thanks, ryan, heres the transcript
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-
the-anti-establishment
Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to Questions for
Corbett. I'm your host, James Corbett of
CorbettReport.com, and I'm here to answer your
questions. And I've got one today from the email bag,
specifically from Ben, who writes, Hi, James. I'm sure
you have a million questions, but as a kid who grew up
in the 90s, I have to ask,
what happened to the anti-establishment people? There
used to be so many people that distrusted authorities,
no matter what party they were or what side. Where has
this gone, and how was it so widely crushed from the
bands to the artists to anything cultural? Granted, my
perspective is American,
but I used to know tons of people who were anti-
authoritarian, but now they have joined one of two
tribes. From my vantage point, I think this really
advanced during the first Trump term, but it probably
was in motion much before, and it is smart. Basically,
they have set up parameters for someone who is unhappy.
It's the Democrats' fault, or it's the Republicans'
fault. My question, though, in a nutshell, is what
happened to being anti-authoritarian and the default
distrust of the authority figures? Excellent question,
Ben. Thank you for writing in with this question. I
think it's an important one that needs to be addressed.
And I will note that I did receive this email shortly
before I penned my two-part editorial series that to
some extent answers this question, but not completely.
And I think I have an interesting take on at least a
path forward to answering this question that I will
present in due time. But first...
Let's talk about that aforementioned editorial. So for
people who don't know, of course, this is
CorbettReport.com. And on the front page, well, at the
moment that I'm recording this, the top post is the
latest editorial. But if you ever want to know about my
newsletter editorials, of course, you could just scroll
down and... Here they are.
And so here are the latest few. Well, here's the first
part and the second part of this series that I'm
referring to. Back and to the right, the pendulum
swings again. And from flatland to reality, escaping
the political pendulum. These are essentially two parts
of one long editorial.
So if you click into this back and to the right, you
can get the post. But of course, this is a subscriber
newsletter. So please do sign up and become a member if
you are not one. However, having said that, you do not
need to be a member to read this editorial.
You can go read it for free on my substack. So why
don't we go do that? So if you go to my substack and
you go back to the back and to the right editorial,
which is slipped down to the second page now. Back and
to the right, the pendulum swings again.
Here is the full, complete editorial for free. And I
did address, essentially, I think, the meat and
potatoes of this conundrum that you're referring to
here, Ben, in this editorial, specifically in this part
on the meaning of anti-establishment, where I write...
Since the manufacturing of teen culture in the 1950s
and due in no small part to
the rise of mass media in the 20th century, Western
culture has venerated one particular trope, that of
rebellious youths rising up against their stuffy
conservative parents. So oft told is the baby boomer
coming-of-age tale about a young man or woman defying
their parents by growing out their hair, dropping out
of college, and joining the anti-war movement,
that this narrative cliche now stands, at least in the
American popular imagination, as the archetypical story
of the 1960s. It's easy to see why this story appealed
to the populist sentiment of the time. By tuning in,
turning on, and dropping out, the younger generation
created a youth quake that shook the establishment to
the core.
This story of rebellion manifested itself culturally in
the veneration of countercultural icons like James
Dean, the Rebel Without a Cause, in the rise of protest
music, rock and roll, and risque fashion, and in the
advent of the pill, the subsequent promotion of free
love, and eventually the attendant dissolution of the
traditional family structure.
Links for those who are interested. But importantly,
this renegade spirit also manifested itself
politically. Although the tie-dyed, long-haired, socks
and sandal set eventually put on shirts and ties and
joined the workaday world, they would never abandon the
political worldview they had adopted during their
coming-of-age era. In the U.S. specifically, the
boomers' political consciousness,
forged in the crucible of the civil rights movement and
the Vietnam War protests movement, associated the term
establishment with the conservatives they had opposed
in the 1960s and the term anti-establishment with the
left-wing progressives who had marched alongside them.
