So, it's no secret by this point that I've been working on something other than this blog. I've been doubling down on that lately, which is why I haven't been posting here that much. That and, let's face it. Politics sucks with Trump coming into office. I just wanna tune out and focus on my own thing, you know? It's exhausting, having to follow the crazy crap he's trying to do day in and day out. And obviously, as far as the blog goes, we don't want like 25 articles of "bad people are doing bad things", so yeah. Kinda focusing on something that keeps my interest better.
But in doing this project, I did kind of make some connections that should be obvious, and I want to share them here. Basically, I wanna talk about how COVID was an ideological war for the GOP, and that's why they behaved in the batcrap insane way that they did.
Here's the thing that you need to understand about the GOP. For the republican party, and modern conservatism, everything is worldview, everything is ideological. I keep talking about worldviews on this blog, but for many people in mainstream politics, this stuff goes over their head. The modern left, especially the modern institutional left, doesn't have a coherent worldview or ethos. Individual leftists do. You got marxists and their "theory", you got the identitarian types and their critical theory stuff, and you got me, adopting a form of secular humanism, and expanding this into an ideological form of "humanist capitalism", or as Yang would call it, human centered capitalism.
Being a former right winger, I understand the importance of worldviews. After all, I was taught about it...by them. And I know that everything the right does, even if it seems insane to those outside of their bubble, actually makes sense within their paradigm. A lot of them are biblical christians. And on economics, most of them are free market fundamentalists who have this die hard conservative protestant work ethic crap tied to everything they do, and honestly, the way the GOP has been acting since about...2010, and how crazy that was, is because they know that they have been at risk of losing the ideological supremacy they've had over the country's politics, and they want to preserve it at all costs. That's why, when the GOP retook congress during the Obama era, the focused on obstruction. They were trying to sabotage Obama, because they saw it as their ticket back to relevancy. Of course for me this strategy backfired so hard I'm now batting for the other team, but I kind of respect the hustle, they had a cause that they believed in and they went scorched earth for it.
The right has long since seen the left as an existential threat. They even tend to project strawmen onto them. They see them as lazy people who wanna give people free money, they see them as communists, as godless atheists, as people who hate America, and you know what? Those ridiculous strawmen actually ended up making me into who I am, and being unafraid of being so. Because why would we try to compromise with these guys if they're gonna see us as this strawman anyway. Not to mention, things like secular humanism, shifting away from work, and giving people money actually are very good ideas.
Of course, I'm not the mainstream left. As I said, the mainstream left has no ideology. If anything, their ideology is half the GOP's ideology, because of their fixation on third way politics and triangulation. They've long since adopted a weaker version of their ideology, and everything in their calculus is "oh well, we're a conservative country, we can't go too far left, we can't do nice things, people won't vote for us if we do nice things." So they oppose nice things. And the GOP are the anti nice things, because their worldview sucks and is based on fundamentalist christianity, authoritarianism, a dismal view of human nature, and the need for work ethic and morality to be beaten into the populace. And any time we have a hint of how anything could be different, well, they gotta oppose that full stop.
Of course, I'm fully in the camp of "the future is now, old man", I recognize that party alignments typically only last for 36 years, and I've been pushing, since the 2016 election cycle, for the left to become bold, to fight the right, to take them on, and to push for their own vision and ideological supremacy. We were the ones holding the cards once. It was back during the new deal era. FDR came in, did awesome things for the american people, and while not perfect, his legacy was the only era in american politics in which I can say capitalism actually worked. But the right, like they always did, started organizing after WWII with their Mont Perelin Society neoliberal bullcrap, and they gained steam throughout the decades until by 1980, when the country was ready for them. So then they swooped in, said government was the problem, the free market was the solution, and everything has been right wing since.
I keep trying to remind the left that we CAN retake the narrative from the right, but the institutional left is fricking useless and doesn't want to, which is why I'm so critical of them. They're complicit in keeping the status quo the same, and as that status quo festers and living conditions worsen for most Americans, Americans turn on them and suddenly find populist demagogue Donald Trump to be a good option. I mean, how badly does the party of FDR have to screw up for DONALD FRICKING TRUMP to be a superior option for most Americans? And this happened not just once now. It's happened twice, and quite frankly, Biden was lucky he won in 2020 all things considered. Had we not had covid, he never would have.
And honestly, the GOP has, since 2020, been waging a culture war over COVID, which is what I intended to write this article about.
So yeah. Basically, the GOP opposed COVID measures and restrictions for ideological reasons. They have these oppression fantasies of the government coming in, taking away peoples' freedoms, and implementing "communism" on people. Of course, these people cant often define communism, or differentiate it from liberalism, or social democracy, or my own ideology. They just see statism in general as like some grand communist plot.
