Peon, welcome to your new progressive society, sponsored by your friendly tech billionaire

It is popular right now to portray what is happening in the USA as some sort of herald for tomorrow’s dystopia, as a sort of failed and divided state – a Trumpland of hatred and bile interspersed with talking heads analysing everything and nothing. Yet the USA remains the biggest economy in the world and, without question, is still the biggest cultural, academic and intellectual influence on us all. You need only look at how the summary killing of a black man in Minnesota resulted in protests, riots and supine elite displays right across the world, to understand that the USA dominates the world. There is no protest march for a racist genocide in Burma, slavery in Mali or police killings in France.

Trumpland is a hiatus not a trend, a reaction rather than a planned or directed ideological movement. It may be that this reaction sustains enough to see Trump returned in November for another four years of bizarre twitter trolling, but this doesn’t affect the real change in the USA, the change that created the reaction. You can, like Joel Kotkin, see this as a New Feudalism or you can track those who see the world of “woke” as a sort of permanent cultural revolution, but there is no doubt that what’s happening in the USA right now is spreading ever more quickly elsewhere.

The winning ideology is perhaps best called “progressive” rather than “leftist” or “Marxist” (for all that it is filled with these ideas). Even if Trump is re-elected the slow tramp of this ideology will continue, indeed opposition to Trump will be used as a vehicle to accelerate the change. Because of Trump, and to some extent the way in which conservatives react to the progressive idea, the model for progressivism won’t be democracy, for all that they talk about it, but rather the sort of Brave New World, soft oppression typified by the Communist Party's propaganda image of China.

Even traditionalist or communitarian voices will begin to question the essentially liberal presumptions of the USA. In one well-received opinion piece describing the US as a ‘failed state’ we read this: “…America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion.” We read on to hear how, in effect, liberalism has turned Americans into weaklings all mixed with a disdainful dismissal of that nation:

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

The thing being attacked here isn’t Trumpland but rather the vainglorious idea prevalent in those progressive circles that the USA can have the economic success wrought by liberalism and social justice - a sort of warped ideology more about social control than actual social justice. The threat to America doesn’t come from Trump, it comes from that ‘nepotistic rentier oligarchy’ in places like California.

Even before the pandemic, California topped the nation in the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners and has become progressively more unequal in recent years. But its greatest shame is the prevalence of poverty amid enormous affluence. California’s poverty rate, adjusted for cost of living, is the highest of any state and was higher in 2019 than in 2007.

California’s political leaders like to talk about racial justice, but Latino and Black populations bear the brunt of the pain. And by some measures, such as minority home ownership, California remains far behind states such as Texas, Michigan, Arizona and Florida.

California presents us with the vanguard of progressivism, a set of characteristics that represent a soft authoritarianism that Aldous Huxley would recognise:

“…it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.”

So, what characterises this Brave New World of progressive, caring authoritarianism?

1.   The search for and idolising of victimhood. Not simply “we are all guilty” but rather “you” (a specific and identified group, organisation, or institution) are guilty, your very existence oppresses me and makes me a victim. Authority uses this to control institutions and, by indulging victimhood, buys compliance and support

2.   Increasing dominance of business strategy by human resources management – these ideas are presented as protective (“employee rights”) but become just another tool for control and direction. Fear of exclusion, loss of advancement or even dismissal for “wrongspeak” will act to protect the organisation from external criticism and to ensure compliance and the spreading of corporate propaganda. People's private lives are not exempt from this corporate oversight.

3.   People will rent rather than own – not just homes but cars, equipment, and entertainment. In many cases this will, in true feudal tradition, be wrapped up with employment. You won’t just have a job but a flat, a vehicle and a set of home services courtesy of your employer.

