OK, this will be one of my non-satirical essays … or mostly non-satirical essays.
It will serve as a companion piece to The New Normal Left, another non-satirical essay that I published in April 2023, which was basically just a reiteration of a speech I gave at a conference in London. It went over pretty well back then.
I republished most of it in my latest column, A Brief History of Global Capitalism. It didn’t go over quite as well this time. Political perspectives appear to have shifted significantly over the course of the last year and a half. Or maybe it was just the word “capitalism” in the title, which, for some reason, annoyed a lot of people.
This essay will also annoy some people. However, that is not my intention, so, if you’re one of those readers who get agitated if you see the word “capitalism” in anything other than an enthusiastically pro-capitalism context, you might want to give this essay a miss.
Also, if you’re one of my regular readers, apologies for the repetition of points that you’ve heard me make many times. Not everyone has read my previous essays, so I need to do that for the sake of clarity, which is what I hope to provide in this essay, rather than, you know, just making people laugh.
Ready? OK, here we go.
The first thing I should probably clarify is what I mean by the term “New Normal.” Naturally, people associate it with Covid. It doesn’t have anything to do with Covid. Yes, the “New Normal” was ushered into being by the “state of emergency” that was imposed on the world from 2020 to 2023, but it didn’t end in 2023, and it never had anything to do with a virus.
You do not transform entire societies into pathologized-totalitarian police states and force people to submit to experimental “vaccinations” because of an airborne respiratory virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of humanity.
The “New Normal” was never about a virus. The term — which I did not make up; it was deployed by the authorities and the corporate and state media — means exactly what it sounds like it means. The “New Normal” is our new official “reality,” just as “The War on Terror” was our official “reality” from September 2001 to 2016.
The “New Normal” is actually an evolution of “The War on Populism” that began in 2016, after Brexit and the rise of European populism, and Donald Trump in the USA. I’ve published whole books of essays on this subject, so I’m not going to reiterate all that here. Essentially, what happened in 2016 was, the global-capitalist system that we all live under switched “realities” like The Party switched official enemies in Orwell’s 1984. It happened over the course of a few weeks.
Most people have probably forgotten by now, but, back in August 2016, we were still very much living in “The War on Terror.” By October, “The War on Terror” was over, and “The War on Populism” was on. “The War on Populism” was our official “reality” from then until the Spring of 2020, when it morphed into the “New Normal” with the roll-out of “the pandemic.”
And now…well, here we are.
OK, let me try to clarify another point. When I say the “New Normal” is our official “reality,” I mean “reality,” not ideology. Ideologies are a dime a dozen. They exist in relation to other ideologies. “Reality” doesn’t. There is only one “reality.” If there is more than one “reality,” they’re just ideologies. “Reality” is singular. It is axiomatic. “Reality” isn’t up for debate. If you debate “reality,” you are a “crazy person.” That’s the whole point of having a “reality.”
I realize this is a difficult concept. If you are having trouble with it, perhaps think of official “reality” as a supra-ideological ideology. I’ve often called it a “post-ideology.” It’s what an ideology becomes when there are no longer any other ideologies to put it in context (i.e., as an ideology). So, it disappears as ideology, and becomes “reality,” and becomes unassailable … or, in other words, “just the way it is.”
Which, of course, is the ultimate goal of every totalitarian movement and system, i.e., to overcode every element of society with its official “reality,” eliminating any and all forms of dissent, which, at that point, no longer has to be suppressed, because it has become inconceivable, literally inconceivable, as in the mind can no longer formulate such thoughts (no more than fish could think critically about water, i.e., if fish could think like that).
In any event, the “New Normal” is our new official “reality.” We are only in the early stages of it, but some of its features are unmistakably clear — the criminalization of dissent, corporate and state censorship, the devalorization of democratic rights and principles, the “pathologization” of political opposition, etc.I have described it as a new, nascent form of totalitarianism. A global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. I’m sorry if that agitates my “pro-capitalism” readers — as I mentioned, that is honestly not my intent — but global capitalism is the system that we all live in. We need to be able to call it what it is, and try to understand how it is rapidly evolving.
It is evolving in an increasingly totalitarian fashion, which, given the circumstances, is not at all surprising. As I put it in those earlier essays…
It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but ‘clear and hold,’ i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in ‘The Global War on Terror,’ and finally, in our so-called ‘Western democracies,’ as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit less dramatically. In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the ‘New Normal’ is.”
If any of my staunchly “pro-capitalism” readers are still with me at this point, please, try to relax. I don’t want to confiscate your private property, or raise the capital gains tax on billionaires, or any of that other “commie” stuff. I am neither “pro-capitalism” nor “anti-capitalism.” I’m just trying to explain where we are.
Where we are is in the inceptive stages of the evolution of the first globally hegemonic power system in human history. Communism is dead. Nazism is dead. Every would-be ideological opponent to the hegemony of global capitalism is dead. There are only two major forces in play: (1) global capitalism, which is carrying out that above-mentioned global “Clear-and-Hold” op , and; (2) the reactionary resistance to it.
The character of that reactionary resistance is decentralized and heterogeneous, as is the character of the global-capitalist system. Neither force is a monolithic entity. The basic differences are: (1) global capitalism, despite its heterogeneous elements and the perpetual intramural competition among them, comprises a single ideological system, whereas the reactionary resistance to it does not, and; (2) the global-capitalism system is the occupying force, so it controls the territory — i.e., the entire planet — whereas the reactionary resistance is an insurgency, or, rather, a diverse array of insurgencies, many of which do not entirely understand what they are actually “insurging” against.
