The Great Dispersion

The End of the Culture Wars in a Haze of Narrative Bunkers

In a warm Thanksgiving post, Substack’s founder and owner, Chris Best, optimistically paints this platform as a herald of a coming cultural peace in which pluralistic opinions will coexist without people getting in each other’s way. He’s right…sort of.

The coming culture peace

Culture wars originate in the latent fears and resentments of populations, but they are generally driven from the top-down. There need to be enough people in positions of authority (to some degree) claiming repeatedly that something is worth getting incensed about. The Republicans pioneered this rather brilliantly through the “Mighty Wurlitzer” of talk radio and Fox News; the Democrats have imitated it over the last ten years with far less impressive results. Both sides’ agitprop yielded a panoply of unpredicted consequences, whether QAnon or Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, but the impetus to kulturkrieg still takes its spark from a shared view of reality, which requires some kind of top-down regulation in order to keep it from fragmenting. In order to fight, you have to have some mutual agreement as to what’s being fought over.

We’ve seen the mass media-driven narratives of the 20th century collapse already. Now we are seeing the collapse of the shared frame altogether. As subcultures sink into private argots and spend more time affirming one another than doing anything notable outside their subcultures, the ability for any one group to point at another group and persuasively say “They’re the problem!” is diminishing. Already, groups often stigmatized as problems (QAnon, Antifa, Proud Boys, the Soros Organization) are so nebulous or faceless (or wildly exaggerated) that particular targets emerge more by chance than by strategy.

An example: I spoke to a politically informed, upper-middle class person recently who was very concerned about QAnon and its impact on the country. Yet they knew nothing of QAnon’s origins, its method of information dissemination, nor even that there was a “Q,” to say nothing of who Q might be. In their view, “QAnon” vaguely denoted “crazy Trump partisans,” though I could not even get them to say much more than that. And yet the term QAnon was firmly ensconced in their vocabulary as an enemy—faceless, amorphous, inarticulate. This confusion was not at all apparent to them.

This person was hardly anomalous. Those who nurse nightmares of Antifa usually can’t tell the difference between a black bloc anarchist and a champagne socialist. Such nebulous conceptions, even frightening ones, lose traction rapidly if they aren’t consistently fed with visceral reminders. Trump acted as the visceral, visible glue to attach people to the threat of QAnon—even with QAnon supporters elected, there is not the charge against QAnon that was so present when Trump was in office. Trump’s hypothetical return to Twitter created more anger and fear than anything under the actual rubric of QAnon has.

I know what QAnon is, and I know what Antifa is, and yet it seems pointless to belabor any of it. As enemies become more amorphous and undefined, they will slowly slip from the mind’s grasp. My interlocutor might have been worked up about QAnon, but QAnon will grow less clear and distinct without ongoing reinforcement. As any sort of centralized media narratives fade from public consciousness, such reinforcement will dissipate.

(After the chaos of recent years, the powers that be—financial, economic, and cultural power elites of one form or another—have every motivation to push spontaneously-arising subcultures toward docility and inefficacy. Both Democrats and Republicans appear to be reaching a point of seeing their most fervent followers more as liabilities than as assets. When those followers could be kept on a short leash out of the spotlight and away from the slightest levers of power, their chaos could be mitigated, which is why the top-down Mighty Wurlitzer model of right-wing talk radio and affiliated media remains the paradigm for effective agitprop motivation. Online social media/blogs/forums have proven to be very faulty imitations that allowed followers far too much latitude to develop their thoughts in unhelpful directions.)

The calm won’t increase across the board. There will remain narrative bunkers that hone in and define an enemy in their particular way, and if a QAnon supporter should take drastic action (use your imagination), that will suddenly redefine the movement vividly and viscerally for a much wider population. In times of clear economic and social crisis, differing viewpoints will jarringly reconcile themselves at the macro level, likely not for the better. This reconciliation may not even be comprehensible.

But the overall trend today is toward hermeticism, toward groups being not only uncomprehending of one another but unaware of one another. If the best and the brightest of finance couldn’t figure out until it was too late that cryptocurrency exchange FTX was a Potemkin village minting its own Monopoly money in an Adderall-fueled haze, what chance does the average subculture have of figuring out what is actually going on?

Narrative Bunkers

Substack owner Best thinks the peaceful truthseekers will write the future. They will. So will the combative liemongers. Everyone will. In an age of informational abundance, the idea of a large-scale cultural narrative being written by consensus becomes anachronistic, just as natural selection wouldn’t apply if there’s no competition in the first place. “Selection” itself is changing.