Counterculture: Who’s the Establishment Now?

What follows is a guest post from Marlow Kurtz, a renowned chef and political activist.

In the 1960s and 70s, the West underwent an ideological and cultural upheaval against the establishment. Championed by young people, artists, and intellectuals, the counterculture movement stood up to the ideological demons of senseless war, bigotry, and conformity, and these coordinated social efforts paved the way for expansions of the rights of people of color, women, and queer identities. Today, the counterculture’s ideals represent a much more widely accepted swath of American values. In essence, counterculture has become culture, and new ideological failures have arisen from this New Establishment.

MAGA and other extremists are relying on the New Establishment’s lack of societal standards— downstream of a good faith emphasis on personal authenticity over societal expectations —to run rampant with disinformation and emotivist rhetoric. In the 60s, it was a novel idea to attack Western values and to shake the foundations of our political institutions, but these impulses have become the norm. The New Establishment did not stop after achieving its goals, and is now anti-American and anti-institutional; MAGA is both attacking these ideas and using them to gain electoral and political power. The Far Leftists are also functioning within the New Establishment: their continued anti-American and anti-institutional rhetoric is weakening the political power of the whole left wing, enabling the spread of MAGA ideology, and furthering the polarization of American politics.

The threat of Far Left Extremists cannot be underestimated. The extreme wing of the left is an enemy to which everyday liberals are far less attuned, making it easy for radicals to move and speak in our circles. The easiest way to tell the difference between a Liberal and a Far Leftist is the way in which they seek to achieve their goals. While Liberals seek to affect change by enacting policies through existing legal and social infrastructure, Far Leftists seek to use society as a weapon against the existing infrastructure. In essence, they are the continuation of the original countercultural belief that our political institutions are part of an oppressive establishment. This leads them to refuse to cooperate within it. Where Liberals seek to enact policies, Far Leftists seek social upheaval, revolution, and the disintegration of the Democratic values that are core to our nation. The Far Left employs many of the same rhetorical tactics as MAGA, but does not even seek to build a coalition of effective electoral power. Both extremist factions demonstrate a deep anti-American urge, politics based in identity, and rhetoric designed to emotionally manipulate— but only one is a wolf in liberal clothing.

We can easily recognize MAGA’s anti-Americanism, but the Far Left’s anti-Americanism is less obvious. It surfaces most often as over-simplified emotional reactions to morally complicated issues. You can identify them by their calls for the abolishment of the police, their wholesale rejection of capitalistic economic structures, and their full-throated sympathy for terrorists– all of which are childish, disinformed, extremist stances without any consideration for the facts of the underlying issues. Much like MAGA, the Far Left will turn violently on anyone who does not toe their idealist line.

These extremists abuse the Democrats’ political infrastructure to amplify their emotivist messages, but they don’t vote for our candidates or support sane policies. The faction of Far Left Extremism that refused to vote for Kamala Harris because they did not think she was hard enough on Netanyahu are directly responsible for the installation of the Trump administration. When pressed on the issue of their refusal to vote, many Far Leftists argue that Harris would not have been any better for Gaza than Donald J. Trump. Far Leftists are not our political allies; they are our political enemies. Until we, the broader Democratic voter base, demonstrate contempt for these reductive ideas, our party leadership has their hands tied. They cannot defy the extremists unless they know we want them to do so.

It is easy to see that MAGA wants to throw out the institutions that protect our rights and keep our citizens safe, but the Far Left is not so different. Far Leftists believe that our political institutions have failed to protect our freedoms; they view our political institutions as members of “the establishment” against which the original countercultural urge fought. Far Leftists believe that our legal infrastructure is nothing more than a series of cogs in a machine of pure oppression. Democratic politics are so tainted with deference to these extremists because we, the rank and file liberals, are so sensitive to the manipulative tactics of Far Leftist rhetoric. They say they are fighting against oppression, and we are naturally interested in helping fight oppression. They are not, however, interested in improving our institutions to better serve anyone. Both MAGA and the Far Left are hell-bent on simply tearing our institutions to pieces in order to reshape the nation according to their extremist ideologies.

These extremist factions also share a similar way of speaking: simply make it impossible for anyone to have a reasonable disagreement (a tendency that is fueled by algorithmic reinforcement of each social media user’s existing biases). Each time a Far Leftist makes a political claim, they declare their position to be the moral high ground and characterize any form of nuanced discussion as morally bankrupt. They are not informed on the issues they champion. When pressed for further information on their stances, they either change the subject to something unrelated or they lash out, declaring that anyone who dares to ask questions is too stupid or immoral to understand something so obvious. Far Leftists over-simplify every issue down to a relationship between an oppressor and the oppressed in order that they can imagine themselves as morally superior advocates for at-risk populations, but their ideas about how to stop oppression don’t address reality or deal with facts. This is why the Far Leftists are so difficult to recognize. On the left, Liberals are deeply concerned with protecting the oppressed from their oppressors; it is an integral part of left-leaning politics. Our good faith makes us susceptible to this extremist rhetoric. We must begin to resist them or we will end up just like the GOP: disenfranchised of our political power.

Don’t forget: there used to be actual conservatives in power. Now, real conservatives have all been completely ousted from the American government by the MAGA movement. In the same way that the GOP failed to hear their extremist wing for what they truly were, we are failing to hear our own. They will throw us out of power if we do not begin dealing with them like the threats they are. What we need is a coalition of liberals who are willing to set aside differences in order to oppose the autocrats in power.

The reality of our position is that we must reject the rhetoric of our extreme wing while mirroring their successful past operations. The counterculture movement focused heavily on using social upheaval to fight back against a political system they believed was rigged against them. We are now dealing with a system that is actively being rigged against anyone outside of the MAGA movement. We must become a social movement that challenges the status quo— the New Establishment of traitorism, stupidity, and cry-bullying —and we must fight back with patriotism, information, and dialogue.

The only counterculture movement left is to believe that our country is worth saving, and to love it enough to do the hard work it takes to fucking save it.

-Marlow Kurtz