Recreational Outrage

We are living in unprecedented times. Ideological division has given birth, once again, to extremism.  Extremism is as old as belief itself.  Look hard enough and you’ll find evidence of it in nearly every complex society that has ever existed, from the first caveman chief who claimed to know the divine secrets of the sky as the voice of godly powers, to the Zealots in Roman Judea, or the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire.  A lost and impressionable citizenry searches for meaning and answers, so they turn to leaders who claim to have them. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme and all that.

The more desperate a people (or, interestingly, how complacent and decadent a people), the more an extreme idea resonates.  For the post-Weimar Germans, whose currency was more valuable as fuel for heat than for actual purchases, Nazism seemed everything their life at that time was not.  For starving Russians living under an uncaring Tzar and huge wealth disparity, Marxism sounded like a dream come true.  Among the less desperate, the Romans called it luxuria – the psychological state of the population concerned with extravagance, indulgence, and the breakdown of traditional natural and social orders.  Christianity arose as – to the Romans of the time – an extremist sect, those monotheistic heathens who refused to give blood sacrifice to the gods, and coupled with the numb boredom of luxuria and other factors – like mass immigration and civil wars – gained total power in the Crisis of the Third Century to spell the end of any tendrils remaining of the Pax Romana as the Western world became a Christian theological superstate, before plunging largely into the resultant dark ages.

So no, extremism is not new. It is the oldest political technology in existence. It thrives in hunger and in excess; it rarely gains mainstream traction in stable societies and requires more of a “system shock”. It flourishes in the desperation of collapse and in the boredom of comfort. It promises moral clarity and validation in exchange for an informed and nuanced world view. What is new is not the existence of radical wings, but their proximity to – and accumulation of – power, their viral velocity, and the normalization of rhetoric inside societies that once prided themselves on institutional restraint, and championed the Enlightenment and the rule of Reason.

The 20th century gave us extremist regimes; the 21st century may be testing whether democracies can survive the ideologues that result. I will look at the past 125 years of what were considered the radical views of the day, on both the left and right extremes, and try contrast that with what is happening today. The speed of mobilization on a global level, the institutional erosion and corruption, the fragmentation of information, and the violent rhetoric accompanying.

1900 – 1920

A turbulent time in human history, much like today, but without weapons that can exterminate the species in an instant. The Industrial Revolution produced a new and incredibly powerful industrial capital class. Factory owners, financiers, rail magnates, all gaining massive political power in countries like the US or Britain. Early labour conditions were brutal, and still kept the working class impoverished. Over time, workers found new ways to assert themselves, but always found themselves getting less than they felt they deserved. While Marx himself died in 1883, his intellectual heirs and rivals spent the turn of the century engaged in a full-scale ideological cage match over how industrial societies should be governed. Communism, Anarchism, Social Darwinism, Liberalism… an endless parade of intellectuals claiming to have the answer to all the woes of the citizenry.

Leftist revolutions like the Mexican Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution sought to return the wealth of a nation to its working class. There were labour uprisings, assassinations, even a few anarchist bombings. In the radical Left of the time, opponents were not seen as legitimate political actors, they were enemies of mankind, and violence – while unpleasant – was necessary to save the people from an irredeemable system. Sound familiar? Rhetorical justification of violence, dehumanizing language, the viral spectacle of the Propaganda of the Deed. The results? Well, I’ll touch on that next section but spoiler alert, it didn’t turn out well.

On the Right, there were some scattered nationalist militias, some proto-fascist organizations, but nothing on the scale of the Leftist radicals of the day, nor of the far-right regimes that would rise from the ashes of WW1. The Left was praising murder of political enemies, making martyrs of their slain members, framing disagreement as betrayal, and portraying opponents as monsters. On the Right, the overarching sentiment was nationalism and xenophobia. At the very extreme you had anti-Semetic and ultranationalist groups who engaged in paramilitary street violence. This was mostly Germany/Austro-Hungary, where things intensified after 1918, with the violent suppression of leftist uprisings who themselves had been waging a campaign of bombings and other terror-style attacks.

