“I would prefer not to be in politics. I stepped into the arena because I think the stakes are extremely fundamental.”
Elon Musk
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH.”
Vivek Ramaswamy
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”
Donald Trump
In 2010’s Iron Man 2, there was an interesting, albeit brief, scene where Tony Stark and the new CEO of Stark Industries, Pepper Potts, run into none other than Elon Musk, sitting quietly in a posh restaurant. Musk rises from his chair to greet them, congratulating Potts on her new leadership role and mentioning his idea for an electric jet to Stark before the two walk off. This wasn’t a random cameo, since, according to Iron Man writer Mark Fergus, the South African-born businessman was the “biggest real-life inspiration” for Stark‘s character for the first movie in 2008. Nonetheless, his cameo prefigures the iconography of Musk as the Tony Stark of our time—a real-life genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist. Three of those descriptors are dubious at best, but Musk certainly is a billionaire; the richest in the world since September 2021.
It was only a matter of time before the world’s richest man dipped his toes (or more aptly, his funds) into politics. However, his earliest political foray came long before his rise to becoming the wealthiest man in history. During the 2004 presidential election, Musk donated $2000 to Republican nominee George W. Bush and his Democratic rival John Kerry. It wouldn’t be until 2016 that he took a position in the American government. New President Donald Trump appointed Musk to an advisory role in his Strategy and Policy forum, where businessmen would weigh in on economic affairs. Musk resigned from the forum in 2017 due to the administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreements, a liberal decision despite Musk’s recent rightward turn.
His early donations to the 2004 candidates and his forum resignation show that Elon Musk is a political flip-flopper. This is typical of the ruling class. After all, it is well known that the hearts of the wealthy elite bleed neither red nor blue but ultimately green. The flip-flopping continued throughout Trump’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign but ended recently, when Elon Musk ultimately settled on the political right. He donated a staggering 227 million dollars to Trump’s successful 2024 campaign. At a campaign rally, the crowd witnessed a visibly jolly Musk, jumping up and down, arms flailing over his head like an excited toddler, an image far removed from the calm, cool, collected swagger of an Iron Man. Trump stood on stage behind Musk, appearing to smile approvingly. Only God knows what he was thinking behind this smirk, whether he actually approves of this meme-worthy display of happiness and exuberance.
To make matters worse (and/or stranger), he was dressed in all black, donning a black version of the iconic red Make America Great Again cap. Pointing to the hat, Musk declared himself not just MAGA but something much more mysterious (if not more ridiculous)—he is “dark MAGA.” The difference between the typical red MAGA and its new dark transformation vaguely echoes the same distinction between the so-called “red-pill” and “black-pill” in various misogynistic internet circles. According to these circles, the “black-pill” is the extreme next step in the journey towards unhinged, violent, fanatic inceldom, the pill to take when one realizes that the red pill simply isn’t enough to deal with all the horrors of the modern liberal world. Dark MAGA is also the next step, only in this case, it isn’t just for misogyny but for American politics in general. It reflects the rise of the Technocratic Right and the apotheosis of its goofy yet dangerous billionaire leader, Elon Musk.
Since Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, jokes have circulated among Republicans and Democrats alike over how the real new president is Elon Musk. Trump, with his titanic ego, must be bothered by such jokes. At one of his rallies, Trump showed a bit of insecurity by recalling an obvious fact of American governance—that Musk couldn’t possibly be the real president because he isn’t a natural-born citizen. This can be interpreted as a minor signal to the nativist tendency in the right wing. However, even if this is the case, Musk is a de facto leader in the new Trump administration, and the jokes represent a public awareness of this fact.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were even named the two heads of a planned federal commission called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) (Ramaswamy was removed from this position, however). The word “department” is a misnomer here since there are no plans to create a new federal department like the Department of Homeland Security at the time of this writing. Nonetheless, Musk's leadership over DOGE only furthers the argument that he has too much control over the American government. As a famous rapper once said, no one man can have all that power!