4.   Leisure will be tied in with employment with your social life dominated by work colleagues, even to the point of socialising being done at corporate facilities – gyms, (alcohol-free) bars, and restaurants. The boundary between work and leisure will erode for all but leaders who will continue to enjoy ownership and a tightly policed private life

5.   There will be few children – a persistent faux-green propaganda will encourage this by telling women having children is selfishly destroying the planet – and those there are will spend much of their growing up in communal child care settings so the productivity of their parents isn’t lost to the sponsoring corporation or the government it owns

6.   Society will be unequal, not just because people no longer own things but because leaders will live apart from others and will have radically different lives to the workers even those fortunate enough to work for those leaders. Beyond the progressive corporation will be another world, a sort of hand-to-mouth existence of insecure, low-paid work. But far from those in this life representing a failure to meet need, they will instead provide corporate or state propaganda opportunities in the form of ‘charity’ and ‘policy’, how progressive concern for wellbeing is expressed.

7.   Surveillance will be ubiquitous, from cameras and face recognition through to apps that track our whereabouts and activity in the name of wellbeing. Moving around the corporate spaces of our lives will be dominated by the lanyard and the ID card. The world will become increasingly Taylorist, a sort of Californian version of Zamyatin’s “We”, as our work, play, reproduction, sleep, and health are monitored day and night

8.   Social enforcement – where people police their neighbours’ compliance – will become normal as government and corporations use technology to create systems encouraging the snitch, the bully, and the gossip

It may be that this world never arrives (although I fear it already has for some people) but it is the world – a sort of 21st century bread and circuses – that emerges from the chrysalis of progressive politics. In one respect it is a world of contentment (although we should probably not ask what the system would expect of those who do not comply or even rebel) but it is also a dead world. It’s not just that liberalism provided grit in the world’s shoe, a sort of impulsion to betterment, but that it told us you are not better than me and that each should have the same opportunity to improve. This was what made America, indeed it is what made the world, rich.

Progressivism rejects the idea of equal opportunity, choosing instead victimhood and a preference for identified groups. A preference that doesn’t threaten the powerful but acts to limit the old pioneering spirit, what Deidre McCloskey calls “innovism”, by removing much of the impulsion to betterment that liberty provided. As talk of innovation, research and development expands so the amount of actual innovation diminishes. Economic growth stagnates but, so long as people remain content in their coccoon, with dependence on the system, this stagnation is accepted.

Trumpland is a reaction, a reflection of the fear many have that they’ll be left outside this progressive bubble as much as a feeling that somehow the direction is wrong. The problem is that conservatives are really bad at revolution, they have an almost visceral opposition to breaking things up or tearing things down. This is one of the reasons why, while Trump is not a conservative, his revolution has, on its own terms, failed. The need to face down the new feudalism was there but, when the chance to do so arrived, conservatives were not prepared to pull down progressivism’s statues – to defund universities, to end affirmative action programmes, to face down public sector unions, to reform state schooling, and to refuse the cries of victimhood that sustain progressive ideology.

In a past age it was liberals – the sort of men who wrote the USA's Declaration of Independence and drafted its Constitution – who tore down the institutions of feudalism and mercantilism. Today’s liberals, leave aside a few noble libertarians, prefer to tolerate the faux liberalism of our progressive culture. They trip over themselves to splutter about black lives mattering, to argue that words not truths define identity, and to attack conservatives for daring to criticise their progressive friends’ propaganda or their 'save the planet' mythology. This is a liberal world where freedom enhancing things like the motor car or the Internet must be controlled and restricted because a few people use them badly. This is a liberal world that bans e-cigarettes while permitting cannabis, that plonks "me too" on its chest while indulging polyamory. A world where the leaders lead dull conservative lives in stable families and protected communities while urging others to reject family, children and traditional lives.

Progressivism is a modern monster raised up on ideas of victimhood, entitlement, and dependency. It is not interested in giving people a stake in society, the chance to grow and succeed, and the chance to fail too. We’re sliding gently into a warm pool of compliant contentment where we don’t need to grow up, a sort of Never Never Land presided over by seemingly benign corporate HR programmes and a government that enables this soft authoritarian control.

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