So, the government came in and shut the economy down. They did it because, again, we had to stop the spread of the virus. The logic was sound. And we kinda needed to adopt to a world where we could no longer have everyone working all of the time. People stayed home on the couch, they collected unemployment checks. Some mightve worked from home, maybe working for less than 40 hours despite being productive, because we all know a lot of office workers basically work like 10-20 hours a week and spend the rest of the time surfing facebook and reddit while trying to LOOK busy. In America, youre expected to work 40 hours no matter what and efficiency is punished since if you get done with your work early, you end up having more work imposed on you. It's kind of a flaw of a system that insists you dedicate your life to work. And these bosses, well, they are control freaks. They want control. it's not enough that you get your work done. You have to suffer while you work. And the bosses want you to suffer. Because to them they get a power trip from it. When you work for a wage, employers own your time, and they want you to know it. So they get these "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" power fantasies of bossing workers around and not letting them take breaks while on their clock. It's where a lot of "professionalism" comes from. Not only are you to be productive, but you cant LOOK lazy. You cant lean. You cant sit as a cashier, you cant finish your work and just chill. No, the bosses have to have that power over you telling you want to do and reminding you that they own your time. Really, the difference between this and literal slavery is the difference between renting and owning a person, and giving people the pretense of freedom while they're not really free.
And let's face it, as all know people aren't free. Which is why they fear the government giving people money. If people werent dependent on the employer class to survive, they would lose their power over them. So the second a glimmer of freedom comes by, it threatens their whole worldview. People sitting on the couch collecting a paycheck might realize, much like I did like a decade ago, that life doesn't have to be this way. People working from home might achieve better work life balance, working only 20 hours a week, while keeping productivity up, keep in mind they're still doing their jobs, might realize that they have passions outside of work. And that's what the employer class doesn't want: people to realize that life doesn't have to revolve around them? How do you keep a society of slaves who dont realize they're slaves? By working them so hard they dont have time to think about anything else.
Btw, I know I praised FDR earlier, but as I said, he wasn't perfect. Remember what I wrote about a couple of months ago? back in the 1930s, some people like Hugo Black wanted to reduce the work week, but the business community went to FDR and said "please, we'll give you everything you want, just dont cut the work week." What were they so scared about? I'll tell you what, they were afraid that the populace would wake up, realize life doesnt have to revolve around work, and decide to enjoy their free time and their freedom. So instead, FDR put us on the path of endless economic growth and a culture of consumerism instead to keep us on a cycle of working and spending money ad infinitum.
And now we're six times richer than we were back then, but we're still trapped on that cycle. Keynes predicted by now that we could have 15 hour work weeks, and yeah, we could. We could work 15 hour weeks, while being twice as productive as we were back then. I'm not saying that's the goldilocks zone of work vs productivity, I would say something more like 25-30 hours is ideal at this time, but yeah we could've done it. But most people dont realize it, because most are too busy working just to survive to notice it.
And that's what the republicans were so afraid of during COVID. COVID broke the illusion of what the economy was, and they were desperate to restore it at all costs, and even suggested sacrificing the elderly to do it. That's why they basically wanted to literally kill grandma to "save the economy." The economy didn't need saving. What needed saving was their ideology. COVID could have opened up a whole can of worms that shifted the debate toward things like UBI, and working less, they couldn't have that, so they fought to restore normalcy as fast as possible.
It's also why, when Biden got into office, they were quick to sabotage him. Now, Biden himself wasn't the enemy they were afraid of, I mean, I AM that guy, and I wear that moniker with pride. I love taking pride in the fact that my ideology would instill existential dread into the modern GOP. Because I see them and their ideas as evil, so screw them. I view them the same way they view me. But Biden? Nah, he was one of those complicit triangulators and he did work to restore normalcy as fast as possible too.
Still, the GOP had to go scorched earth against the whole experiment that was COVID. Because COVID was kind of an experiment into the kind of economy that I keep saying is possible, and that we should pursue. I wouldnt force people to not work like happened then, but if people decided to work less, or decided not to work at all? Meh, as long as the core functions of the economy continue to run, I don't care. Karen might want her precious haircuts, but she's not entitled to one, because workers shouldnt be slaves to others for their frivolous wants. The idea that those who dont work dont eat makes sense if the alternative is famine and mass starvation from not enough food, but not being able to get a hair cut or get your nails done? Get the heck out of here. Do it yourself. Or pay someone to do it for you at a rate that motivates people to actually want to do such a thing.
But yeah. That's why, when the economy reopened, they had to go all "no one wants to work any more". Because they HAD to shame workers to get back to work. They HAD to blame Biden for encouraging workers to be "lazy." They HAD to blame him for causing inflation by giving people $1400 checks. Because they HAD to sabotage those policies. They HAD to drag them through the mud. They HAD to, because Biden's success was a threat to their ideology, even if Biden wasn't a threat himself. It wasn't about Biden per se, it was about making sure that COVID didn't make a million more "mes" out there pushing for broader economic change.
