Freedom Fries & Coronation Chicken
Bigger Things Than Woke Have Been Put Away
Paradigm shifts, in what where once considered unshakable norms in the western world, became commonplace in the 20th century and have left both the UK and USA unrecognisable in the 21st century. The rapid degeneration of the traditional, and mostly static, communities that humans have inhabited since the dawn of agriculture has led to rapid changes in all facets of human life—changes which have upended the deep roots of traditional culture. At present, these changes only continue to accelerate, with the lifecycle of cultural and political movements—and entire modes of thought—becoming ever shorter.
That does not stop the human mind from assuming that the current situation is how reality will continue to be; this assumption leaves people blindsided and unable to respond once the paradigm of The Current Thing is upended. This is partially how such vast changes in society have been brought about: focus on The Current Thing masks the rise of the next Current Thing . The masses are constantly bewildered by the onset of changes that they cannot understand, changes that just so happen to be introduced by a class of people they are told do not exist—the permanent Managerial Elite.
Whilst Woke has long since become a trite term devoid of meaning, it is nonetheless the cultural paradigm of the current moment; those who have planted their flag on it, either for or against, will once again be blindsided and tossed into the cultural churn when it is dispensed with—and it is being dispensed with.
The possibility of Woke being put away is at the current moment a hotly debated topic, however it is a situation that some of the first pieces of writing on this Substack dealt with. As a cultural phenomenon, Woke has always been contrived and insincere. Since its inception it has been clear that one is supposed to have disdain for Woke activists, they are playing the vital part of the heel in the great kayfabe that is the conflict of culture and politics. It is worth noting as an aside here that things only live because they die, Wokeness was only ever given life by elites because of the death of the previous political paradigms—a death it too is designed to undergo to make way for the next Current Thing.
Culture is malleable in the modern world; the bonds of family, fealty, church, community, and ethnicity that previously rooted Western populations have been ruthlessly dispensed with. We know fair well by now that to be Multi-Cultural is to have no culture, and to actively strive for its negation. Therefore people have little else to identify with except what is put in front of them by mass communication. Technology is a large driver of these shifts, and culture in the age of the technological total state is reduced to merely the collected beliefs and opinions that exist within a geographic border—even this is fleeting in our time. Those beliefs can change—rapidly—to the point that those who held them yesterday will swear they never did today. This has already occurred multiple times within a single human lifespan to the degree that it renders laughable any arguments that the current Woke era cannot possibly be dispensed with.
Chapter One: Coronation Chicken
“Western Society seems now to be moving, almost unprotestingly, into a condition which might fairly be called "universal incorporation.” In it, 'persons' have become functional organs of society, and creatures of flesh and blood are mere shadows which take on reality only on assuming their place in one of these "organs." The strength of the forces making for that condition cannot be denied, for the more dependent a man becomes upon the services rendered him by Society the more will he come to regard the organs which perform these services as having a real existence. The organised Coal Industry, the organised Transport Industry, then become as gods whom we must propitiate, and the lofty exhortations of a 'highly respectable' Chancellor may be conceived as addressed to the deities of an economic Pantheon.” —Problems of socialist England, Bertrand De Jouvenel 1949
The transformation of British society and its self perception in the wake of World War II is something that is not often talked about barring celebrations of the creation of the NHS. Britain went from a strident empire, to a struggling behemoth in the interwar years, and finally to a country with rationing stubbornly persistent into the mid 1950s. So humbled was Britain, that it was the last country involved in the war to stop rationing food—including West Germany.
In forty years, Britain had given up much of its colonial holdings, including the loss of Southern Ireland, which had been held by The Crown in varying forms since 1651. It was now a struggling nation deeply in debt to its once allies, devastated in the wake of a war it had supposedly won. A situation unthinkable for those who served in the First World War, men who were so truly of the nation and empire of Great Britain that they signed up to fight and die for it in their droves.