No boomer, in other words, had to be told who the
short-haired, yellow-bellied sons of Tricky Dicky were,
or on which side of the political aisle those sons were
standing. That's why the inversion that has taken place
in recent years is so difficult for those of a certain
vintage to understand. To them, the establishment has
always represented conservative values, and by
extension, Republican politicians, in the American
context, of course.
The anti-establishment has always been populated by
progressives, radicals, and activists on the far left
wing of the political spectrum. But all that has
changed. Do you remember when advocacy of same-sex
marriage was an idea too radical even for left-wing
politicians? Do you remember when a president having
sex with his intern in the Oval Office was
dismissed as a trivial issue? Though it was perfectly
acceptable to shame the intern for the affair. Do you
remember when Ace Ventura's over-the-top reaction to
his Einhorn discovery was treated as a hilarious joke?
rather than an example of insanely transphobic
moviemaking deserving of a re-evaluation. For all those
who answered yes to the above questions,
keep in mind that there's an entire generation growing
up today who don't remember those things. For the Gen
Zers, and now the Gen Alphas, there has never been a
time when the establishment, from the politicians
running the country, to the media figures and
celebrities appearing on their screens, to the teachers
at their schools,
to the corporations plying them with products, has been
opposed to those ideas once considered so radical and
progressive. Of course the Biden administration
appointed a dog role-playing fetishist to a top
position in the Office of Nuclear Energy before firing
him. I mean, firing them for repeatedly stealing
luggage at airports.
And if you think that's odd, you're a bigot who
deserves to be cast out of polite society. Of course
teachers spend their days at school casually wishing
death on conservative Christians. And if you don't
think the teacher is the real victim here, then you're
probably one of those bitter clingers who deserve to
die.
Of course Gillette made ads insulting their own
customers for their supposed toxic masculinity. And of
course Bud Light partnered with a transgender
influencer to market their beer. And of course Lockheed
Martin sponsors Pride Month events. And how dare you
question the virtue of their public advocacy. Yes, for
as long as today's younger generation can remember,
the establishment has been synonymous with identity
politics and woke virtue signaling. It doesn't take a
genius then to figure out that for this generation,
being anti-establishment means living the baby boomers
coming of age tale in reverse. That is cutting their
hair short, dressing in suits, rejecting free love and
going to church.
And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what's been
happening in recent years. In fact, not only do Gen
Zers self-identify as more conservative than previous
generational cohorts, they are also, according to some
overzealous clickbait headline writers, possibly the
most conservative generation in history. The old truism
that children are always more progressive and left-
leaning than their parents,
it turns out, isn't an ironclad law of the universe, as
generations of people in the West have come to assume.
Naturally, this political shift is manifesting itself
in every aspect of society and culture. Gen Zers are
having less sex than previous generations and are even
less interested in seeing sex depicted in movies.
Gen Zers are repopularizing traditional gender roles
and family dynamics with Gen Z men gravitating to the
manosphere and Gen Z women embracing the trad wife
lifestyle. Even religion is reasserting itself, with
Gen Zers half as likely as their parents to call
themselves atheists and young men converting to
Orthodox Christianity in record numbers.
There is one simple way to contextualize these sweeping
changes. We can relate them to the swing of the
political pendulum. The political world had swung so
far to the left that a swing back to the right was
inevitable, and that is exactly what we are seeing now.
From this viewpoint,
there's a strange mirror image similarity between the
hippies, the extreme countercultural elements of the
1960s, and the tiki torch bearing white identitarians
and Nazi flag-waving extreme countercultural elements
of Gen Z. They are both defying political convention in
ways that are sure to shock their parents' generation.
But if we stop our analysis here,
we run the risk of assuming we're merely living through
some generational cycle that has always existed and
will always continue to exist for the rest of human
history. As it turns out, the pendulum swing from left
to right and back again does not adequately describe
our political reality.
