On Kyle Rittenhouse – Summing Things Up (For Now)
This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the show trial era. – On Boys and Wolves by Fred Watson, Jr. at The American Sun
By far the best thing I’ve read on the meaning of Kyle Rittenhouse.
(And, while you’re reading it, be sure to be listening to this:
“The Death of the Left” from Chris Cutrone
The Left has fallen apart into either accommodating capitalist politics through welfare statism or accommodating society’s disintegration in capitalism through antinomian opposition of anti-bourgeois nihilism and anti-social attitudes — including the tribalism of communitarian social-group identity politics. In either case, it has abandoned the task of socialism… – The dictatorship of the proletariat and the death of the Left
It’s worth reading Dr. Cutrone’s recent comments on the state of the current left, but also important to remember that one of the most interesting things in this regard is the left’s efforts to actually follow both paths at once – to employ the violent, anti-social behavior of the lumpen and the ultra-left in the service of what is fundamentally a ruling class project, as the events of 2020 demonstrated so clearly and as we are once again reminded by all of the discussion around the Rittenhouse verdict.
In counterposing the two approaches, Cutrone gets it wrong – it is not a matter of “either-or” but “both-and.”
(This is, in fact, what is so chilling about the current moment, since it reflects the willingness of the ruling class to in practice dispense with the liberal democratic order in its efforts to fundamentally re-cast society and the enthusiastic collusion of the left in this project.)
(And also see my post 60’s vs Now as well as a recent piece America on the Verge at the American Mind. For some of my other comments on Curtone, see here. To watch Dr. Cutrone’s presentation, see here.)
How Sweet It Is!
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal is a moment of peak political satisfaction which I have not experienced since November, 2016. I am reveling in it! The sounds of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from all of the usual suspects is music to my ears.
And yet all of that is a further reminder of the breathtaking bad faith of these same people and the fact that any sort of social peace with them will be impossible. The lesson they draw from the Rittenhouse case (and the events of 2020 in general) is not that they went too far, but that they did not go far enough. Perhaps we need to learn the same thing!
NeoPopulism 