In place of an empire with global hegemony they had free healthcare, they had televisions, and they had coronation chicken sandwiches with little Union Flags in them. The novel feelings of decline gave way, slowly but surely, to the banality of everyday post-war life. Those in charge never ceased in telling them that they must accept that Britain was poorer, weaker, and increasingly no longer an Empire—but at least it was fairer.
“Attitudes regarding what is consistent with human dignity and freedom have changed in the past in response to the needs of the system, and will continue to change in the future, also in response to the needs of the system.”
When did Britain stop thinking of itself truly as an empire? The dignity fig-leaf of The Commonwealth of Nations presents us with a plausible date of 1949, but there was no announcement on British TV that the Empire had ended, there was no grand proclamation. The British were allowed to continue under the delusion that they where a world power and maybe even an empire to this day, with sporadic outbursts of Rule Britannia style patriotism such as the Falklands War, and routine celebrations of the great commonwealth’s diversity during sporting events.
From a pre-1914 perspective, Britain has endured a Century of Humiliation—largely at the hands of The United States—but this clear fact is not recorded in its history books. So complete is this ongoing humiliation it is not permitted to be spoken of in those terms. Those that attempt to make this humiliation known of are frequently declared as the total enemies of Britain and what it supposedly stands for.
I want to impress upon you the notion that culturally, something as potent as the British Empire can be successfully put away—because it has successfully been put away. The brutal trauma of both the World Wars made Britain so malleable that it not only lost its Empire and place as world hegemon, its population was not allowed to mourn such a momentus passing. By the late 1960s the idea that the British Empire being gone was a good thing had gained ground in the national consciousness. Any readers of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain will recall the adulation of teachers across Britain as updated atlases no longer demarcated the colonies as the “Pink bits on the map.” The reality of events—Britain’s sharp loss of power and America’s sudden gain of power at its expense—had become lost in the heady mix of rapid cultural change and cold war manoeuvres. People largely accept the world as it is put in front of them and any incongruities can be rationalised away or simply ignored.
The cultural differences between Britain in 1939 and Britain in 1949 are reduced to a mere historical footnote—although these differences are obviously vast. They are lost in the swell of “world events” and history rightly records hard power—not soft power— was the driver of these shifts. It demonstrates something that must always be present in any political analysis: culture is downstream from law and law is downstream from power.
But the UK is not unique amongst western nations in undergoing previously unthinkable cultural shifts:
Chapter Two: Freedom Fries
Obama stands over a packed crowd in a football stadium, his message is clear: the flag waving jingoism of the war on terror is over. Change is coming. America will reclaim its place as the moral compass of the western world, reverse the anti-freedom sins of The Patriot Act and heal the divisions wrought by America’s illegal wars.
A mere seven years earlier George W. Bush, a previously divisive figure in a legally contested election, had stood in front of America and given them the very patriotic vision Obama was performatively putting back in the bottle. In the wake of the trauma of 911 “Dubya” was received with rapturous applause, a fact the history books are already heaping shame and embarrassment on. The American public would not have believed you, had you told them in late 2001, as the flags hung thick as falling leaves, that less than a decade later their feelings of unity and resolve would be looked upon by most Americans with abject shame.
In the years that followed 911, America was bullish in the face of international condemnation of the war drums being beaten for Iraq, the most infamous incident being the suggestion by multiple lawmakers that French Fries be renamed “Freedom Fries” in rebuke of the French in the build up to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom.’
Lunchtime offerings on the House side of the Capitol complex had already been changed. A sign in the food court in the House Longworth Office Building -- which, for the record, also serves tacos, vegetable lasagna, Greek salad and Chinese lo mein -- announced: ''Update: Now serving in all House office buildings. Freedom fries.''