How did Musk get here? On a direct level, this is just the result of monopoly capitalism. Monopolies unify businesses under one great banner, one successful corporation. This is a simple law of competition and free trade—to the victor in industry go absolutely all the spoils. Beyond the corporate world, however, monopolization encroaches on every aspect of life. It’s no secret that once a corporation dominates a single industry, it starts to dominate multiple industries. After it dominates industry in general, it further dominates life beyond industry. Politics is always the next venture; it isn’t even a discrete next step in this process. The struggle for political domination exists alongside purely capitalist competition. It isn’t as though the elite capitalist laser-focuses on dominating industry, and then, when he is complete and victorious, says to himself, “Alright, time to dominate politics!” Industrial domination always involves political maneuvers—take the classic example of lobbying for legal kickbacks. The capitalist will always take the opportunity to use his power in productive relations to influence the so-called superstructural spheres so that he advances in the base as well.
Elon Musk started humbly enough by joining PayPal and establishing domination in the financial industry. He then sold PayPal and founded SpaceX, aiming to dominate the space industry. Two years later, he founded Tesla, which dominated the automobile industry. This was the same year he made his meager donations to the Republican and Democrat campaigns, conditioning (in the most minor sense) domination in politics. His business timeline, in light of his newfound position as “real president,” clearly reflects the monopolizing tendency of capitalism. Capitalism is coalescence. It unites power under one singular banner. The phrase “All hail our new CEO Overlords!” loses its humor as it becomes less a joke and more a sober assessment of reality.
Technology is the future of the world and the essence of the digital age. It is also the future of political domination—in previous times, oil was the medium for power and used to elevate tycoons like John D. Rockefeller. Nowadays, technology like artificial intelligence reigns supreme. Here again, Tony Stark appears, as Elon Musk helped cofound OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT (along with Sam Altman, the company's current CEO). However, regarding digital political domination, Musk is currently master of another domain—social media. On October 28th, 2022, he bought the app X, formerly known as Twitter. Twitter has a rich political history, as it was the main bully pulpit that Trump used during his first presidential run. Although Trump still uses the app (although he has another rival platform called TruthSocial), it is now mainly associated with Musk.
Again, how did Musk get here? We can explain Musk more deeply by giving a brief yet broad historical trace of all the forces that structured his rise. America has a long and contentious tradition of states' rights—a national ideological debate since the times of Jefferson and Hamilton, constituting one of the core issues that structures American politics. The issue of states’ rights vs. federalism has transformed in the great political eras. Its function has varied throughout American history—the early national period, the Jackson era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, Jim Crow, the progressive period, the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Era, and the Cold War.
Out of this sustained struggle arose the ideology of right-wing libertarianism, which emerged in the mid-20th century. Libertarianism is a natural outgrowth of states’ rights and, more closely, laissez-faire liberalism. It takes the principles behind laissez-faire as a foundation for organizing the state and civil society—the respect of private property structures the entire ideology. The Austrian school, a conservative reaction to the postwar New Deal policies of Keynesianism, provided the primary economic and philosophic justification for libertarianism. Thinkers like Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman only furthered this intense relationship between Austrian economics and libertarian political ideology. We can say that this ideology came to ascendency twice in American politics: through the installation of neoliberalism under Reagan, and Bush-era right-wing populism, ushered in by an alliance between the business world and the various factions of the American right, which had hitherto been disorganized under the New Deal order.
More recently, the increasingly online world has fundamentally transformed the libertarian movement. Libertarian leaning young men started to clash first with religious fundamentalism. This is evident in the rise of a new atheist movement centered around early “skeptical” YouTubers like The Amazing Atheist and Thunderf00t. These figures would advocate for a “logical” and “rational” outlook that was initially seemingly very humanistic and liberal. The endless online debates exhausted the new atheist movement, and it began to set its sights beyond religious fundamentalism. This movement became increasingly political—the earliest signs of one of the many dreaded online rightwing pipelines. The new atheists started to identify as “anti-social justice,” and internet controversies like Gamergate and the Red Pill / MGTOW movement registered this rightward change. Meanwhile, in the world of national politics, from the Bush era to the Obama era, a crisis in the right-wing establishment grew alongside major political developments like the Iraq War, the housing crash, and the recession. To breeze over a very crucial era, this crisis eventually intersected with the anti-social justice movement, and born out of this intersection was the first presidency of Donald Trump and the unholy movement known as the alt-right.