To truly understand what is happening, we need to think
outside the box. Or should that be outside the
spectrum? I will leave this dramatic reading of my
editorial there. You, of course, can go and read that
on your own time in its full context. And then, of
course,
you can read the second part of this editorial in which
I describe in more detail what escaping the political
pendulum or the political spectrum means and how we can
envision something that is not quite as simply one-
dimensional as the political spectrum that we are told
comprises the totality of the political universe. But
having said that,
I think you're starting to understand at least one
aspect of an answer to a question like Ben's. What
happened to anti-establishment? Well, to a certain
extent, the conceptualization of even what the
establishment is and how anti-establishmentarianism
manifests itself in our current age has changed. The
very concept of what it means to be against the
establishment...
I suppose in a general sense, it's the same, but in the
specific sense, it's a mirror image. It's the exact
opposite of what it was, say, in the 1960s or in
previous generations, even in the 1990s, when I
remember, for example, Nirvana's downplaying of macho,
swaggering, traditional rock star imagery and embracing
Kurt wearing
dresses on stage and things like that was still
transgressive. That was anti-establishment and counter-
cultural at the time. Fast forward a few years, and
that is the establishment. That is what is expected.
You better... at least embrace and celebrate people who
go on stage with the dress, or else you're some sort of
horrible bigot.
And that has become the establishment narrative. So
what does it mean to be anti-establishment at a time
when what was anti-establishment just a couple of
decades ago is the inverse of what it was now? So you
see, that complicates the question of anti-
establishmentarianism. But Ben, I think you're right to
ask, where does this really come from?
Where does this impetus of dividing everything into the
left-right political spectrum, and even more
specifically than that, specifically the culture war
issues, so that one's entire, not just political
identity, but entire identity is defined by one's
position on the spectrum between woke and MAGA. And
that's it.
Where did that division really start to come into play
and how does that affect that conception that used to
exist in previous generations that the anti-
establishment was at least fighting aiming upward
rather than at each other? When did it become this
absolute total binary polarizing division of society? I
think there is an answer to that,
and I posited at least where I would identify that
juncture in history where we started to go down this
path in my recent conversation with John Titus about
his new documentary series on the war for bankocracy. I
think there is an incredibly fascinating history of the
past 15 years that can and should,
and maybe I'll write it myself, but should be written
on the cultural history of the past 15 years and the
woke culture identity, culture war nonsense that has
absolutely subsumed every other political story. is a
result of that 2008 backlash that you're talking about,
which gave rise to two populist movements, one on the
right, the Tea Party,
one on the left, the Occupy movement. And both of those
completely subsumed into this culture war nonsense that
has totally diverted it from the fact that, hey, it
seems that people on the left and the right totally
agree on this against the bankers and against Wall
Street. Wow. Oh, wait, now that's all gone.
It's all been shoved under the rug and no one even
remembers the 2008 peel-out.
I remember because I was making a movie. I was making a
movie called Bailout. At that time, I went to a lot of
Occupy Wall Street protests. They didn't look anything
like what the media said they did. I was at these
protests. There was a lot of people who were older and
a lot of people were having
conversations exactly like you just said, like, hey,
you know what? You know, I may be lefty, but the Ron
Paul people are making sense. And the Ron Paul people
are like, hey, those guys make sense. And they were
getting together. And the powers that be had to put
that to a stop as soon as they could.
They got together and they did it.
Once again, that was a clip from my recent interview
with John Titus about his new documentary series, The
War for Bankocracy, which is available for viewing
right now at Solari.com. The first two episodes have
been posted as I record this QFC. So if you haven't
seen that interview, what are you doing?
The link is in the show notes. Please do listen to that
conversation in its entirety if you haven't yet seen
Titus' series. Start watching. It is worth your time.
Having said that, I am not going to presume today in
this edition of Questions for Corbett to do that
deep dive history that I think deserves to be done on
specifically that post-2008 global financial crisis
moment that I identify there as the moment where a
true, real, grassroots, widespread, anti-establishment,
populist movement started to to come together
spontaneously, but was very deliberately driven apart
with a gigantic wedge.