A highly unscientific survey of cafeteria patrons found opinion to be either neutral, or anti-French. ''There ain't a whole lot of need for the French,'' said Roger Todd, an official with the Albany, Ga., chapter of the Communications Workers of America, who was in town on a lobbying trip. ''I would just as soon call them freedom fries, even though I'm a Democrat.'' —New York Times, March 12, 2003
The “Freedom Fries” phenomenon is merely a visible outgrowth of the jingoistic cultural mood within both the US and UK in March 2003, it looks silly in retrospect but condemnation of the Iraq war was incredibly muted at the time—despite large scale protests—and the war was firmly a bipartisan project on both sides of the Atlantic.
America as well as Britain has long since moved past what would previously be considered cultural “Red Lines.” Bush Jr. sold himself as the candidate for Christian America, especially evangelical America, and much of his appeal was the lip service he paid to what people would now call “Christian Nationalism.” The rhetoric in the Bush era was not merely patriotic, it was explicitly the image of the protector of a Christian nation against the last Civil Rights frontier that violated popular sentiment:
Part of what Bush does for evangelical voters is symbolic. He talks about the decline of morality. He talks about the sacredness of life. And you know, we can sort of say, "Well, that's just symbolism. Why doesn't he do more concrete?" But symbolism is really important. And they view having someone in the White House who is willing to say the right things in the culture wars as being really important. …
When we talk to evangelicals about political issues, we actually hear them talk much more about gay marriage than about abortion. It's not that they're not concerned about abortion. But it's like people have been fighting that battle for a long time. Everyone knows this script. There's a sense that if there's going to be movement in one direction or another, it's going to be relatively minor.
Whereas with gay marriage, there's a feeling that they've just gotten hit with a tidal wave, and that society as they know it, and as they think it should be, is being destroyed rapidly. It's urgent. It's an emergency. And something has to be done about it.
-Steve Waldman, editor-in-chief of Beliefnet, Speaking to PBS in 2004
The culmination of The Civil Rights Movement in the outpouring of liberal adulation for Gay Marriage was the last humiliation of the Republican base who had stomached the watering down of their values into Neo-Conservatism. It was able to happen because the 2008 election stunned the grass roots American Conservative movement, who did not have a vision of where to go after the neoconservative experiment had failed, because they had been pandered to in the previous five years in a symbolic fashion whilst the Bush administration undermined their communities and lurched the country further down the managerial track.
Equally, the Obama administration could only hide the reality of continuity of military policy with the Bush administration for so long—their surface level political victory had been so complete they struggled to manage the expectations of their activist class as one by one the promises of the campaign gave way to a maintaining, then an intensifying, of The Forever Wars. What Obama did for anti-war Democrats was just as symbolic as what Bush did for evangelicals. Culturally the flag waving had been put away, there was no more appetite for dead Iraqi children, but popular sentiment has no bearing on the actions of power. Obama left office as “The Drone Striker in Chief” to many, a deeply unpopular figure—despite the mythologising—who preceded an even bigger political culture shock to the mainstream in the form of The Trump Administration.
What will be recorded in history about 2015-2025 will not be the cultural minutia such as Woke, it will be The Pandemic, Lockdowns, The Ukraine War and the economic fallout of both. It will be the ill fated attempt at “decarbonising” the global economy and the breakdown of globalised systems that causes. The mass cultural outpouring that led to Freedom Fries and the idea of George W. Bush as a beloved Christian Nationalist figure have already been relegated to the status of cultural time capsule curiosity. When asked an open ended question by Pew research, there was no significant mention of cultural or religious aspects of his presidency despite the role they played in his campaigns.
With the reappraisal of The War on Terror within the cultural narrative very few people would claim now to have backed him so fervently. This political amnesia for the cultural mores of the day is commonplace, here in the UK people seem unable or unwilling to recall their sentiment at the time of the War in Iraq.
Though it has been controversial for over a decade, the invasion was actually popular at the time. In 2003, YouGov conducted 21 polls from March to December asking British people whether they thought the decision by the US and the UK to go to war was right or wrong, and on average 54% said it was right.