1920-1945

This is what got Orwell all hot and bothered about the world of the future. Those experiments with radical socialism had failed, and failed hard. The alacrity with which communist Russia went from Marxism to Stalinism was astounding. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of up to 20 million of his own people, when the world population was a 10th of what it is now. The Great Purge alone featured up to 800,000 extrajudicial killings. That puts Obama’s 4500 or so to shame. There was always a new “Five Year Plan” promising the eventual payoff with the patience and enthusiastic cooperation of the workers, who were now worse off than they had been before. When the plans failed, scapegoats were made and murdered, as is always the way with attempts at socialism. And despite this Soviet shit show, Mao’s revolutionary efforts were gaining ground in other nations.

Another mass-murdering psychopath was Hitler over on the extreme right, accompanied by a fascist Italy and militaristic Japan. Totalitarian, just as the communists, but marked by Hitler’s and Hirohito’s aggressive wars of expansion. The Nazis may not have killed as many of their own people as Stalin did, but they introduced a uniquely horrific innovation of German efficiency: the industrialization of genocide through a conveyor-belt process of state-sponsored murder. There were far-right groups in nearly every country at the time, like the Silver League in the US, or the British Union of Fascists, as wars both ideological and physical were still ringing Europe like a bell.

Hitler and Stalin weren’t all that different; primarily, they were both extremists. (They actually shared a lot more in common. The book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock is excellent) The ideological spectrum isn’t a line; it’s a circle (Horseshoe Theory). Pushed too far to either extreme and you end up in a third wing: the Iron Wing. This is what men like Orwell saw destroying the world. Totalitarian states that did not just want control over the economy, the education, the military – they wanted control of your thoughts. This was done through censorship and propaganda, both which had become powerful tools coupled with the relatively new science of psychology. Edward Bernays – Sigmund Freud’s nephew coincidentally – is considered to be the father of modern public relations and propaganda theory. He built on Machiavelli’s management of public perception, need to appear virtuous (even when not), and use of fear and narrative control as tools of influence. His 1928 book Propaganda argued that the “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of the masses was a central element in democratic society – a tool that extremists quickly weaponized. Bernays applied psychoanalytical concepts to mass communication in a way that systematically shaped public opinion. When applied to the public en masse, it enabled men like Hitler and Stalin to take and maintain control (through people like Goebbels, a famous student of Bernays’ work).

The clearest era of radical domination, the first half of the 20th century was a bloodbath. When the smoke cleared, the Left remained extreme, while the Right was defeated entirely, or absorbed toward center. Except in Latin America, where military dictatorships were just starting to pop up. Military juntas styled themselves as the last line of defence against communism, and seized power in places like Guatemala and Argentina.

1945-1970

The Latin American military dictatorships were far-right in the sense that they endorsed private ownership, abhorred communism, and suppressed labour movements rising out of the Great Depression. They were often supported by the US as a bulwark against the spread of Socialism. The Dirty War in Argentina disappeared 30,000 people. Franco was in power in Spain and heavily suppressed opposition. Apartheid South Africa sprung up from ultranationalist Afrikaners. The hallmark of the far-right, as ever, was military suppression of dissent. In the US, McCarthyism sprung up as an overreaction to the (very real) threat of communism (which killed up to 100 million people in the 20th century).

Researchers in psychology, such as Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch sought to understand how the propaganda systems used by the Nazis and Japanese could cause everyday to commit systemic atrocities, testing the “just following orders” defence. What they found was that roughly 2 out of every 3 people will obey to commands or conform to group opinions – even when it clearly violated their moral codes – with almost no prompting. Hell, Milgram had his random everyday subjects “kill” a man by electrocution just because a scientist in a white coat told them to. Other experiments like The Third Wave by Ron Jones, or the Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes exercise by Jane Elliott, showed us what people like William Golding and Thomas Hobbes had warned us of – the “darkness of men’s heart”. And this psychological susceptibility did not vanish with the fall of the Axis powers.