States' rights, libertarianism, Donald Trump, and the alt-right are all structural aspects of the figure of Elon Musk. States' rights loom amid all historical attacks on federalism. Although Musk isn’t explicitly advocating states’ rights, the ideology supports his federal dismantling project (we will discuss this shortly), as it rallies Americans around dangerous and destructive deregulation campaigns. Musk renounces censorship (see: his rants about comedy), but this is just a mask to manufacture consent for general deregulation. Libertarians always tout liberty to hide their cowardice in the face of the tyranny of capital. They express an eternal preference for the private and the corporate: “Private corporations are always more efficient than the government.” Indeed, this thinking has influenced the current federal dismantling program. We should also highlight how other figures like Peter Thiel have represented these forces specifically in the world of technology, too, further contributing to this moment. Donald Trump literally plays a role in Musk’s political power. We don’t need to say anything more to justify that. Lastly, the alt-right provides Elon Musk with his worldview, not to mention his cultural attitudes and taste in memes. His comments on race and IQ are enough to place him squarely in the camp of seeing the world as the alt-right does. He still parades Pepe the Frog in 2025, the alt-right mascot that rose to national prominence during Trump’s first campaign.
Elon Musk is using DOGE to dismantle the federal government, ultimately transforming it. There must be some change in the political base to enact this transformation. This is because the previous consciousness from below cannot support and further the new agenda from above if it has not adjusted to it. If the constituency lags behind the leadership's agenda, the political movement risks a crisis where the leadership no longer represents the base. This is because the new agenda diverges from the “on the ground” experience of the average constituent. The technical maneuvers and tactics of the higher level alienate the typical, “common” concerns of the base. To defend against this, the right-wing leadership welcomes in the new, formerly politically-neutral tech workers into their high-level ranks but also into their base because those workers tend to understand the high-level agenda, precisely the technocratic characteristic of DOGE. A new right-wing technocratic base would be ideal for projects of this kind. But for now, this is an awkward realignment—the right wing welcomes the mötley crew of petty-tech workers into their home, but they start to cramp the living space immediately. Soon, the old guard (the nationalists, the populists, the evangelicals, the core establishment) gets claustrophobic. This rising tension exploded into a conflict to be discussed shortly, between the pro-immigrant technocrats, led by Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump, and the anti-immigrant nationalists, led by extremist right-wing figures like Laura Loomer. The new emerging tech wing has values different from those of the nationalists, partly due to a different educational basis. The conservative programmer, given that he has a college education, will be more open to the acceptance of immigrants on H-1B visas, to the chagrin of nationalists. This particular conflict has calmed down, but still represents a lingering crisis in the right wing.
Elon Musk represents the new petty bourgeois technological class (despite his own position as the ‘head’ of the bourgeoisie), which I will call the petty-tech class for short. Software (especially artificial intelligence) is the primary commodity that determines the membership of this class. A middle-class engineer rises to the technological petty-bourgeois insofar as he masters and exploits software. When that engineer reaches maturity, they can architect and maintain an entire product independently and effectively lead a team of other engineers. They can enter the petty-tech class by founding a startup (note: this class was interpellated into the trump camp over the whole fiasco under the Biden admin over control of OpenAI). The more successful the startup is, the more the small-business owner tech leader becomes bourgeois proper. Musk manifests their aspirations for political supremacy. He is deconstructing the federal government under the guise of increasing efficiency and saving money. The real motivation for this project is undoubtedly to replace the current bureaucracy with more representatives of the petty-tech class. This goal is alongside the general conservative road towards fascism, outlined in the dreaded Project 2025. In terms of the petty-tech class, howeverthough, through DOGE and the commands of Elon Musk, the new Trump administration wants to transform the federal government into an explicit instrument of class power.
How will Trump ultimately mediate and resolve this tension as the balancing force? Only God knows. But currently, the president is allowing Musk to run amok in his libertarian obliteration of the federal bureaucracy, thereby affirming the place of the petty-tech class in the home of the right wing. Trump can only benefit from gutting the national government, since capital always rewards its “liberator” (deregulator) handsomely. We can expect more shutting down of departments, more budget cuts, more defunding, more layoffs and firings, more locked buildings, more displacements, more irrational shifts—in a couple words—more haphazardous austerity maneuvers, until the right wing base suffers a direct, conceivable, open injury as a result of these policies. When DOGE eliminates social security and welfare programs and the poor rural population can no longer survive, the right-wing crisis will bubble up to the surface again.
