A Gentle Introduction to Mencius Moldbug Part 1: "Red versus Blue America"
Today, everyone knows the red pill for its associations with the right-wing and with the internet communities of 4chan and gab. However, the first time I heard the term “the red pill”, in a political context, was in my freshman diversity seminar; one of those infamous “indoctrination classes” so frequently complained about by mainstream conservatives. I remember the first day of class, my professor telling us that this course about “privilege” would allow us to understand the mechanisms behind society. Understanding, “power and oppression” was like taking the red pill from The Matrix. Just as Keanu Reeves was able to see the ones and zeros behind the virtual reality world where he was trapped, so too, would the tools of “intersectionality” allow us to see the strings behind our own world. These progressive ideas would be a tool for our own liberation, ideological or otherwise.
However, graduating from college, I noticed something strange when looking at my peers. While in high school I remember many people being Republicans and having sympathy for moderate right-wing, or even the libertarian right-wing causes, after college I couldn’t name a single one of my peers who voted Republican, or for that matter, even deviated from the left party line of the Democratic establishment. While I did come from a blue state and this type of general bias should have been expected, it did seem for a moment that college had been a mechanism for generating more “blue state” Americans, more loyal Democrats. Myself being something of a “liberal-tarian” (a left-leaning libertarian), I still had a bit of the conservative values. Occasionally I would flip through the pages of the National Review or read a right-wing blog just to get a new point of view.
And so, looking at the relative ideological uniformity of my peers, seemed strange. Was conservative media correct that college had been a giant indoctrination project?
It certainly seemed like a mechanism for getting people to vote Democrat. Of course, things were more complicated.
When I brought this observation to my peers or parents generation I was usually told that I was not taking into consideration “the nuances of political opinion”. Besides, there was a good deal of disagreement inside the left. College had produced some communists, some socialists, some feminists, some environmentalists, and even some good old fashioned liberals. The fact that they all voted Democrat was a coincidence, a product of corporate media, and a consequence of the fact that the Republican Party was just so egregiously BAD that nobody of a well educated disposition could possibly sympathize with their cause.
On this account, the general division between the left and the right didn't really mean anything. After all, moderates strived to be “bipartisan”, whereas radicals, like Noam Chomsky or Alex Jones, all agreed that our party system (left and right wing across one dimension) was a product of the military industrial complex; two stooges put forward to represent a fake debate.
Nevertheless, the division between left and right, between blue America and red America, reasserted itself again and again in real life. Many of the moderates who constantly talked about cooperation and bipartisanship, were exactly the people who yelled the loudest about how bad the other side was come election time. More telling yet, the radicals, who assured me that the two parties were equally in the pockets of the military industrial complex, seemed to respect left-versus-right distinctions. They even respected party loyalty when it came right down to it.
Noam Chomsky and Alex Jones might paint a bleak picture of the situation and the meaninglessness of partisan politics, But Noam Chomsky was never going to cooperate with Alex Jones. And you were much more likely to find Noam Chomsky, or any other Chomsky fan, rubbing elbows with mainstream Democrats like Barack Obama than you were to ever see him come within speaking distance of your average radical rightwing anti-government type
Whatever anyone else said, I was left to conclude that, on an emotional level, and on the level of real activism, the division between left and right was very real, and possibly more important than anyone was ready to admit.
As I continued reading both right-wing and left-wing publications, I began to cast about for reasons that might explain the intense emotional division between the two sides of American politics. If I looked deeper, perhaps I could find the real cause of this dividing line in American politics. And here, I couldn’t help but start with the difference in the language that the right and left used to describe themselves.
The right talked about “preserving the American Dream” the left talked about “the oppressed” and the need to “reform our standards” and “to be more tolerant”. The right talked about “patriotism” and “loyalty”, whereas the left talked about “social justice”. The right talked about leftwing hypocrisy and how the media wasn’t fair. The left talked about how the right was cruel, and how we needed to overcome the tyranny of the past and look forward.
And in all of the rhetoric, I saw one consistent distinction. The left was forward-looking, and the right what's backwards-looking. And increasingly I found this distinction strange.