The Mask Comes Off
How neoliberal hypocrisy and a curdled counterculture unleashed Trumpism
This is the latest installment of Why We Need an Esoteric Left, the book I am serializing here chapter by chapter. The argument so far: the Left keeps failing because it lacks a metaphysics. It ceded myth, meaning, and the sacred to the Right, and it must reclaim them on the foundation of a consciousness-based understanding of reality — a new metaphysics that gives our lives meaning, purpose, and depth. The earlier chapters explored how the Far Right harnesses mythic and occult energies for its project of domination, how apocalyptic theology drives both Christian Nationalism and Zionist extremism toward catastrophe, and how the manosphere offers young men a counterfeit initiation — taking their genuine pain and aiming it at false enemies, including women.
We are now inside Chapter Four, “Our Civilizational Psychosis,” which moves in two parts: the outer history of how the American Left was destroyed, and then the inner history — the deeper metaphysical wound the Left inflicted on itself. In the previous installment, I looked at the neuroscience of male despair and the tribal reflex, the outrage machinery of the platforms, and the government’s deliberate demolition of the New Left through COINTELPRO: Fred Hampton murdered in his bed, the killings at Kent State, a generation shown the limits of permitted dissent.
This installment continues the outer history. The counterculture, I argue here, was not simply crushed; it was absorbed — its demand for liberation repackaged as a consumer style, its political substance amputated, and its populist “rebellious” stance assimilated. Countercultural rebellion became the operative mythology and style of corporate globalization. Neoliberal leaders like Clinton and Obama supported the expansion of corporate and military dominance. Meanwhile the Right spent fifty years patiently building the apparatus that now carries out Project 2025.
In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank argues that the counterculture was not simply defeated by corporate capitalism; many of its values were absorbed into a new form of consumer society. Advertising and business learned to present consumption as an escape from conformity, appealing to a widespread “disgust with mass society itself.” Buying new clothes, records, cars and experiences could now signify independence rather than obedience. Frank describes how “leisure-time activities of consuming” were “redefined as ‘rebellion.’” The countercultural ideals of authenticity, personal freedom and resistance to authority became highly effective ways to market products. Rebellion ceased to threaten the system and became one of its most productive styles.
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This produced what might be called the baby boomers’ devil’s bargain: they could enter corporate, professional and military society while maintaining an ironic distance from it. They could prosper within the system without feeling that they had surrendered to its values. The revolutionary language of the 1960s gradually congealed into personal expression, therapy, spiritual seeking and lifestyle.
Tom Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the “Me Decade,” while Christopher Lasch diagnosed a broader “culture of narcissism.” Christopher Hitchens later derided the boomers as “a bunch of teetotalling, butt-crushing, Stairmaster creeps with no culture worth cultivating,” asking on whose watch the culture had declined into “candified, soft-centered, massified, and mushy narcissism.” The yuppie represented the completed transformation: the former rebel as affluent consumer, retaining the gestures and tastes of dissent while abandoning its political substance and yearning for systemic change and collective emancipation, with American Psycho its perfect symbolic expression.
For a brief period, electrified rock music seemed capable of doing more than representing revolution; it appeared able to instigate one. Rock concerts, radio and records synchronized millions of people emotionally, weakened sexual and racial conventions, and created the felt presence of a new society. Allen Ginsberg believed that rock music reopened the shut-down body of Anglo-European civilization: African-derived rhythm bypassed the hyper-intellectualized head and hit the base of the spine, a shamanic transmission that prepared the way for the sexual revolution (an ambiguous, and incomplete, transformation of values).
Yet this revolutionary experience depended from the beginning on radio stations, mass distribution of albums, cults of celebrity, mass media and corporate infrastructure. Its liberating force and its commodity form were inseparable. The counterculture therefore did not simply collapse into lifestyle at some later moment. As Frank suggests, it was “a stage in the development” of middle-class consumer values. Its demands for self-expression and personal liberation could be commercialized far more easily than its demands for economic equality, peace, workplace democracy or collective control over social life.
Fredric Jameson, the American Marxist literary critic and theorist of postmodernism, understood the 1960s dialectically: both a genuine liberation and a phase in capitalism’s global transformation.
The decade released what Jameson calls “an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies, a prodigious release of untheorized new forces”: anticolonial revolt, civil rights, feminism, psychedelic culture and experimental art. Yet Jameson argues that this freedom emerged through the transition from one stage of capitalism to another. Older institutions, hierarchies and social conventions were breaking down partly because capitalism itself was becoming more global, flexible, consumer-oriented and dependent on the constant production of new identities and desires. The sexual revolution and feminism, for example, benefited capitalist production as it meant both members of a couple would become productive laborers, as well as avid consumers.
Jameson calls this period “an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit.” Culture appeared to promise more freedom than society’s economic structure could ultimately support. The “Third World and the unconscious”—territories outside Western capitalism and psychic depths seemingly outside the market—were being incorporated into a newly expanded system. The same forces that seemed to liberate colonized peoples, sexuality, imagination and personal identity also opened new markets and new areas of human experience to commodification (as we are now seeing with psychedelics).