Which brings us to the New Normal Right.
I have described the resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism as “reactionary,” but I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. Most of this reactionary resistance is an attempt to defend traditional values from the value-decoding machine of capitalism.
If I can quote from The New Normal Left again…
“Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital. Capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic ‘reality’ in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.”
As the events of the last eight years have demonstrated, there are still a lot of people who have no interest in living in a global marketplace where there are no values, and anything means anything, and everything and everyone is essentially a commodity.
This is what the “culture war” in the West is all about. People are not quite ready to surrender their religious values, their cultural values, their national sovereignty, and other such concepts, and embrace a borderless, monomulticultural, supranationally- governed post-social society that is basically just an endless combination mega-mall and GloboCap theme park.
The thing is, the majority of the resistance in the West is staunchly “pro-capitalist,” or at least staunchly “anti-communist,” and thus is unable to face the fact that it is global capitalism and its values-decoding machine that they are actually resisting. Hence the desperate coining of alternative names to designate the adversary, “cultural Marxism,” “communism,” “wokeism,” “crony capitalism” … the list goes on and on.
The same goes for the non-Western resistance. Most militant Islamic fundamentalists believe they are waging jihad against “the infidels,” or “the Zionists,” or against “The Great Satan, America.” Populists in Eastern Europe believe they’re resisting the USA, or NATO, which they are, but that’s just intramural competition. What they are really up against is the values-decoding machine of global capitalism, which is desperate to get its hooks back into Russia, de-Putinize and re-privatize the hell out of everything, and get those flows of global capital reflowing.
Anyway, that’s the playing field, currently. You got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, neutralizing internal resistance to its global-capitalist Gleichschaltung campaign and implementing (post)ideological uniformity, and you got the internal, reactionary resistance to GloboCap.
So, that works out pretty well for GloboCap. You can’t carry out a Clear-and-Hold op if there’s no reactionary resistance to “clear.”
The catch is, most of the reactionary resistance is not quite scary and militant enough. I’m going to out on a limb here and state that most conservatives are not longstanding members of democracy-hating neo-Nazi militias. They’re just regular folks who want to be left alone to live their lives as they please, and to raise their families according to their values, just like most liberals — and, yes, even leftists — are not fanatical, mask-wearing, censorship-happy, shrieking, totalitarian freaks, but just regular people, with good intentions.
But that doesn’t work for GloboCap. Garden-variety, non-fanatical folks, regardless of their political persuasions, are as useless to the GloboCap Clear-and-Hold op as a one-legged monkey in an ass-kicking contest.
And so that’s where the New Normal Right comes in.
If the New Normal Right did not already exist, GloboCap would be forced to invent it. It needs a convincing boogeyman — or, actually, a diverse collection of boogeymen — to serve as an excuse for its evolution into a pathologized-totalitarian system.
Fortunately, for GloboCap, the New Normal Right does exist, and is becoming uglier and thus more useful by the day. Just like the New Normal Left are playing their part — i.e., as the New Normal’s brownshirts — the New Normal Right are stepping right into their roles like seasoned Hollywood actors.
Their role in this drama is “the far-right extremists.” The “bigots.” The “anti-Semites.” The “Holocaust deniers.” The “neo-Nazis.” The “neo-nationalist insurrectionists.”
In other words, they are playing the part of “Hitler.”
Naturally, GloboCap is playing “America” (i.e., the “good guys” who defeated Hitler), so it needs a “Hitler” to be at war with. It needs a “Hitler” to justify doing away with what is left of our democratic rights, transferring political power from nation-states to supranational global corporations and non-governmental governing organizations, censoring and visibility-filtering dissent, and otherwise continuing to metamorphose into its new totalitarian form. The terrorists are still playing “Hitler” abroad. It needs the New Normal Right to play “Hitler” at home.
Which the New Normal Right is increasingly doing. Emboldened in large part by Elon Musk and other prominent “influencers,” they’re letting it rip with the blatant bigotry, and anti-Semitism, and neo-nationalism, and strutting around like racist bull roosters. Holocaust denial is trending. Rumors of cat-eating Haitians are circulating. Elon, who has been consecrated “Free Speech Incarnate,” is martyring Himself in Brazil and the UK. His disciples are flying around the planet, preaching The Gospel of Elon in their “Free-speech X” T-shirts, and passing out Bolsonaro stickers.
And the Musk Cult is on its way to Washington to rescue the Republic from tyranny!
Yes, the New Normal Right is salty! They are ready for action! The Rebellion is on! Unfortunately, they have no idea what it is that they are actually rebelling against. Intoxicated by a sense of impending victory over the “libtard commies” and their “woke mind virus,” they are playing right into GloboCap’s hands…
…or being led down to the Weser River, depending on how paranoid you want to get.
If I were the showrunner at GloboCap Pictures, I couldn’t have scripted the set-up any better. All we need now is an inciting incident, you know, like terrorists attacking the World Trade Center, Russia invading Ukraine, Hamas attacking Israel, or neo-Nazis storming the Reichstag, or the Trumpians storming the US Capitol, or British racists running amok, or … well, I think you get the general idea.
Something that will enable GlobCap (also known as “The New Normal Reich”) to declare another “global state of emergency,” resuspend constitutional rights, turn loose the goon squads and the New Normal Left again, and maybe even shut down the Internet to protect the public from malinformation, or extremism, or terrorism, or Hitler, or whatever!
Who knows? Maybe they’ll even throw in another apocalyptic virus!