And I think that is the moment that we can see, at
least in this time frame, in the 21st century, this is
how the divide and conquer game has been affected to
bring about exactly what you talk about there in your
question, Ben, this Well,
now everybody is on one of two camps and you either
support this side of the government or you support that
side of the government. But nobody is against the idea
of government. Well, what happened? How did that
happen? Oh, at least we can identify when and where and
for what reasons that was brought about.
But here's the even more interesting, fascinating
question. How? How? was that brought about. As I say,
I'm not doing the deep dive on that today, but I do at
least have the start of that trail that I think is
incredibly important, incredibly interesting, and
starts in an incredibly unusual place with a seemingly
disconnected observation.
So, I want you to think for a second about how you talk
about time these days, how you describe the era that we
live in. You might call it the post-pandemic era, or
maybe the second Trump administration. Or, as I
overheard someone say in LA recently, you might say,
we're entering our fire era. Bleak. But... You know,
we used to have a different way to talk about the
passage of time that was pervasive in our society. Up
until about 20 years ago, we described the passage of
time purely in 10-year chunks called decades. Remember
those? The roaring 20s, the swinging 60s, and the no
soup for you 90s. You know,
it's difficult to overstate how much we structured our
entire culture around these specific 10-year chunks.
But I don't have to state it at all because you know it
already intuitively. If I were to tell you to close
your eyes and picture the 70s, you'd instantly think
bell bottoms, big lapels, and John Travolta staying
alive.
If I asked you what the 40s sounded like, you can hear
a big swing band in your mind. And if I say the word
90s, you can practically see the Saved by the Bell
intro, feel the snap bracelet around your wrist, taste
the Arch Deluxe, hear Blur's song too,
and smell the sickly sweet aroma of Bed Bath & Beyond.
The bundle of concepts associated with each decade
feels so distinct and meaningful that just the name of
a decade evokes a world of associations with that time
period. And up until the late 90s, we used these decade
names almost constantly in everyday speech to describe
not
just the past, but the present.
I mean, the 90s were such an enormous, omnipresent
concept that even sentient axe-murdering dolls
understood they had to get with the times.
The phrase was a cultural shorthand for this pervasive
feeling that the world was new and advancing and that
the old norms of the past were being swept away. The
passage from the 80s to the 90s was seen as this
literal cultural vibe shift. But then, 10 years later,
something happened that made the vibes suddenly stop
shifting.
Now, that was a clip from someone called Adam Conover
from a video entitled What Happened to Decades? And
full caveat up front, I have absolutely no idea who
Adam Conover is, and I am certainly not making some
sort of blanket recommendation. But that video in
particular, I would argue, is worth your time and
attention.
So the link will be in the show notes. Please follow it
through. Please watch. that full video because Adam
Conover makes a very basic, almost trivial observation,
but shows how it is connected to a profound disconnect
that has happened in our society as a result of our
language. And I will spoil, I suppose,
some of his argument here by noting that he goes on to
explain the observation that I'm sure we've all had at
some point. We have stopped referring to decadal units
as decades since the turn of the 21st century. And why?
Because there is no good, handy, shorthand way to say
the decade's name in English. 70s, 80s, 90s.
Zero? Double zero? Oughts? Naughties? No one could
agree on what to call each decade. So, eh, let's just
stop referring to decades. And that, of course, carried
over into the 2010s. You can't call them the 2010s. The
2010s? Again, that's not a decade. We're now in the
20s. But if I say 20s,
you're not going to think 2020s, you're going to think
1920s, because we have so thoroughly become
disconnected from that cultural convention of referring
to decades of time that we don't have any connection
with that anymore. It's the 20s? What does that even
mean? What does the 20s conjure in your imagination?
Now, again, that's seemingly a trivial observation.