On December 26th, 2024, politician Vivek Ramaswamy rocked the political world by making a very long, scathing tweet regarding immigration—arguably the most important issue for American right-wing politics. In the tweet, he claimed that American culture “venerated mediocrity” is more likely to praise the likes of “cool” characters like Zach from ‘Saved by the Bell’ rather than typical smart ‘nerds’ like Steve Urkel. Ramaswamy then called for a cultural awakening in the United States, so we don’t fall behind in STEM compared to our ‘hyper-competitive global market for technical talent’. This was in response to criticisms made against Trump’s support for H-1B visas by the far-right internet personality Laura Loomer. H-1B visas allow American companies to hire foreign workers in specific ‘specialty’ industries like tech. The foundation for Trump’s entire political movement is ‘America First,’ the nativist sentiment that centers nationalist policies and prioritizes American citizens. This most clearly manifests as an extreme anti-immigration stance—recall the infamous border wall at the center of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s support for H-1B visas, backed by Ramaswamy’s hyper-critical tweet, contradicts this core tenet of America First. To make matters worse for the Trump coalition, Musk echoed Trump and Ramaswamy’s support for these visas.
Like Icarus, Vivek Ramaswamy flew too close to the sun during the H-1B crisis. He broke a cardinal rule of nationalism: never demean the nation. Calling out the inferiority of American culture, in favor of Asian culture, is nationalist political suicide. Hence, Ramaswamy was removed from DOGE and relegated to the Ohio governor’s race. Before making this political faux pas, the petty-tech leadership was grooming him to lead. He would have functioned as ushering in the realignment—his non-whiteness would have opened the road for a new, more “tolerant” right wing. A multicultural nationalism, an anti-racist fascism, a tolerant techno-feudalism—these are the only real vital futures of the technocratic right-wing agenda. Vivek Ramaswamy, had he not flown too high, would have been pivotal in bringing in this future.
Mark Zuckerberg has also made a recent rightward shift. He is yet another example of the rich political flip-flopper, given that he banned Donald Trump on Facebook for two years (he was unbanned in January). This is not only an important maneuver but also relevant here—Zuckerberg, like Musk, is now a figure in the Trump administration. The difference from Musk, however, is that while Musk has laid a stake in the administration, Zuckerberg was a bit late to the party. He seeks Trump’s approval and favor and wants to rival Musk in the technocratic world. Mark Zuckerberg is doing what capitalists do best—competing with Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg initiated his rightward shift when he announced that Meta, following the lead of other large corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart, was slashing its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs. DEI has been the symbolic attack target of conservatism as of late—before this, it was ‘critical race theory,’ and before that, ‘postmodernism.’ These are all empty signifiers, abstract objects that the right-wing uses as a launching point for its ideological assault. Next, Zuckerberg ordered the removal of tampons from men’s bathrooms—a dig at what he calls “transgenderism”. But being transgender is not an empty signifier but a lived reality, hence why this attack is more vicious and dangerous than the removal of DEI programs, especially for transgender employees at Meta.
The communist (and more generally, anticapitalist) reaction to dismantling the federal government, and the general rise of the technocratic right, has been a rallying cry for more community organizing (Oh boy!). Communists feel we need to construct alternative dual power systems now more than ever, to support the masses against the material losses suffered from the current onslaught of austerity politics. Community-centered Marxists view mutual aid not as a political luxury but as a matter of survival. If this is the case, we all consider ourselves already dead. Communism and socialism are simply not at the level where they can replace government assistance. It is a desperate fantasy, an apocalyptic hope that the “last shall be the first” in the wake of fascism.
I’m sure that community initiatives, scattered across the nation, are actually helping marginalized people survive when institutions fail them, and I’m sure that they will emerge as government dismantling continues. However, these community efforts are scattered nonetheless—they reflect an activity that cannot constitute a political struggle, an activity of a routed movement. Communists need to run candidates and support policies that directly attack the dismantling of the federal government. Now is the time to wholeheartedly support welfare, social security, student loans, healthcare, etc. This isn’t just to alleviate or help the survival of the masses, as the economist would. Political action that revolves around defending the targets of austerity must organize and direct the political aspirations of the working class against the backdrop of an actual historical situation. The situation that anchors real politics is the emergence of the petty-bourgeois technocratic right and the federal government's dismantling. If communists immerse themselves in real-life moments, we can become active political agents and make strides to overcome our marginal character. The election was the previous site of real politics, and now it is dismantling the federal government and attacking all forms of national welfare.