Communism and the West entered the Cold War. Maoism was spreading globally, the Cultural Revolution happened, proxy wars popped up. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” killed between 15 and 45 million of his own people through ingenious plans like forced collectivization, unrealistic production quotas, grain requisitioning – all while suppressing any dissent in the media – that resulted in a massive famine. It would be bad enough if it were an isolated instance in a communist state, but it was not. Nearly every communist state ever conceived has lost huge numbers to the inevitable famine that accompanies the central planning pillar of the ideology. The Soviet Famine killed 3-7 million in ’33; more than million more in ’46-’47. North Korea’s Arduous March (albeit in the 90s) killed around 1 million people. The post-war famine in North Vietnam killed 1-2 million, and next door, Cambodia lost up to 2 million people. The communist military regime in Ethiopia took a drought and turned it into a major humanitarian catastrophe killing up to a million more through forced resettlement and “villagization”.

In Western countries, post-1945, there have been no major famine events. Western powers even prevented famines in other nations, such as via The Marshall Plan in Europe, actions like the Berlin Airlift, and through reconstruction efforts in South Korea and Japan. The paths may have diverged after the Bolshevik Revolution kick started Commiemania, but several generations later, attempts at socialism were still failures by any metric, regardless of how many 5 Year Plans they tried. Unfortunately for all of us, they became nuclear-armed, ensuring the survival of Stalinist and Maoist structures by raising the cost of any external intervention to an existential level.

1980s-2000s

After the Cold War, ideological clarity faded. The American left, having to admit the failure of communism, drifted to new radical causes. These were no longer political ideology causes. The fringe included eco-terrorism, and the war on climate change. There were anti-globalization riots, as it was a big issue on the Left (of course, they then went on to vote in globalists time and time again). This was where “social justice” became a lifestyle and moral identity. Just like Lenin, they started out with the best of intent, but being politically correct started to become more important than the truth, or policy for that matter. The remaining communist states, like China and Vietnam, underwent a pragmatic shift, adopting state-capitalist models that maintained authoritarian control while embracing global markets.

On the far Right, the concern became more anti-government and anti-regulation, and right-wing militias formed throughout the US. They were demonized by left-wing media as Nazis, and while there were a few examples of that, they did not define the Right, who distanced themselves from the extremists. The Oklahoma City bombing, one man’s revenge plot for Waco and Ruby Ridge, killed 168 people, second only to 9/11 for domestic attacks. It’s important to note that the instances of violence out of the far-right in the US were almost entirely the work of lone lunatics who had become too far gone for even the extremists – nutjobs left with nobody else to blame but the government, condemned on both sides. Europe was a different beast, as the lead up to and aftermath of the fall of the USSR was chaotic. Far-right groups carried out a number of attacks, in addition to lone radicals, but on the whole, violent extremism was a shadow of it’s early-20th self.

During this time, violence on the whole was episodic, and importantly, fringe groups did not have institutional support, on either side. The fringe movements were seen as fringe movements, and did not enjoy popular endorsement. Could it be that we were finally heading in the correct direction – a stable, centrist consensus?

2001-2015

September 11, 2001 radically changed global politics. Ideological extremists were blamed, and Islamophobia launched. Personally, after everything I’ve read and watched, I find it impossible to believe those towers fell in that way due to the impact of a jetliner, but hey, what do I know? If the Islamic extremists weren’t radicalized before the US response to 9/11, they sure were afterwards. I get the strong feeling that it was about this time that Western liberals and their ideological masters started looking at jihadi extremists willing to blow themselves up for the cause and thought, “Hmm. That could work!”, and began radicalization studies.

