A BAD TASTE LIBERATION FRONT.

A Fragmentation Called Freedom.

By Mrs. Begonia Contretemps, NVZ Spokesperson, Why-and-the-Wherefore Cohort.

To use an Amerikan phrase that we utterly despise: ‘Muh freedom’ prepared the way for the current Maoist-style Cultural Revolution, as the following quotes imply.

Long before the Left was accused of making everything ugly, it was the Right that made everything private.

We at the NVZ have long argued that the collapse of the West’s moral architecture did not begin with Derrida’s sly grinning at the margins—but with the glad-handing of gadgetry, the cult of convenience, and the consumerized gospel of freedom as fragmentation. The legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher years was not a reassertion of order, but the elevation of libertarian atomization into a civil religion. In short: the Right put the nail in the communal coffin, then blamed the eulogist for the funeral.

As the late Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head:

“The reason why cultural relativism has caught on is not because ordinary people read Derrida but because the trickle-down essence of Deconstruction suits both the trash aesthetic of media-hounds and the philistinism of Essex Man.”¹

Let’s be honest—no one was actually reading Derrida, except maybe a dazed undergrad hoping to impress someone in seminar. Marcuse made an appearance on a dorm room wall before getting replaced by a Radiohead poster. Most of those kids didn’t end up on the barricades—they ended up in marketing. The real revolution wasn’t footnoted—it was financed. It came with a driveway and a blender. While theory mumbled about structures, Reagan gave everyone a cordless phone and called it freedom.

“As for the clearly Leftist philosophy of Deconstruction, its cynical egalitarianism has done great damage to the old cultural consensus of the West, demolishing respect for tradition and authority with nihilistic relish. A malignant rot has spread through the Western mind since the mid-Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness. Yet this infection threatens all ideologies, Left or Right, being at root no more than a leveling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived—a Bad Taste Liberation Front.”

So let’s not pretend this all unraveled in a grad seminar. The rot came wrapped in shrinkwrap, sold as convenience, and later repackaged as virtue. Our current Deconstructionist Woke-ocracy isn’t a rejection of Reaganism—it’s its lowercase afterparty. Muh freedom begat muh feelings, and the microwave begat the microaggression.

CODA

We are in it. We are, if not wholly then profoundly, of it—the world built not by the dreamers of communes nor the scribblers of manifestos, but by the well-meaning consumers of liberty and comfort. The New Left provided the language; the free-market Right supplied the furniture. And now we sit in the house they furnished, wondering why the walls won’t hold. No revolution awaits us—only recognition. We must learn where this world came from if we are ever to find the door… or at the very least, rearrange the furniture to face the sun again.

—Begonia Contretemps, whose name, like the age she critiques, is both ornamental and poorly timed. Full bio here

FOOTNOTES

¹ “Essex Man”: A Thatcher-era term for the self-made, working-class suburbanite who traded class solidarity for consumer goods and voted Tory with pride. Less into Marx, more into mortgages—he didn’t read Derrida, but his lifestyle made deconstruction inevitable.