“Class war, not culture war!” cries the communist! All of mankind shares the same underlying culture. The real dividing line between our fellow man is economic. Other divisions, like race and gender, are superfluous compared to the lines drawn by the almighty dollar.” This reasoning is economism; its logic confuses and vulgarizes the relationship between the base and superstructure. We see this economism crop up far beyond communism, even beyond the left and liberalism, in the general field of populism. “Class is the real divide” is a common populist sentiment in American political culture, belonging to both liberals and conservatives alike, especially amid a conversation between the two where both sides seek some kind of reconciliation or common ground. Despite this, the right wing advances their politics in the exact opposite spirit of this populist sentiment—culture is everything. The right wing transforms cultural objects (ideas, events, etc.) into policies and seats in office. For them, the cultural moment becomes a political object.
Furthermore, the underlying mode of right-wing politics is a ‘positive’ cultural perspective, a way of life that needs no further justification beyond preference for tradition. The exploitation of cultural objects and the underlying ‘way-of-life’ politics of the right leads to their political domination. The left must update its politics and engage in this strategy. However, the left cannot emulate this maneuver because it occupies a defensive political position based on an assumption of morality. There is no ‘way-of-life’ defense with leftist politics, only adherence to a shared moral code. To properly combat the right, the left must overcome this passive position by positing a definite left-wing culture. They can take advantage of cultural ‘objects’ similar to the rights of this culture. Culture is identical to ideology, providing a lens for experiencing reality like an ideology does. There’s no real way to separate our experience of the world from the cultural position we occupy. Culture engulfs all aspects of public life—everything we do, say, think, etc.
Culture is the lens through which people experience society and contextualize that experience. Politics has to be real to people and touch on their experiences profoundly. Culture is a profound connection to one's experience - culture encapsulates a person’s values, customs, histories, etc., but also more inward parts of their experience, such as their goals and traumas. Denial of culture means a denial of experience - ultimately, a denial of recognition. The right wing feels that left-wing politics are a negation of their culture, ultimately a denial of recognition of conservatism. To combat this, the right-wing pursues policies that are explicitly cultural - they affirm and recognize their own culture in their politics.
Meanwhile, the left-wing doesn’t establish a culture or a way of life in their politics - instead, they defend an ethic. The left wing reacts to right-wing politics by imposing sanctions for transgressions against the morality of their ideology, whether it be communist, anarchist, social-democratic, or merely progressive in the weakest liberal sense. This leads to a movement that lacks zeal since people’s culture and experience are not reflected in politics, only in the defense of a certain ethic. Economism tries to rectify this passivity but fails since it attempts to transcend cultural differences to focus strictly on material conditions and economic relief. This “material logic” is too reductive to sustain an excited and growing socialist movement. Communists have an opportunity now - they must understand the priority of the cultural dimension of revolution and put forth an active cultural tendency to politicize.
Communists say, “Class war, not culture war!” even though we acknowledge the fact that class relations tend to encroach on every dimension of life. You would think they would stop for a second and reflect on this slogan, realizing that in its use, class relations are overstepping its boundaries yet again! We would recognize that our economic plight is so overbearing that it even sneaks into our revolutionary ideology, reducing something as complex and encompassing as culture to a mere distraction. But we don’t do this; we try to parade the same tired reduction, hoping it will suddenly enlighten the labor-weary masses and spring them into revolutionary action. What springs the working class into action is culture—the right wing knows this fact and has mastered it. Border crisis, transgender bathrooms, critical race theory, affirmative action, ‘DEI’—these are the cultural objects that mobilized the working class into reactionary politics. All that the left has done against this onslaught is lazily chastise the right for increasing ludicrousness and lunacy, in step with the liberals.
The political struggle is the cultural struggle. Successful politics result from a cultural victory transformed into a political achievement. To illustrate our point, we can restrict the activities of the entire political sphere to a single goal: creating new policies. In ideal cases, cultural points become political concerns resolved by introducing new laws purported to manifest the solution to the great social issue that the cultural point reflects. In a democratic society, these laws are passed by an elected government. I would say that this cultural-political transformation happens to a much greater intensity in democracies than in dictatorships. This is because, again, in the most ideal conditions, democratic governments represent the largest array of cultural concerns across the nation. In a dictatorship, the concerns of the dictator transform into political policy, and these concerns may be utterly divorced from the cultural concerns of the nation. Think of the dictator who steals money from the public treasury to fund their extravagant vacations. Using national funds is a policy, even though it reflects one person's will. However, in capitalist democracies, this cultural representation is restricted to bourgeois forms. It struggles to appropriate and alienate working-class cultural representations and succeeds in doing so; otherwise, they would no longer be the dominant class. But this is beside the point.
