One constant about the political devolution of America is the loss of respect that once buttressed every political motivation. This loss came in two forms: the perversion of liberalism and the death of earnestness. To examine this freshly, I want to take a page from a recent development that exhibits much of the miasma poisoning us in these ways today: a change to the emoji for the flag of Iran.
Exhibit A: a flag emoji
Events of late provide the initial backdrop to understand why there is heat emanating in the vicinity of a change like this anywhere you can find it being made, but I want to focus instead on the play-by-play dynamic here and explain what is actually going wrong.
Fallacy obscures contempt
Now, the first issue is obviously that the flag of Iran is not currently the one bearing the ‘lion and sun’ design. From that basic fact it is straightforward then to defeat the series of ‘arguments’ the author makes to justify this change:
If you continue through the thread, there are more comments—many annotated with ‘acclamations’ of emoji reactions which at this point anyone who has experience with online communities should know are contrived and generally meaningless with regard to the wider public’s real sentiment on the matter—that demonstrate to us something very important: the people engaging in this do not have any pretensions of earnestness or honesty in what they are doing. Language itself has been reduced to a mere vehicle through which they and their opponents violently transmit their preferences and intentions onto the wider public, and this has massive implications on Western politics that we haven’t fully squared with since it was last deployed about a decade ago. But now that it has transited the political wings, it’s time to enumerate the commonalities here and begin attacking the heart of something truly disgusting and evil that is ripping America apart.
Not a new thing
This is not the first time that emoji rendering has been hijacked as a vehicle for political ends. Perhaps the most infamous example is that of the pistol emoji, the Emojipedia page of which is, perhaps ironically, metaphorically riddled with holes. There are also deeper instances of what one could credibly argue as being politically motivated, such as the Unicode Consortium itself being induced to introduce inventions such as skin pigmentation and combinatory emojis such as that of the pregnant man. The discourses around these things were contrived similarly to the one taking place today about the flag of Iran.
Illiberal revealed preferences
The idea that discussion itself is a nuisance, diversion, or opportunity for manipulation in light of a prospective change of consensus is barbaric. If someone who wants to talk to you has no intention of listening to your response, there is nothing you can do then except yield. This unambiguously implies a massive amount of disrespect from them towards you. The ‘talking’ taking place here has already from the very start been preemptively devolved into a creative form of violence being inflicted onto everyone who receives it.
Formerly veiled as contempt
While this direct approach has been increasingly more common as of late, the norm until the 2010s was a veiled rendition of it better described not as disrespect, but contempt. A modal example of this is the institution of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which was created as a perversion of liberalism tailored specifically to undermine and eventually destroy the fruits of the values therein. Suddenly, ‘liberalism’ had very specific motivations regarding for what or for whom all of its lofty ideals about ‘freedom of association’ or ‘civil rights’ were actually for. Since the 1960s demonstrated that liberalism was eligible for deconstruction by selfishly-preferential opportunists, more patient and prudent people waited two decades to take advantage of that for themselves. Now we live in an economic apocalypse even the Dust Bowlers never knew because the criminals running things back then were honest enough to have the Federal Reserve sanction the death of the economy instead of conspiring with them to lie about it and gaslight the public that everything is fine because the Dow is up and it’s all you guys and not everyone else somehow.
The 1960s chestnut
Baby Boomers and their 1960s fever dreams don’t fully explain how this continued unto today however. Before we get into whodunnit, we have to acknowledge something that began in the 1960s as well: a change in cultural primacy away from the so-called ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’, or ‘WASPs’, into… anyone else. This is often maligned lately by fascists with a redirection into contrivations surrounding the Immigration Act of 1964, as if it were generically ‘immigrants’ rather than a cultural moment change that affected attitudes more than bodies and turnouts. Conversely, it is maligned by communists with a redirection into contrivations surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, so as to villainise the WASPs and deny the reality that they were the ones driving for equality and inclusion in the first place. The reality is more in line with the mindset once espoused by WASPs that can—and often was—adopted by many from around the world, now eroded. As we’re fast seeing, these manipulations litter Western politics today. Such litter is solely material to what is going wrong and what we must to do reverse it.
Who does this?
Now, who could be so reckless and consumed with ignorance and hatred to be perpetrating such things? The answer is a type I will manoeuvre to call, for now, Anti-Americans. These people can exhibit some or all of the following characteristics:
Opportunistic American citizenship acquisition (i.e. Passport-Americans)
Often originates from collapsed Communist countries
Often connected to the operative cores of ethnostates such as South Africa’s National Party or Israel’s Likud
Reflexive anti-American ax (usually European or Anglo)
Material opposition to liberalism (either opposing it or co-opting it)
Big, fat, compulsive liars
The other notable thing about today’s Anti-Americans is that they are increasingly commonly co-opting the symbolism and pageantry of American patriotism, treating it as a costume to be donned within the paradigm of Continental aristocratic politics. It’s important to beware of this, recalling that talk is cheap and liars are everywhere.
