Late Soviet does feel like the right comparison. I've been thinking a lot about not just Gouldner but Kojève's equivalence between the postwar US and USSR lately, and wondering if this isn't just the other foot dropping after forty years, the beginning of the disarticulation. As a Platonist-Christian and a sort-of product of the downwardly mobile managerial-clerical class I don't and possibly can't agree with your precise conclusions, but I think your tone is close to the truth than brother Gasda, who has lately been seeming to me altogether too sunny in his evaluations of the state of things.
Yes, I'm not so much optimistic *or* pessimistic...but I think as lower-middle-classers who were not quite successfully attempting to be upwardly mobile, Matthew and I are just finding doors now open that had long been closed. Which doesn't mean the whole situation is going well or will turn out well. (In the late Soviet analogy, isn't Trump the liberal reformer who softens things up for the asset-stripping? Maybe we haven't seen the new czar yet.) I don't know if this is too sunny or not but I don't see how the social conservatism can survive alongside the libertarian tech accelerationism, and I also don't see how the latter could possibly fail to overcome the former unless the grid goes down or something. Think we're headed in the near term for cyberpunk Neuromancer Blade Runner Transmet—stratified rule by techno-business elites but with tech-enabled diversity to the point of speciation. "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative," as America was meant to be.
It’s hard for me to judge-I’ve been until recently a cynic who assumed those doors were shut to me anyway (I’ve since realized that one should actually experience those rejections instead of preemptively manifesting them) and never tried to be a real intellectual employed in the university published in legacy magazines, etc. I wouldn’t count out the social conservatives-part of why Trump I happened was that the Buckleyites, neocons et al had promised and promised without delivering (and in certain ways I’m more sympathetic to them than the musk/tech faction inasmuch as some of them do hold to a universal humanistic position, however subordinated to nation etc) but you’re right that the logic of the type of capitalism we’ve been doing here makes it difficult to imagine any sort of total victory for them. Which yes, is good, because as afraid as I am of the Thielist-Landist-Yarvinist anarcho-feudalist world we seem to be headed toward, I’d rather not live in the America First Things and the evangelicals think they’re building either.
I am more sympathetic to the Land-style faction because, though taking it in a ridiculously dark direction à la Carlyle before them, they do stem from the Miltonic-Shelleyan-Joycean utopianism to which I am in the end more loyal than to religious orthodoxy, though the latter, as you say, has its humanistic merits, and I ultimately dream (as did Milton and Joyce, I believe, if not Shelley) of a synthesis.
P.S. Émilie Carrière is now the enemy of the last remaining Hegelian egirl, who has become an "Esoteric Catholic Duginist" (some people really do need to take a walk in the fresh air or read Middlemarch or something):
Yes, if we must be on the right I would like some synthesis as well! Moreover both sides are racist and biologically essentialist in the least sophisticated way possible (not that any level of racism is desirable of course) which is the real problem which prevents one from having much sympathy with actually existing religious rightists. I haven’t kept up with Carrière since she left Twitter, good to see that she’s still getting into barely comprehensible beefs
Yes, interesting that he turned out to be the most right/relevant Marxist of the 20th century! All the comments under that X/Twitter thread are about how he was a bad person. It's always arguable if that matters for a poet or philosopher, but I'm sure it doesn't for a sociologist.
Late Soviet does feel like the right comparison. I've been thinking a lot about not just Gouldner but Kojève's equivalence between the postwar US and USSR lately, and wondering if this isn't just the other foot dropping after forty years, the beginning of the disarticulation. As a Platonist-Christian and a sort-of product of the downwardly mobile managerial-clerical class I don't and possibly can't agree with your precise conclusions, but I think your tone is close to the truth than brother Gasda, who has lately been seeming to me altogether too sunny in his evaluations of the state of things.
Yes, I'm not so much optimistic *or* pessimistic...but I think as lower-middle-classers who were not quite successfully attempting to be upwardly mobile, Matthew and I are just finding doors now open that had long been closed. Which doesn't mean the whole situation is going well or will turn out well. (In the late Soviet analogy, isn't Trump the liberal reformer who softens things up for the asset-stripping? Maybe we haven't seen the new czar yet.) I don't know if this is too sunny or not but I don't see how the social conservatism can survive alongside the libertarian tech accelerationism, and I also don't see how the latter could possibly fail to overcome the former unless the grid goes down or something. Think we're headed in the near term for cyberpunk Neuromancer Blade Runner Transmet—stratified rule by techno-business elites but with tech-enabled diversity to the point of speciation. "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative," as America was meant to be.
It’s hard for me to judge-I’ve been until recently a cynic who assumed those doors were shut to me anyway (I’ve since realized that one should actually experience those rejections instead of preemptively manifesting them) and never tried to be a real intellectual employed in the university published in legacy magazines, etc. I wouldn’t count out the social conservatives-part of why Trump I happened was that the Buckleyites, neocons et al had promised and promised without delivering (and in certain ways I’m more sympathetic to them than the musk/tech faction inasmuch as some of them do hold to a universal humanistic position, however subordinated to nation etc) but you’re right that the logic of the type of capitalism we’ve been doing here makes it difficult to imagine any sort of total victory for them. Which yes, is good, because as afraid as I am of the Thielist-Landist-Yarvinist anarcho-feudalist world we seem to be headed toward, I’d rather not live in the America First Things and the evangelicals think they’re building either.
I am more sympathetic to the Land-style faction because, though taking it in a ridiculously dark direction à la Carlyle before them, they do stem from the Miltonic-Shelleyan-Joycean utopianism to which I am in the end more loyal than to religious orthodoxy, though the latter, as you say, has its humanistic merits, and I ultimately dream (as did Milton and Joyce, I believe, if not Shelley) of a synthesis.
P.S. Émilie Carrière is now the enemy of the last remaining Hegelian egirl, who has become an "Esoteric Catholic Duginist" (some people really do need to take a walk in the fresh air or read Middlemarch or something):
https://x.com/tenshi_anna/status/1888628740441391553
Yes, if we must be on the right I would like some synthesis as well! Moreover both sides are racist and biologically essentialist in the least sophisticated way possible (not that any level of racism is desirable of course) which is the real problem which prevents one from having much sympathy with actually existing religious rightists. I haven’t kept up with Carrière since she left Twitter, good to see that she’s still getting into barely comprehensible beefs
*cough* For Gouldner will fight, and Gouldner will be right.
Yes, interesting that he turned out to be the most right/relevant Marxist of the 20th century! All the comments under that X/Twitter thread are about how he was a bad person. It's always arguable if that matters for a poet or philosopher, but I'm sure it doesn't for a sociologist.
Who hasn’t wanted to beat up a grad student…including grad students.