The video posted of Adam Posen[1] (a well-known monetary economist deeply tied to the variety of neoliberal think tanks, central bank committees and academic fellowships) stating that support for manufacturing industries and onshoring of productive capacity are a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in” is perfectly indicative of the ideological networks of which Posen is a member. It shows the embedded nature of the successor ideology (woke ideology, post-neoliberalism, identity politics, etc.) and its tentacular reach, as it easily seeps into establishment institutions and policy-making networks.

One of the first things to note is that Adam Posen, while being an establishment economist with links to the Bank of England, Federal Reserve and Washington lobby machine, is not the actor in power here. Posen would not have even made such a reductive argument even 10 years ago, mainly because the ideological framework which produces a revulsion towards whiteness and masculinity had not spread itself sufficiently across the networks that Posen was and is a part of. Rather, the power of what Yarvin calls the Cathedral is at play here.

“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure. Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together”[2].

Networks of policy related to academic fields like economics are vectors through which cathedral entities spread. Posen is himself a vessel for an argument he doesn’t need to understand or adequately articulate. Amongst his circle, his argument is self-explanatory. It isn’t even designed to inflame so much as provide a common framework of understanding for others at the Cato event he spoke at. Even the fact that a decade or less ago this argument would not have been made by such a person at such an event is irrelevant.

Relevance is only related to power, and currently the arguments of the successor ideology are emerging as a political and sociological force that bends existing networks to its position, or censure them in the process of expanding its power. When Yarvin makes the argument that Big Tech or Zuckerberg hold no actual power[3], it is here that we can see it acutely.

Of course there is an element of symbiosis here. The economics profession wouldn’t simply take these arguments on board ex nihilo. They recognise that these arguments help further their own, while those of the cathedral can partially capture an important policy-making arm that further spreads its ideas. And this shows the terrifying reality of ideological power and capture in modern institutions.

That reality is that there is no winning in the current framework. There will be no recapture of institutions nor the emergence of alternative structures that can rival their power or prestige. Posen’s argument has already won. Manufacturing in America and across the West is denuded except in pockets in Germany (which were already creaking under Schroder). Most countries are now massively reliant on Chinese export industries to prop up currencies and maintain current accounts deficits. The only industry of importance to modern politics is finance[4]. There is no return to a forgotten heyday, but instead an increasingly limited set of choices around how our countries will decline.

The fact that Posen chose to frame his argument within the realm of anti-White identity politics is only indicative of what the successor ideology to (neo)liberalism will be: a global technocracy highly influenced by cultural and economic liberalism but attempting to maintain their network’s gains through locking out those demographics and structures it cannot control – the post-industrial working classes, the agricultural industry, the petit-bourgeoisie and the remaining lower middle classes. Liberal gains for them, political and sociological losses for the rest. We already see a vast managerial sector propping up the sufficiency of technocratic expansion. In combination with an elite identity politics that patronises and lets loose minorities to be as violent and feral as they like, creating urban warfare in many Western cities with little police intervention or subsequent prosecutions, we have a bifurcation with uncrossable lines. The networks Posen is a member of, the cathedral through which his arguments are strained and refined, are closing ranks as they position their power directly against any vestige of opposition. Arguing against them or pointing out the flaws in what they say is pointless. They’ve already won. It’s what comes next that matters.

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[1] https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1578130142655905816

[2] https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral

[3] https://graymirror.substack.com/p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-all

[4] https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/vectors-of-inflation