The Left began to cozy up to the fringe even more than they had during the eco demonstrations and other media-friendly causes. More and more, examples of extremism started to show up in the mainstream, often dressed as remedying systemic injustice. Consider the transition from “equality of opportunity” to “equity of outcome,” – a shift that moved the goalposts from legal fairness to social engineering. Only the examples of injustice started to make less and less sense as they reached farther into the realm of faith and well past the road to reason. Empirical data was no longer as relevant as “lived truth”, as the movement morphed to mirror a secular faith rather a ideology of reason.

The radical Right during this era maintained its traditional isolationist and nativist contours, though it increasingly integrated a post-9/11 “security” mindset. In the US, citizen militias, like the Minutemen, would meet up and talk about patriotism and how immigrants are to blame and occasionally shoot some anti-personnel weapons off in rural areas. There were still the same anti-government, anti-outsider crazies who would pop up every few years, taking their anger and failures out on innocent people by murdering them, like Anders Breivik. The far right were all about the War on Terror, mistrust of the foreign, and trampling on people’s privacy in the name of security.

Then in 2007, the iPhone was released and suddenly, everyone in the developed world had a scrying mirror pressed to their face nearly every waking hour of every day. Very quickly, media systems started to polarize. Social media algorithms began to massively reward high emotional arousal – specifically outrage – engagement to maximize user retention and drive revenue. Public forums started to look like echo chambers, and they quickly became near-frictionless radicalization pipelines. Those in power understood this to be the move valuable instrument of thought control ever conceived, and quickly turned these screens into de facto telescreens, broadcasting tailored propaganda 24/7. Identity-based mobilization started to occur where people increasingly referred to themselves by their cause or party affiliation, rather than as an individual person, and sometimes as an entirely different gender.

Extremism became networked, on both sides. Journalism and the mediums that used to carry it died, and along with it gatekeepers that curated public discourse. Newspapers failed; clickbait became the norm. The idea of “woke” was born, and with the #metoo movement, Cancel Culture was established for extrajudicial social enforcement, and the rigid social orthodoxy of wokeness began to lay ruin to people’s lives – at first to some who probably deserved it, but very, very quickly it turned into a public lynching of anyone threatening the groupthink. Consider the 2015 “Yale Halloween Costume” controversy or the 2017 firing of James Damore at Google as early examples of this ideological enforcement. Then Donald Trump decided to run for president and everything suddenly went manic.

2015-2025

The Republicans didn’t really have anyone who could match the charisma of Obama, who charmed his way into a Nobel Peace Prize despite raining death in the form of up to 4500 extrajudicial killings while in office and resolving zero conflicts. Still, much of the American public was rightly upset over the direction the world was headed, namely straight into a dystopian nightmare. Along comes Donald Trump. He didn’t charm like Obama (far from it), and he certainly wasn’t as masterful an orator, but he had his own DGAF charisma, and people LOVED that he wasn’t a politician. He was a Ross Perot on a party ticket. He was also a TV personality, and he leveraged that on-air disdainful “impress me” vibe into an “I’m not with them; I don’t sound like them at all” personality throughout his campaign, completing the image of a true Outsider. Watch him interviewed decades ago and it doesn’t sound like the same person; gone is the aggressive, populist cadence. The Right ate it up and he won the Republican ticket despite both parties reacting to it like a macrophage to a virus.

On the far right, nationalist populism exploded. A new wave of anti-immigration sentiment rose up against the loose borders of the Left, who were seen as importing voters loyal to them, no matter the societal cost. There were open calls to dismantle institutions that the people on the Right no longer had any trust for. Terminology such as “Deep State” and “Drain the Swamp” became and remain common refrains, charging institutions like the FBI and DOJ as partisan adversaries (probably not that far off the mark). But the issues were no longer discussions with the Left, and tribalism became an entrenched part of the political theatre. It was very much a “with us or against us” mentality that destroyed what used to be center, although diversity of thought on the Right remained more flexible than that of the Left, where radicalization and became mainstream.