The left’s assumption that humanity’s only real division is class derives from humanism, an ideal born from Enlightenment thought. Related to this humanism, one of the more subtle errors of left politics is that it is blind to its prevailing ethnocentrism. The left confounds its relative tolerance of cultural differences with an attitude of sheer open-mindedness and a value-neutral stance on freedom. In actuality, the left’s universalism is a positive cultural position—it is closed-minded, as it values a specific cultural perspective that negates others. The left isn’t tolerant of religious differences, for example, but only those that can be expressed in such a way that the expression does not infringe on others. There’s no room for religious extremism in a leftist society, even though extremism is an actual cultural pattern that arises everywhere religion appears. To have a fundamental stance that bars any cultural perspective makes that position, itself, cultural. There is an illusion that this fundamentally democratic and liberal view of social behavior is universal. Still, this perspective is merely a colonial assumption—that the Enlightenment ideals transcend difference and should be carried across the globe in large voyages. It isn’t universal but as local as any other culture, regardless of whether it has been taken worldwide (much more by capital than by colonial-era ships).
Nonetheless, what this means for the far left, and especially for communism, is that we can express a definite cultural position to advance our politics. The left doesn’t do this—the fundamental attitude of leftist political expression is defensive. It defends an ethical standard that it views as universal. This standard is universal because it appears to be the common-sense morality of ‘proper’ humanity. Of course, we should support welfare and mutual aid; it is common sense that people shouldn’t suffer poverty or starve. Of course, healthcare is a right; it is common sense that people’s livelihoods ought to be guaranteed beyond their income. Of course, everyone has the right to vote; it is common sense that discrimination is evil. These rationales are abundant in leftist thinking and largely depend on a false view that compassion is ‘inherent’ in humanity and unifies the world, but that this unification is ‘corrupted’ or ‘obscured’ by capitalism. The left doesn’t advance and defend a way of life—they advance and defend a moral stance that they assume accommodates and protects cultural differences.
I agree with all the basic moral positions of the left and all the content of the rationales listed above. However, I do not believe leftism is based on anything accommodating or universal. I support welfare and mutual aid; healthcare is a right, and discrimination is evil. However, these views cannot be posited as common sense. The left falls into an unconscious assumption that their ideology is culturally accommodating since it is based on tolerance. It also sees its ideology as universal; it takes social justice as the natural application of basic human morality. To be a communist, to believe in and struggle for a communist future, is to put forward a way of life that disqualifies many others. The economic divisions sown by capitalist society do not universalize the cultural position that these very divisions are alienating, harmful, and ultimately destructive for society. To hold this position is to enter the culture war on the same grounds as all the other combatants—fighting to defend a local culture on completely relative (subjective, contingent) grounds rather than grounds justified by a universal claim to morality.
My point is that communist politics needs to meet the demands of the culture war. The communist world is the world we want to live in not because communism is the right thing to do, the most optimal society respectful of the “absolute” right to freedom, but because a communist society would exacerbate the parts of our current experience that we want to maintain, the lifestyle we must defend from attack within the realm of politics. Multiculturalism, diversity, religious moderation and separation from the state, welfare, democratic rights, gender liberation, peace, freedom of expression, charity, anti-racism, sexual liberation, climate justice, etc.—all positive aspects of our particular way of life that we appreciate right now in our liberal capitalist society. These are not inherent “goods” within themselves. There is no transcendent reason why any of the elements listed above ought to be respected by those who aren’t already convinced or soon to be convinced by their worth. In war, an invaded nation cannot shout at the enemy how morally wrong it is to invade another country, hoping to sway them ethically to leave their territory. They have to prepare their troops for battle and fight back. The same goes for left-wing politics—long gone is the era of liberal moral expectations from conservatives. This goes twice for communists since their position is even beyond that of liberalism. However, I would argue that the entire left operates on the same liberal moral expectations, even if their explicit stance ranges beyond capitalism. Hence, there is no need to specify communists above. All in all, we have to find a way to express our real unity—the liberated lifestyle that our leftist cultural position brings us.