I’ve always found it ironic that right-wing culture warriors are determined to see the most admirable facet of western culture — its open intellectual ferment — crushed before a narrative of blind, unquestioning triumphalism. Those ‘self-hating leftists’ are WHY the west, for all its flaws, can claim to be the leading light of human civilisation. The right-wing culture warriors, in contrast, repeat a cultural archetype utterly unexceptional in human affairs, an archetype repeated around the globe, and most predominant in those regions the west considers most barbarous. The difference between American right wingers and the Taliban is that the former have long been subjected to the civilising influence of those whom they detest, a process which they have opposed every step of the way.
Whatever else might be said of Marx, he was at least correct that nationality, ethnicity, religion, and so forth are not the fundamental cleavages between persons, rather the fundamental cleavage is psychological, largely a byproduct of parenting style and childhood experience, and in the latter aspect Marx was correct to identify economic structures and realities as of paramount importance in determining the social consciousness. Ironically, right-wingers will readily agree to this, but only when it is phrased in certain ways — as, for example, the notion of ‘decadant coastals’ found everywhere from America to Saudi Arabia.
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