Liberalism matters
It’s easy to forget this, but in the 1800s people around the world fought and died for the institution of liberalism. Now in the 2020s, it’s the one glaring omission from contemporary politics. On the left, communists have hijacked the Rooseveltian banner of progressivism and traded the big C word for ‘democratic socialism’. On the right, fascists have hijacked Jeffersonian libertarianism and shedded the earnestness of labeling outright. Both ‘sides’ are unapologetically socialist—Continentally so—something that has never been indigenous to American politics. Liberalism is nonetheless symbolically strawmanned as a stand-in for the big bad establishment, despite its increasing nonexistence in politics.
Socialism is an alien pathogen
Whether on the left or right, socialism as a political machine is to be understood as a weapon of ‘righting’ historic ‘wrongs’ by force of will. ‘Theory’, as the communists call it, serves as lore to give ideologues cosmic inspiration and an imagined sense of universality to their cause so that they will be motivated enough to carry out the will of the devil in their ears about this. Fascists replaced theory with crackpot historiography and revisionism as an innovation designed to embrace the subliterate so as to deputise them as tools of the same demon. In the real world, this all goes back to some history involving aristocrats who didn’t know when to stop or didn’t believe they had a need to consider the public spirit, and as a result killed millions of innocent people. The fact that this history cannot be undone is why Continental Europe—and a few colonial outcroppings of theirs, which we’ll get to later—are still fighting with this to this very day.
Truly, historically alien
The biggest detail about all of this is the fact that, by mere virtue of time, the United States of America uniquely avoided all of this. Independence was fought for—and won—nearly a century before Germany came into existence. It even narrowly predated the French Revolution. Those two events alone are the only things besides the two World Wars—which were started and lost by Europe—that can contend for having the most profound effect on European collective identity. This means that—for whatever petit fights in the realm of labour and commerce aside—the grand fight for socialism was never, ever the prerogative of Americans. Socialism is, by a plain analysis of history, unequivocally alien to the political constitution of the United States.
Americans have no horse in the race against cosmic wrongs done by despots of yore. No sooner did we come into political consciousness did we decide to do away with the yoke of imperialism, arriving at the conclusion of force by way of practical reality, not orgiastic opportunism as in France. When we had a fundamental disagreement about our political constitution that left civil war as the only recourse, we again arrived at it by a process of elimination of bloodless alternatives, not by grand design and poetic intrigue as in Germany. American lives were not to be ‘priced in’, nor was there any delusion about the smile of God shining down upon Patriots in the moment as they bayonetted redcoats.
America’s cosmic impetus
Manifest Destiny and Providence looked to the frontier and the future; it did not glorify the violence of the past, but instead only glorified the sacrifices made to keep the door to those things open. In general, America was founded as a much-needed divorce of the divine from the state; the Founding Fathers saw the simple danger of Man being able to conflate himself with God, and sought to preempt that for his greater benefit. After successfully achieving this divorce, America acquired two competing wings of political thought from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, both of which have been fundamentally liberal for over a century by now.
The Founding Fathers’ true cause
More than the ideology and more than the historical contrasts between America and Europe, there is one detail about the Revolution that will prove crucial in legitimising the retaking of America by Americans: it happened as a direct consequence of simple disrespect and contempt. How the criminals running the country now and their socialist lackeys on the fringes treat Americans is exactly how Westminster treated the colonists, making things like the Boston Tea Party both logical and inevitable. Deeper than the Constitution and the trappings of Deism lies a violent and justifiable rejection of being held in contempt by a party that provides nothing to you and maintains an unequal relationship without your consent and at your expense. This was the same language now being spoken by the people agitating to change the emoji of a country’s flag to that of one which does not presently exist. The Founding Fathers’ most material motivation is now our biggest wellspring of inspiration and justification to do away with such barbarism by whatever means are available to us.
It’s all about respect
Centring respect is as much a solution for resuscitating the indigenous American political body as it is an explanation for how it was misplaced to begin with. The outline of this was only forgotten well within the confines of living memory: in the 1980s the public was induced to elect an actor who could convincingly play the role of the great American liberal, while in reality ceaselessly implementing its betrayal and destruction. The intoxication of wealth resultant from America’s victory over the European world in 1945 left the public particularly weak to this in the sense that they did not quickly realise the subterfuge, and even so did little to undo it or right the ship. That said, the material losses from this have progressed enough now that Americans are well and ready to receive their political salvation again, providing only the premises of a competent leadership who can articulate this vision and avert the gaze of assassination.
What is to be done
The lessons that follow are both straightforward and crucial for the public to apply:
Understand who is and is not American based on their record of earnestness—regardless of object-level opinion—in politics
Give no quarter to people who fail this litmus test, as they are the sole true enemy of the American people
Give every quarter to people who pass this litmus test, helping them in whatever way you are able to that they are in need of without limit or concern for their fallibility otherwise
Make political work out of the task of undoing the power of those who are enemies or rely on the fruits of methods the enemy employs
Propagate the understanding of the need for respectable liberalism and its historical backing in the actions of our Founding Fathers and in contrast to the failures of Europe
With all of that said, let us get to work.