Mary Harrington
UnHerd, Dec. 7, 2022
“The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy,” but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable.”
Is it okay to be authoritarian, as long as it’s in the name of the right moral values? Some “post-liberal’ conservatives would say so. America might have been founded on the liberal separation of church and state, the argument goes, but that’s running out of road. Instead, to save the American polity and way of life, church and state should once again draw together.
But if there’s one lesson we should take from the ongoing spectacle surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop, it’s not the avalanche of claims and counter-claims about censorship or bias, or the sulphurous accusation of stolen elections. It’s that polite proposals about a bit more Christianity in the public square are hopelessly behind the times. All of politics is already post-liberal, and mainstream power has already explicitly embraced a faith-based moral order.
That is: American Church and American State have already ended their three-century separation. And Laptopgate is most significant in what it reveals about the contest now on for a suitable post-liberal political regime: a battle that pits the “human” against something more like a “swarm”.
To recap, shortly before the 2020 election, a laptop was discovered in a computer repair shop which was later verified as belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Emails and other information were found on the laptop that revealed Biden fils to have been up to some dodgy stuff. The story was broken by the Right-wing New York Post, shortly before the 2020 election. It was swiftly censored on Twitter, where for some time it was impossible even to share the story via direct message.
Now, Elon Musk has released internal Twitter emails from back then to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Last week, Taibbi published a lengthy Twitter thread based on this data, setting out his view of the context and events surrounding Laptopgate. And these confirm the extent to which the Biden laptop story was censored, and how flimsy the pretext was for doing so.
Needless to say, the story has reignited Right-wing grievance. Blake Masters fumed: “Any candidate who explained how Big Tech put its thumb on the scale was called an ‘election denier’ — but the simple truth is that the Hunter Biden laptop censorship put Biden into the White House, full stop”.
What is Elon Musk playing at with this intervention? He has claimed that his aim in buying Twitter was to hold it to public neutrality: that is, to the order governed by liberal proceduralism. But this can’t actually be done, thanks to the digital revolution in which Musk himself is an active, heavyweight player. I doubt Musk is unaware of this. Instead, we should read the Twitter files as an intervention in the bitter contest over the form politics should take after liberalism.
If post-liberal theorists called for a re-convergence between political power and an overt moral framework, they got their Wish during the pandemic — in classic Monkey’s Paw style. For Covid-19 did indeed prompt Western governments to bypass liberal norms in the interests of a common good. The twist is that as it turns out, Christian-flavoured conservatism isn’t the only moral matrix in town. Rather, to escalating murmurs of disquiet from liberals on both Left and Right, the moral outlook that reached pandemic-era hegemony was the fusion of progressivism with the interests of technocapital whose core credos make up the now-famous “In this house, we believe…” lawn sign.
We might characterise this as progressive post-liberalism, colloquially known as “wokeism”. Its proponents, like all post-liberals, believe that authoritarian measures are just fine, provided they’re ordered to the right moral priors. Because from a post-liberal perspective, whether progressive or otherwise, some values are so existential that “neutrality” is itself a moral failure: “bothsidesism”. … SOURCE