But more than 10 years of opposition is a long time, and many people now remember things differently. Now only 37% of the public say they believed military action against Saddam Hussein was right at the time, instead of the 54% recorded at the time.
The popular sentiment of a certain time and place is lost in a deluge of subsequent propaganda, revisionism, and just plain embarrassment. Memory too is malleable, and the culture of the day makes admitting to adhering to a previous popular sentiment socially unacceptable. The same political amnesia is taking hold with beliefs during the lockdowns, with many now denying they supported reporting their neighbours to police for minor infractions. Polls are also a good measure of what the regime wants people to think about a certain topic through their framing: you are supposed to forget all but the broadest strokes of the past, which will be repeated to you ad-infinitum—that is the essence of The Boomer Truth Regime.
Chapter Three: This Too Shall Pass
If questions as big as “How did Britain win two world wars but lose the largest empire in history within the same timeframe?” and “Why weren’t the wishes of Americans who fought in World War 2 respected?” can simply be hand-waved away, then there really is no limit to historical revisionism. What World War II, 911, and the Lockdowns have in common is they represent periods of exception within Liberal Democracy where normality is suspended. In the past according to the Jurist Carl Schmitt this would be done in the name of restoring normality after a specific act, or legal infraction was enacted upon. Today normality is suspended indefinitely, so it can be forever manufactured anew. The Iraq War is not an isolated case, people often have trouble recalling periods of heightened stress and emotion, making the most stressful political periods the least likely to be well remembered by the populace.
They could simply write Woke out of the history books and replace it with the moderate activists who achieved “gains in rights we all agree are good” like they did with the historiography of the 1960s, making the whole Anti-Woke affair a humiliating waste of time—another in a long line of historical boogiemen. None of the current crop of TV friendly Anti-Woke types would dare to challenge the narrative of The Civil Rights Era, but in twenty years they will be written into the history books in the same way: simply another group of people on “the wrong side of history” who opposed its march. Like with the Iraq War, people could simply say they never supported woke when asked to recall their sentiments in future years—they might even believe it too.
The feelings of bitterness over the loss of the empire never went away in Britain, they merely faded into the background, just as the feelings in the wake of 911 never went away and became part of the background noise of American politics. These complex cycles of political moments—of “the new current thing” replacing the previous political dialectic—leave many deeply unpopular changes unreconciled. It took thirteen years from the start of the war for the UK Iraq War Inquiry to release its findings. Those findings were damning, but by then it was so hopelessly out of its time period to seem somewhat quaint. In 2016 the UK was immersed in the political theatre of Brexit and entranced by the electoral circus taking place in the USA. The inquiry into one of the most controversial political decisions in UK history that cost thousands of British lives barely registered in the news cycle—in the US press it was barely even a foreign news footnote.
The battles that felt so important in the moment, vital even, now evoke dull recollection in all corners of the political world. I’m reminded of the anti-globalisation protest movement being up until around 2016 a predominantly leftist anarchist phenomena. With the regime using dozens of NGOs to effectively switch the narrative on globalisation to the point that the visible wing of ‘Antifa’ now attacks what are portrayed as right wing anti-globalism protests and events. This momentous shift in activism happened quietly and most people simply didn’t notice. It was a reaction to the caged and fed anti-globalisation movement gaining a little too much steam in their protests—which eventually resulted in effective marital law in Seattle when the police force panicked at the unexpectedly large crowds. This is why the regime must capture all sides and should demonstrate that they can not only “put away” movements, they can entirely invert them.
Occupy Wall Street too is a famous example of activist capture and repurposing, which saw activists sympathetic to the ideas during their college years ending up as some variant of corporate diversity officer or activists employed by a Woke NGO funded by the large banks. This has led some on the traditional left to accuse the woke movement of being a capitalist ploy by big business to trick the activists into compliance and even evangelism for big-money interests. The conservative narrative is identical, expect they replaced big-money with big-government.