On the Left, things moved past even the most extreme views of communist revolutionaries a century prior. It helped that nearly all mainstream media and mainstream social media were either voluntarily or involuntarily supporting radical leftist themes and “progressive” social narratives. Dissent was now censored quite openly, with voices that threatened the now cult-like Left being de-platformed and/or cancelled. One didn’t really even need to be a direct threat, just influential and non-compliant with the groupthink. Legislation that functioned as ideological enforcement became codified in left-leaning Western nations around the world that reflected “wokeism” – censorship, like the NetzDG Act in Germany, and mandated speech, like with Canada’s Bill C-16. These were not in support of individual rights – something that had come to define Western culture – but rather enforcing a specific, collective social vision that it would become illegal not to agree to.

People started to be punished for their opinions, even jailed for them – and as Trump’s second term began, murdered for them. Boys could change into girls by sheer force of will, and if you disagreed, you faced life-destroying consequences in the form of cancellation, economic ruin, jail, or catching a bullet through your neck. Much as in the bloodthirsty days of the Bolshevik Revolution, political violence was encouraged, normalized, even celebrated. Though, even the Bolsheviks weren’t as overtly sociopathic as the line ups of every day people who competed to see who could party to celebrate the murder of a podcaster and get more likes. Protests became deadly and justification for extreme violence. The moral absolutism of issues like identity politics gave violence an “ends justify the means” framing. Rhetoric was never so violently hateful. People who disagreed with you were sexist, racist, bigoted, Nazi pedophile protectors who deserved to die – them and their whore wife. Law enforcement was continuously undermined from BLM through ICE assaults, and soccer moms started attacking officers because their screens told them federal immigration agents were evil Nazis, despite them doing the same job they had been doing for several successive Democratic administrations.

Extremism today is no longer isolated in the dark corners of European cafes or on Bubba’s militia field. It is the norm, only on one side, where is very violent and absolutely refuses rational discussion. Fascism was defeated; radical socialism never fully was.

It is unprecedented, even with all the destructive examples of the past 125 years.

• The speed of global dissemination is near instantaneous.
• Algorithms amplify extremism and ignore moderation.
• Platforms governed by these algorithms are monetized and fiscally reward extrmism.
• Trust in institutions such as the media, courts, elections and academia are at all time lows, giving the people a sense of zero recourse.
• Reality is asymmetrical, and people no longer share a baseline agreement on what facts are.
• Opposition is evil, not mistaken. And by evil, I mean 100%, subhuman, Johnny-get-your-gun evil.

And today, politics is no longer about policy, but about identity warfare, waged all day, every day. It is a full time job for some. And if radical left elements are in majority power in Western nations, it will become a permanent and unquestionable world of totalitarian control over your very thoughts. “The left thinks the right is evil; the right thinks the left is wrong.” as Charles Krauthammer said. Or I like: the Left sees the world as it should be; the Right sees the world as it is. There is a lot of road to traverse between “should” and “can be”, and it’s lined with the “is”. The promise of the Shortcut is a lie; that path only leads to Orwell’s nightmare.

The 1930s were objectively far more violent, and totalitarian regimes were more lethal, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Nuclear brinksmanship was an existential threat that weighed heavily on the minds of the people; now that has been replaced by fears that you might be “born in the wrong body” (while the weapons remain poised to strike). We are not necessarily more evil than our ancestors, but we are instantaneously interconnected, which amplifies instability and radicalization in a way never before seen. When extremes become “respectable”, democracies quickly erode. For radicals always believe they are saving civilization, but history shows that they damage it more often than not.

The 20th century survived its extremists, but only barely. The 21st looks bleaker. Know that anyone telling you what to say and what to think – to the exclusion of all else – is not your friend. They are not “good”, no matter how noble their cause seems. “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4”; you’ll know the dangerous extremists when they ask you to believe otherwise.