I have been thinking about this the past few days, and have come to the conclusion that it's really bad news. The centrist-to-soft-progressive establishment does have people with a will to power (i.e. to wield power and foist their vision upon others simply due to their conviction that it is right; in other words, to act politically). Its only acceptable cultural expression, however, is hidden under layers of bureaucracy and disguised with an entire specialized lexicon. Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter (great names btw) were only able to bomb all those countries because they had advanced degrees from elite institutions and an entire appendix of institutional positions that allowed them to wield power, which is clearly what they wanted to do. Perhaps the best example of this culture of "hiding" the power you really have a libidinal desire to wield, comes from a recent piece by Lily Lynch on former Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin, where her true motivation briefly breaks cover:
In Chappaqua, Marin didn’t hold back. ‘I love power’, she told the audience. Power, she confided, is the thing she missed most about being prime minister. After all the contrived effort to present an image of feel-good millennial relatability, and all the feigned Nordic modesty, it was an admission that finally felt honest.
This model was partly a victim of its own contradictions, where the middle-class politesse developed in academia meant that all voices and perspectives had to be listened to and respected. This became its own moral economy which obviously cut against, and to a degree ate into, the actual stakes on offer, of wielding power over others; it also exposed the emptiness of the ideological justification, as there were ever more glaring carve-outs for whose voices in fact did not matter at all (Palestinians being by far the most obvious and devastating example). The result is that the libreal center now has a position on power and a justification for its use that has now essentially collapsed, but that they cant acknowledge as having collapsed; the Powers and Slaughters of today are still constrained by the same ideology, but the ideology patently doesn't make even a rudimentary kind of sense. I think the practical result of this is actually paralysis, but why exactly would take a lot more thought I guess.
Needless to say, the right doesn't have this problem. Power is to be wielded, the right to wield it is won by putting yourself in a position to do so, and collateral damage is to be ignored or justified. Say what you like about the moral vacuum here or the shitload of unintended consequences, but it is at least an effective ideology for doing stuff. It seems to me that anyone who wants to wield power (as is in my view inherent to a kind of unquantifiable portion of the population) will today naturally end up on the right for this reason.
This is a historical anomaly that sets us apart from the 19th century, which (many have by now pointed out) it feels in many ways like we're back in. Many 19th-century liberals, let alone radicals, displayed a bravery of action and clarity of principle that is simply unthinkable today (I'm thinking of the actions of someone like Robert Blum in 1848, who gave his life to defend Vienna from the Austrian monarchy). This creates serious trouble for the possibility of anything more than token resistance. All this is to say that once again, until we get rid of the rotting corpse of liberalism and all the ways it's tying us down, we're completely fucking stuck.
