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the right knows exactly what has happened to them. it's exactly the kind of ideological collapse that they imagined would accompany the american invasion of iraq and it was supposed to happen because america in 2003 was just that great, so it explains how it was that the invasion of iraq made sense and was in a sense the objective and strategic center of the war. so they know exactly what has happened. the right just can't get it's collective head around the fact that they did it to themselves and that they did it simply by exercising power. because the other thing that neo-con thinking assumes is that the existing order is somehow legit normatively, so that there's a basis for gauging when a regime slips into authoritarian rule. so they know exactly what happened, it's just that they realized perhaps a bit late in the game that they are in fact once in power the kind of regime that their thinking is built around opposing.
all of this is a great big problem.
but things would kinda make sense again if this whole pulverization of an ideology because it ended up having to do what a coherent reformist ideology is ultimately supposed to enable, which is the exercise of state power, so the ability to undertake coherent actions and formulate coherent policies in fact turned out to be the result of the actions of some malicious Outside Force. because if anything like that were true, then you'd still have, you know, an ideology. a worldview.
so to preserve an ideology you need an explanation for your waterloo that does not in its story foreground the fact that it was the people in power exercising this ideology that through their actions and through the thinking that informed them pulverized the ideology that they enacted, but instead located a Malign Outside Force, something shifty that doesn't stay in place, something that damn it you just can't trust, which only makes sense if the neoconservative understanding of nationalism is entirely normative, you know, abstract and all ethical-like, so that it could be a check on regimes that slid toward, say, authoritarianism in the sense that it's a normative grid relative to which sliding off can be seen dammit lookit what's happening there mildred, it's time for a revolution.
so what remains the same is equated with what is ethical and what adapts is what is evil.
so this type of collective psychological problem of having watched as their own worldview ate itself through actually having power gets worked out this way. and to clinch it, it's good to have people be able to go look at each other, every theory of general strike talks about the importance of the public assembly, which really is about people looking at each other ok so you're doing this too. builds morale. i know, let's have a tea party.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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