Okay, it seems to be true, but so what? Who cares? What
does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Well, let me tell you what that has to do with the
price of tea in China. As Adam Conover goes on to
state,
we have replaced thinking about time in chunks of
decades that everyone in the 90s was in the 90s. It's
the 90s. It's hammer time. Whatever. Whatever you
associate with that decade was associated with
everyone. And as he goes on to point out, for example,
90s nostalgia, like the wedding singer looking back at
the 80s,
everyone could look back at the fashion that was taking
place 10 years ago and everyone could say, that was
crazy. Wow. Remember when we all did that? Oh. But
since we no longer refer to decades as these cultural
units, now we've replaced that by talking about
generations.
Now we talk about millennial fashion or we talk about
Gen Zers slang, for example. There is no 2010s, there
is no 2020s. There are generational units. And
precisely because of that shift in language, our
society has instantly become stratified, disconnected
by generational age cohort.
Now, not everyone participates in a certain fashion
style or musical trend or what have you. No, now that
is associated with a particular generation by its very
nomenclature. So that if I'm not a millennial, which
I'm not, how can I possibly have anything to do with
that millennial fashion or the
millennial whoop or any of these other things that are
now being associated with generational cohorts? And
what does that end up doing? Now it's not a shared
cultural feeling that we're in the 70s. This is the
80s. We're in the 90s. Now it's this generation does
this thing, this generation does the other thing,
and instantly we are divided amongst ourselves. Are you
starting to get where this is going and how this
relates to the establishment conversation? Because I
would posit there has been a similar, I think probably
embedded, nomenclature shift in the language, whereby
we now no longer talk about establishment and anti-
establishment, culture and counterculture.
Those terms are being drummed out of us, and if it
weren't for old fuddy-duddies like me, I don't know if
anyone would be talking about it, or people like Ben,
who admits he was a child of the 90s, so he's probably
getting a few gray hairs by this point as well.
But do younger people talk about the establishment, the
anti-establishment, culture, counterculture? Are those
concepts still linguistically present in our society? I
would argue, well, certainly not to the extent that
they were, for example, back as I was talking about in
my editorial in the 60s. And you will note, in my
editorial, I talked about generational cohorts.
It was the boomers, and it's the Gen Zers. It's not...
decades of time in which we are all taking place in a
big cultural stew. No, it is specific generational age
cohorts that are manifesting in certain specific
identifiable ways. And if you're in that age cohort,
you're that person. You're a Gen Zer. You're a
millennial.
You're a Xer. You're a boomer. Okay, so where does this
go? What can we see taking place as a result of this
change that is happening, where establishment, the
concept of establishment, is no longer in our lexicon?
Let me point to a specific example of that, something
you can put your finger on.
When was the last time you heard anyone, even
ironically or jokingly, refer to the man? Okay. I mean,
even by, I suppose, the 90s, when I was also growing
up, I could certainly remember that the man, oh, you
know, stop oppressing me, you're the man,
was a joke because it had become such a dated cultural
reference to the 1960s boomer-era hippie movement of
the anti-establishment at that time protesting the man.
Well, it had become kind of a cultural joke by then. I
don't think it even exists anymore.
If you said that to a Gen Z-er, would they even know
what the man is supposed to be? Would they even get
that? Even if you used it ironically, would they even
get it as a joke? The man has been removed from the
lexicon. Now, again, trivial, minor observation. Who
cares?
Words come and go, and some things, slang changes all
the time. Okay, but it's not just the man. It is also
the establishment. Or if we wanted to go with
Eisenhower's formulation, the military-industrial
complex, which was a wonderful phrase that Eisenhower
ceded into the English language and
into our popular cultural lexicon that helped
generations of people understand the... A thing that
exists that is real, that had no name, there was no
concept for it until military-industrial complex. Oh,
suddenly I understand this thing exists and I see how
it's related and I understand how it influences.
