Everything’s political, until it isn’t
As state, party politics, education, policing, public debate, mass media and social-media regulation all conform to what liberalist secular citizens unthinkingly accept, that stratum of society sees no politics in public life.
The sight of Regent Street, London adorned for half a mile with the latest iteration of the progressive flag to mark Gay Pride month drew comment. The most cutting one was “This is what occupation looks like”. It was hard to argue with that. It was not simply a couple of flags, it was dozens. They loomed over the capital’s most prestigious street, casting shadows on all who walked below.
The progressive flag, which changes every year, is a euphemism treadmill. This is when, to demonstrate fealty to the elite, people are expected to use politically correct terminology that is updated every few years. The conforming politeness of last year is the outdated patronisation of this year. This system forces people on to the back foot, needing to follow trends and apologise for failing to apply new jargon. It is a way of socially vetting and disciplining people. Across the country, diversity officers – actually political commissars enforcing conformity, embedded in every medium-sized organisation – would no more fly a simple rainbow flag than they would say “coloured person”.
As an organised display of supremacy, the Regent Street flags were faultless. Like the best propaganda, it was theatrical, impeccably co-ordinated, assertive, unavoidable. There was no doubting the message: progressivism controls the street, city and country that you might have thought were your own. Make no mistake, the state is not yours. It belongs to the elites, who rule in the name of secular materialism and whose flag, while nominally a symbol of sexual and sex minorities, actually forms a perfect analogy for the incompatible client groups who are its client groups: liberalists, socialists, sexual/sex minorities, migrants, racial minorities and (so long as they don’t actually apply their principles) religious minorities. As the scale of victimhood is adjusted, so new elements are added to the flag. What could be a better flag for a progressive state than a flag that is always evolving?
For that reason, we should call the rainbow flag “the progressive flag”, so that we remember it is the symbol of the elites, who co-opt minorities as clients. Nationwide, city buildings fly the flag of progressivism. It is emblazoned on streets, at the cost of thousands of pounds. You will be forced to see it. If you decline to genuflect then you are a bigot. If you remove a political flag then you are committing a hate crime; if you topple a historical statue then you are fighting for racial justice. A civic statue is a part of the city’s cultural-material fabric and a flag is just a piece of fabric, but the flag of the elites is protected and the handiwork of your ancestors is unprotected. This is made clear through every channel of authority.
Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political theorist, suggested that the distinction between state and politics was illusory. Authority and values of rulers would be exerted, regardless of what law might say about separation of powers. Those in power get to decide when and to whom laws are applied. There are certain individuals and groups who are unofficially exempt from laws. These are not just the monarch and top politicians; they are also people who are favoured because of their demographic characteristics or political allegiance. That is why damaging a temporary poster or flag is a hate crime, but destroying a permanent statue is not. In the USA, this distinction is made a little plainer. That is why people understand that Democrat police chiefs will not arrest iconoclasts and Democrat state prosecutors will not prosecute them. The mob is doing the Democrat Party’s will, so it is almost exempt from legal sanction.
In the UK, it is still possible – though increasingly unsustainable – to believe the state is apolitical. This is a delusion, held by liberalists who find themselves in agreement with the civic values of today and the direction of social change. As state, party politics, education, policing, public debate, mass media and social-media regulation all conform to what liberalist secular citizens unthinkingly accept, that stratum of society (from which the managerial elite comes) sees no politics in public life. Every right-thinking person has the same outlook, therefore the state that conforms to that worldview is natural, universal, timeless and correct – apolitical, in fact.
One of these apparently unchallengeable beliefs is that the state is apolitical. Or rather, it is that it should be apolitical. If only those pesky lefty police commanders would apply the law impartially, then we could get back to neutrality. Except, the truth (only painfully and gradually admitted) is that the far left and the reactionary right have been correct all along in stating that the state never was neutral. That hated leftist cry “Everything is political” is both an analysis and a justification. It analyses power as operating through social systems, civic institutions, commercial transactions and personal interactions; it justifies the political policing of every aspect of a person’s life and admits for no room for individual judgement, taste or privacy, in effect, abolishing the possibility of the private person. For the liberalist, whose key belief is recognition of the independence of every person, it is a frightening prospect. For not only the belligerent feminist and steely-eyed Marxist, but also the Neo-Reactionary (following Schmitt’s dictum “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”), the idea that the state can be neutral is untenable.
When a progressive, who will happily tell you “Everything is political”, is challenged about flying the flag of her political movement over public streets and civic buildings, she will reply that it is a symbol of gay love and acceptance of the marginalised. All of a sudden, a world subject to “vectors of control” develops a bubble within which normalisation of minority sexualities is politically neutral, morally good and civically virtuous. To which, you might reply “Everything is political”.