And to some extent, they were successful. Going over COVID in my other project, yeah, I dont think giving people $1400 was the primary cause of inflation. I don't think that unemployment insurance made people lazy. I don't think that workers demanding too much money caused inflation. Inflation was caused primarily by supply chain issues and corporate greed, actually, and what caused the "worker shortage" was too many people hiring at once for the available work force. The answer to that was to use the fed to scale back the jobs surplus to match the number of workers available, ideally without doing a recession, and Biden did that.
Still, people didn't appreciate Biden's economy. Because despite full employment, cost of living increased dramatically, and workers didn't get a wage. And while I understood this election cycle that I had to defend Biden and tiptoe around the issue, I mean, even if my ideas are still valid, the optics of them just looked bad in 2024, and I read the room somewhat. But in retrospect, i do wonder if a small UBI would've actually helped the inflation situation by functionally giving workers a raise that way.
Either way, I just wanted to make people aware of why the GOP acted so irrationally. They've been on the defensive since 2008, and they HAD to sabotage any democratic president to push their ideas out of the overton window. They HAD to sabotage COVID restrictions because they posed a threat to their worldview. And they had to push everything back to normal overnight, while simultaneously blaming everything that went wrong on the left, to ensure that anything associated with COVID and this era is politically toxic. They were trying to "jimmy carter" Biden. Remember, Jimmy Carter was the guy who gave them ideological supremacy in the first place, because his failures drove the country right into the arms of Ronald Reagan. They were trying to do it again. And while we minimized the damage somewhat with the Harris switcheroo, it is apparent to me that maybe the GOP isn't as successful as they think. I don't think their agenda is popular. it just wasn't the democrats, so they voted accordingly.
Oh yeah, and on work from home, I do also wanna mention that a little bit. yeah. The same thing happened there. They're trying to systematically destroy that too. Force people back to the office. Goad workers with passive aggressive messages about not being able to work in pajamas. Systematically firing people who are in WFH arrangements over time and only hiring people who will travel to the office. It's about conditioning the workers to accept less and go back to normal. They really are trying to destroy everything good about this kind of legacy.
And this is how the right wins. This isn't anything new. Remember that book I mentioned where I talked about FDR being complicit in the 40 hour work week? Well it also mentioned a lot of stuff about why we never adopted reduced hours, and the right won there too. They pushed toxic masculinity agendas that feminized people who wanted to stay home with the women (because, ya know, traditional gender roles of the 1970s). They called people who worked less through union contracts sissies. They called them unpatriotic and helping the commies win the cold war. And ultimately, they won there too. Even the unions ended up pushing this stuff against the workers they were trying to represent, and that's how we got a lot of the toxic work culture we have today and how being a manly man is apparently...spending all of your time working. And yeah. The right's been doing this for decades. And then the left just...rolls over again and again. We havent had a strong ideological left in this country in over 50 years now, and a lot of the left acts like controlled opposition. Even then, the FDR left was never perfect. We all know the unions sold out and pushed the "dignity of work" crap instead of pushing for reduced working hours long ago. And yeah. We live in a society that brainwashes people into wanting to basically be slaves. We might argue about the conditions and the terms, but we never argue against the idea itself. Never mind how we live in the 21st century and how we literally do have sci fi levels of GDP, just with the same broken system we always did.
This will never change until we have a left with balls. And that's why I work so hard on this blog, and why i work so hard on this other project of mine. Because ultimately, i do want a different world. I hate this. I hate our society to some degree. Because it's so fricking work centric, and we really do keep giving the control of the narrative to the right, and refusing to fight them on it. Well, my own ideology is intended to be a foil to those guys. Their worst nightmare, but maybe not their worst worst nightmare since I'm not a communist nor have these statist power fantasies of oppressing people. I actually do split the difference and while my ideas would raise taxes a lot, they would also make peoples' lives better, and I can demonstrate that mathematically. The fact is, a better world is possible, and the left should fight for it. I dont mean through violence obviously, but through civilized political and labor organizing? Hell yeah. Also, educat yourself, become like me, and spread the fricking word.
The worst nightmare of the right, other than literal totalitarian communism, is millions of people like me, who all organize themselves, and say "NO MORE" and advocate for change. The right fights like hell through political obstruction and information warfare, and we gotta do the same. Again, no violence, I don't advocate for that Luigi Mangione crap, that's OFF THE TABLE for me, but fighting through LEGITIMATE means? Hell yeah. We gotta realize the right plays for keeps, and we gotta do the same. And that's what I've been wanting since coming over to the left.
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