The liberal

The liberal despises his own recent past and the rituals in which he participated, ashamed of them and deleting their memory from public view while constantly pursuing new rituals, new forms of expression and new social movements. And these are to be forgotten as well, as soon as they are adopted by under classes with whom the liberal does not want to be associated. Cancellation is only one particularly moralizing dimension of a voluntary technocapitalist amnesia. Exhibiting an embarrassing photograph of an individual has been common practice perhaps since the invention of the camera, whether in good humor or not, but now fads appear and disappear so rapidly that embarrassment can arise within a window of only a few months. The toppling of statues that we see now, while perhaps justified in the majority of cases and certainly not without cause, seems at least partially motivated by the same sort of logic that governs social cancellation in online and media centered discourses. The liberal exacts retributive violence constantly against representations of the past, since any individual, sustained reflection on the present is so horrifying as to render coherent plans of action impossible.

The liberal holds representational equality as a triumph precisely due to its anti-democratic character, since democracy implemented in any kind of coherent form would have to account for those implicated in his roving consumption patterns: the only logical democracy for a fully-globalized world is one that encompasses the entire globe. Yet the Bush-era fantasy of spreading democracy, as if it were a blanket infected with ideology instead of smallpox, has failed and left regional destabilization and horror in its wake. For this reason, the white liberal in particular desires to see a representative black body, not the collective expression of black political will, nor even a black individual’s opinion if chosen at random from the population. They desire instead a logic of racial representation analogous to the algorithmic system that suggests products to them on Amazon.

The liberal condescendingly mocks things like the prepper movement and Christian apocalypticism not because he doubts the inevitability of the world's end, but because he secretly knows that he is not included in his own conception of "the world." The end will certainly arrive, he says, but not for him. He has already secured his place in a technocapital afterlife that has already arrived, that is arriving, and that arrives constantly by replacing the past with an ever-expanding present that defers to a rigidly-conceived future. The liberal is horrified at the idea of the world precisely due to its unreality, its status as a forbidding spectacle to bear witness to, something that will inevitably exhaust his emotional energies and require the deployment of increasingly identity-specific mechanisms of “self-care.”

The liberal is a latter-day apostle ushered in by the death and resurrection of 20th-century capitalism. In the left, this liberal sees a kind of doubting Thomas, one who cannot believe that a resurrected order could ever overcome the wounds it was seen to have suffered. But even this death and resurrection is as mythic as the gospel story, for we know that there is no lapse in the historical continuity between the prior socioeconomic order and our contemporary one. What appears as death and resurrection is only the perspectival shift necessary for the present conditions of the liberal's psychic and material domination by technocapital.

The technocapital machine can only rate limit for so long while maintaining sufficient cultural power to extract its required levels of profit, which is to say exorbitant profits. Simply put, we face two possible futures. On the one hand, we will see a collective limitation of technological "progress," and will technocapital assume a more classically authoritarian character in order to maintain its social and cultural dominance. On the other hand, technological progress, due to a miscalculation on the part of corporate leaders, outpaces its own ability to be controlled through any kind of centralized power structure and leads to a diffuse though real, material change in global structures of power and autonomy.

The liberal is terrified of anyone who defies the strictures of good entertainment.

The liberal abhors gaudiness since it reveals wealth’s status as an unforgivable societal excess. He prefers the common man’s billionaire, one with either sanitized Midwestern charm or impotent West Coast nerdiness. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates inspire nowhere near the disgust as did Donald Trump during the 2016 election. The liberal considers excessive wealth to be an excess of a particular sensibility rather than a class position or even an income threshold, and for this reason he is largely silent on the question of generational wealth even if he does not already benefit from it. He knows what side his bread is buttered on. The Right for him is a distasteful ideology, but not one with which he has nothing in common: he sees social progress as periodic payments on a mortgaged future, and politics appears as a negotiation of interest rates, terms, and conditions.

The liberal identifies fascism only as authoritarianism in bad taste.

The American liberal fears the intrusion of the state into his private life precisely because the purported values of a conservative American federal government, one that must also profess to represent the values of middle Americans, is in conflict with the Californian morality that polices and is created by technocapital. Today’s liberal purchases narcotics over the internet and engages in sexual behaviors over cameras and microphones, all activities that urbane Californians and New Yorkers enjoy and have enjoyed for decades now. The liberal's utopia is a place where firms such as Google, Apple, or Amazon safeguard information and anonymize it sufficiently; they fear federal power that, at least superficially, must represent mass moral and economic sentiment. The mob and it’s old-fashioned moral compass threatens the liberal's enjoyment and ability to be entertained in their increasing leisure time, even as the liberal's labor resembles to the illiberal working masses a kind of bizarre, performative leisure.

In truth the liberal has very little to fear with respect to his own privacy. He is always secretly grateful to have a new product recommended to him, even though he might bemoan the supposed intrusion of microphones and cameras into his daily life. This indignation is a façade, of course. The problem is not surveillance by the companies to which he has surrendered his information, but rather the fear that state or lower-class scam artists will somehow acquire this information. Fear of technocapital intrusion belongs to the young liberal's conservative parents and is seen as backwards and uninformed.