Okay, now I can do research and I can start thinking
about it. But if that word doesn't exist, how do you
situate yourself within that? Who talks about the
military-industrial complex anymore? That's, again,
outdated. Besides, those establishment, military-
industrial complex, that is just the man in a tuxedo.
So...
Here is my radical idea as a stopgap measure until we
do the deep dive Corbett style exploration of the
history of how we've reached this cultural moment of
complete polarization. In the meantime, here's my
radical suggestion. I think we need to bring back The
man.
I think we need to start using that phrase again to
identify who are the real oppressors, who are the
people who are truly oppressing all of us, whether the
woke hipster libtards or the red hat wearing magas,
because those are the only two types of people who
exist in the world anymore, apparently.
They're all in the same boat and they're all fighting
the same people. But if you don't have a word to
describe the people that you are fighting, You're going
to start fighting each other. No, no, no. My enemy? No,
it's DEI is my enemy. Woke transgender bathrooms,
that's my enemy.
Or, oh, these fascists with their red hats, that's my
enemy. No, no, no, no. The enemy? Look up, guys. Why do
you keep looking left and right? Look up. There's the
enemy, the oligarchs, the establishment, the man. We
need to... hey, maybe it doesn't have to be the man.
That's probably not going to catch on.
But we need a word to identify the oligarchs who exist
in every era of human history, our era, not excluded,
and that is not simply on one side or the other of a
political aisle. If you are still thinking in the
straight line, one-dimensional space, of allowable
political thought. You are not thinking about these
problems deeply enough.
And if you do not have the words to describe the, at
the very least, two-dimensional reality, oh my God, we
can imagine a second dimension to politics that
involves an up and a down, not just left and right. And
suddenly, wow, maybe we can develop some language to
talk about the people who are up there in the
positions of power at the top of the power pyramid
oppressing us. The man. And suddenly we have words to
describe these people. Ah, you know what? I think I get
it. I'm starting to understand how this works. Okay,
so, you know, like Donald Trump. He's the man. Yeah, I
get it. Or Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is the man. Gavin Newsom is the man. George
Soros is the man. Nancy Pelosi is the man, the woman. I
don't know what you'd say to that. Peter Thiel is the
man. Hillary Clinton is the man. Larry Ellison is the
man. Bill Gates is the man. John Ratcliffe is the man.
Anyway, we can start to identify the man. And then we
can actually have an anti-establishment again. Because
all these critters who are infesting all of these
technocratic, bureaucratic positions of power and
trying to rule over the people for their wealth and
benefit and at our expense, they are the man. We...
James Corbett is not the man.
I'm not sitting there oppressing you from some position
of power. I am not your enemy. Even if you disagree
with all my political opinions, I'm not your enemy.
Look up. Same thing with dear anonymous internet user
735Q-8B1 who is listening to my voice right now. You're
not the man. I know. I know you are not the man.
I don't care what your political opinions are actually.
I know you are not the enemy. I'm concentrating on the
people who are actually oppressing us. I am
concentrating on the man. So there is at least the
start of the answer to your question, Ben.
I think, yes, you're right to identify that there has
been a shift over the past few decades. not the past
generation, that has taken place, that has certainly
resulted in this situation where who is against
authoritarian establishment politics anymore? No,
everyone's for the authoritarian establishment
politicians. It's just, which one are you for? What
happened to the anti-establishment?
What happened to the countercultural movement? It lost
its very vocabulary for describing the position that we
are in. It lost the man. Anyway, that's my observation
for today. Thank you very much for a very interesting
question, Ben. And I hope this answer at least gets
people's thinking caps on and gets them pondering. And
hey,
if there's a linguist in the crowd who has a catchy
slogan that will catch on more than the man, be my
guest. Run with it. And I will start using whatever
wonderful catchphrase you come up with. But I think we
do need one. Anyway, that's my observation for today.
James Corbett, CorbettReport.com.
Thank you for investing your mind time in the Corbett
Report. I'm looking forward to talking to you again in
the near future.
Ready for more?
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