The Left as well as The Right both fall into this thinking, they both alternately defend the public sector and private sector faces of the managerial elite as it pertains to their ideological area. The ability of those in power to completely switch ideological direction whilst maintaining the same policies allow for the seamless capture of both groups of activists and demonstrates a vital truth: the managerial elite are non-ideological. Those currently in power do not believe in anything but power—that’s why they are in power. Decades of rhetoric around Gay Marriage as the ultimate culture war red line for the American right can simply be abandoned because those in power had no ideological attachment to the conflict, Obama could intensify The War on Terror whilst promising to end it because he had no ideological attachment to the conflict. The British establishment could sell Britain to American globalism because they have no ideological attachment to Britishness as an idea. Woke can be put away very easily because those in power have no ideological attachment to wokeness. The internal interests of the ruling elite class take precedence over all other concerns, practical concerns far outclass the window dressing of ideology sold to the non-elite outgroup.
Indeed, the framing around wokeness will age this piece horribly in the coming years—that’s why the examples of post-war Britain and post 911 America are important. The reason so many struggle with the idea that the current political moment can be ended with the snap of a finger is that they have forgotten previous political moments, they are too immersed in “fighting the culture war.” The internet and social media especially keep people saturated in “The Current Thing” to the point they really can spend all day reading and arguing about it. There is a class of grifter who makes a living from this parasocial war and is intensely defensive of their culture war pantomime.
Chapter Four: Unreality
To accurately filter reality you must deglobalize your mind and wrench it from the narrow limits of The Current Thing. I would advise anyone who wants to better see into the political future to increase their time horizons and reject the false dialectics of the news cycle; or else they will forever be doomed to eat the freedom fries and thank them for their service in ruining your nation. Do not be appeased by the changing of the window dressing—or the framing—surrounding events. Ultimately, that is the purpose ideology serves within a managerial state ruled by an embedded elite class: a framing device. The post-war project of American Hegemony has survived unimpeded under many governments that were supposedly radically different in terms of ideology. The differences between the Bush and Obama administration centre on how the use of power was framed, and who this framing was meant to appeal to. Outside of how events were framed, the two administrations were almost identical in policy. This is how you get Nobel Peace Prize winning drone strikes. When a large scale change happens a populous would otherwise reject, events are framed with a sense of continuity and neutrality, as was done with Gay Marriage. Other times a political party that is supposed to be against a certain issue will instead maximise that issue, as seen with unprecedented rises in immigration under The UK Conservative Party caused by deliberate mass resettlement schemes.
In the age of mass media and the mass society, where our immediate experiences are no longer the sole factor of how we think about the world, reality can be warped by the use of propaganda; if things we do not experience in our everyday lives stop being pushed to us via mass media then. in our minds. they effectively stop existing. Conversely, mass media can act to assure people something still exists which no longer does—only those with first hand experience are able to spread their knowledge and only through word of mouth. This is how radically unpopular policy can remain constant over the course of decades within states that claim to govern via popular will: those in power control the framing around events. This is an often misunderstood point about the power of the managerial elite: they are not omnipotent when it comes to the control of events. but they have a high level of control over how events are framed and the narrative around them. This is part of what Vladimir Putin was referring to in his now infamous Empire of Lies Speech—technology in the form of mass media has allowed those in power to construct for their populaces’ a world of unreality. It is this unreality that allows chaos to be framed as order, collapse to be framed as dignified retreat and the past to be framed as a dark age from which we were rescued by those in power.
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the 1950s was so impactful as a symbol of false continuity because it coincided with the push for mass television adoption in the UK. Similarly, 911 was so impactful to the American mind because it coincided with the height of 24h cable news; the images of the towers going down were played over and over and over again as a form of mass agitation aimed at an entire nation where an average of eight hours of TV a day was consumed in typical household.
We are only just discovering what the internet and its consequences will do to the mass psyche, but so far the evidence is that we should be even less accepting of the narratives that are put in front of us—especially those tailored to our own ideological bent.
fantastic article, definitely sharing this one around