capital thrives on numerous interconnected separations, compartmentalizations if you will, of various political phenomena. You start seeing the clubs and guns really come out when these divisions are threatened, when things start to come together outside the logic of capital.
The cultural onslaught that the Breitbart media network is carrying out is preposterous and a pale shadow of the leftist cultural realm, and it is opening this new flank just as the right's economic platform is going up in flames. The left is now tasked with building bridges between economic and cultural struggles throughout the land. And the oligarchy sits frozen in place and stares on.
It is no secret that there is a general terror passing through the ruling elite. One hears tales of escape planes, island landing strips, doom bunkers, buried grain silos, and a huge assortment of what we might call various panic buttons.
This isn't necessarily a new development; I think here of the 19th century industrialists that built their homes just down the street from the local garrison, always cognizant that the end was nigh. So it has been for some time, and since then we continue to rebuild our homes along the fault lines and flood plains of capital, without a care that these fault lines and flood plains - which become more inflamed by the day - are largely socially determined, as opposed to their natural brethren.
No doubt, there is a general unease passing through the lower classes as well. The fields of potentiality are opening up once again, within which exist both terror and hope. But the stakes are very high today, stakes which I'll be exploring further in time.
