The mainstream has run dry

You’ve heard a million times that opposites attract. But they don’t. When they attract, they aren’t really opposites. They are the same dish served with different sauces.

That’s why whenever people apply that platitude to the political extremes of left and right, I feel that something is wrong with their definitions, indeed with today’s whole political taxonomy.

I shan’t repeat what I’ve written many times before, other than stating that the taxonomy I use is based on civilisational, cultural and psychological factors, not on any particular political beliefs.

In my book How the West Was Lost, I identified the key clash of today as one between those stubbornly clinging to the fragments of a smashed Western civilisation (‘Westmen’, in my terminology) and those who are committed to annihilating all such fragments (I called them ‘Modmen’).

The first group used to form the mainstream of Western politics, while the second one operated at or beyond the fringes. Neither group was monolithic, each had numerous subgroups (for example, I distinguished between nihilist and philistine Modmen). But all of them had more in common with one another than with anyone in the other group. Westman and Modman were irreconcilable. For one to live, the other had to die.

That’s exactly what has happened. The mainstream that used to reflect the political aspect of our civilisation has disintegrated. This could be expressed as a crisis of conservatism, but the mainstream I’m talking about didn’t just consist of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

Much of the Labour Party in Britain or the Democratic Party in the US used to belong to the mainstream too (I’m talking about the countries I know best, but parallels could be drawn throughout the West). Western civilisation was a diamond with many facets, and its politics had to reflect and refract a whole spangled spectrum of brightly sparkling glints.

That made Western politics rather amiable. People diverged and argued, but without demonising one another as implacable enemies. They all loved and wanted to preserve the same things, even if they disagreed on how to go about preserving them.

I recall how surprised I was in my twenties when I first arrived in the West and found out that a conservative like William F. Buckley and a liberal like John Kenneth Galbraith were personal friends. Where I came from, people of such opposite views didn’t exchange drinks and Christmas cards. They exchanged bullets.

And then that mainstream ran dry – the tributaries feeding it had disappeared. The centre of our civilisation fell apart, and the mainstream no longer had anything to reflect and refract. But politics didn’t disappear. It just fell prey to the extreme groups that until then had been seen as the loony fringe.

You can see that by looking at the two parties that used to belong to the left half of the mainstream: British Labour and American Democrats. Both are now in the hands of those I described in my book as nihilist Modmen – extremists determined to destroy what’s left of our civilisation, by violent means if need be. And European parties traditionally inclined to the right of the mainstream are increasingly coming under the sway of populist demagogues with fascisoid tendencies.

If we look at the political shifts currently under way, we’ll begin to understand the strategy of the avowed enemies of the West. Such as the Soviet Union and its reincarnation as Putin’s Russia.

Both have relied on subversive forces within the West to undermine it, and in that sense nothing changed when the USSR became the Russian Federation. What has changed is the troubled waters in which they fish.

The KGB used its unlimited funds in real or counterfeit currencies to buy agents of influence in the West, including a few here and there who genuinely disliked communism. But most, those Lenin used to call ‘useful idiots’, they didn’t have to buy. They got them for free by appealing to their left-wing conscience.

For example, the ‘atomic spies’ didn’t betray America’s most precious secret for money. They believed in the proclaimed values of the Soviet Union, which they felt were closer to the real interests of their own countries. Some of them were conscious agents of the Soviets, but most were recruited ‘in the dark’, to use the KGB parlance. That is, they were spies without realising it.

When in the late 90s, early 2000s KGB operatives finally ousted the Party to become the Russian government, they brought their skills and training to bear on their expanded responsibilities.

KGB officers were no better than Party apparatchiks at running the country for the benefit of its people. They didn’t know how to convert the world’s richest natural resources into a thriving, prosperous economy. They had neither any talent for public administration nor any interest in it.

What they did know was how to subvert and undermine the West anywhere and in any way they could. The imperative for doing so was coded into their DNA. They no more had to ask themselves why they hated the West so much than a fox has to ask itself why it kills chickens, often more of them than it can eat.

Any recruitment starts from analysis. Intelligence officers cast a panoramic glance at a target country to identify any potential weak spots. They then narrow that field of vision to particular individuals or groups and go to work.

Career KGB officers that make up over 80 per cent of today’s Russian government are eminently capable of the same analysis I’ve attempted here. Hence they know that the traditional political mainstream in the West has disintegrated, and it’s the former fringes that have become, or are rapidly becoming, the mainstream.

Whether the fringes used to adorn the left or the right edge of the mainstream is immaterial to the Russians, and in that they display a more realistic assessment of Western politics than many of our own commentators do. You put your left foot in, you put your right foot out, but it’s all the same dance to the Russians.

This explains the situation so many of our commentators find baffling. Putin is successfully recruiting ‘useful idiots’ among both card-carrying lefties, in the vein of Chavez or Maduro, and those usually identified as extreme Right, such as the German AdF or the French National Rally (né National Front).

The new mainstream, formerly known as the lunatic fringe, is swelling with the influx of disaffected conservatives and frustrated liberals. They feel they have to seek alliances wherever they can find them, and the erstwhile extremes look more promising than the impotent remnants of the mainstream run dry.

This is what makes an utterly evil Putin Russia such an attractive proposition to seemingly respectable Westerners of various political hues. They have been recruited ‘in the dark’ by real experts who know how to identify and exploit weaknesses.

If you wonder why Western support of the Ukraine is waning, look no further. Putin’s friends are following orders, most of them subliminally transmitted. And they are succeeding.