I greatly doubt any remotely decent or rational human being still sympathizes with the left or with liberalism, but by now the last few holdouts must find themselves tempted to jump ship over the sheer hypocrisy of the left/liberal establishment, who constantly indulge in the same behaviors they forbid to the general populace.
Dr. Jay Varma has become just one of endless examples, now revealed (because he didn’t know he was being video-recorded) to have been going to drug- and sex-filled underground raves on Wall Street at the same time he was in charge of pushing pandemic lockdowns, the abolition of crowds, and the avoidance of close physical contact here in New York City.
This city is the home of the most fanatical, hostile mask-wearers and the most intensely proud booster-shot-seekers, many of whom, after getting their shots, crowed online about feeling bursts of super-strength or running their best-ever marathon times. Real medical note: liberalism may make you intellectually arrogant, but it does not make you immune to the power of suggestion or the placebo effect, you sanctimonious, power-worshipping imbeciles.
Who can blame Varma pining—just like us peasants—for the pre-pandemic freedoms he was working so hard to crush, though? The grimness and claustrophobia of the whole pandemic and post-pandemic era have made even us middle-aged folk remember the world pre-2020 as if it were, by contrast, a continual cavalcade of fun, risk, youth, mystery, partying, and spiritual discovery, like a cross between Beck’s video for “Up All Night’ and Grouplove’s video for “Tongue Tied.” Remember that world? Can’t you almost feel it?
In the (far less entertaining) covert video of Varma, he admits that the pandemic rules were really about pressuring the non-compliant at work and in their private lives, not persuading them with medical messaging. Even to the minds most focused on health and science, it was more an exercise in control than in rationality. And the controllers clearly won that round. In the long run, humanity only wins if it belatedly draws the right lesson, which is, roughly: never obey. That’s closer to the truth than a longwinded scientific explanation, in any case.
The same dynamic of the elite partying while the masses obey and/or die has been in play since the days of Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” two centuries ago, or perhaps I should say since The Decameron seven centuries ago, or perhaps I should say since humans first realized some 10,000 years ago that the two main downsides to population density, which is to say cities, are plagues and more centralized authority.
I have to give Francis Ford Coppola credit for recognizing, as seen in his unpopular and poorly-reviewed but admirably experimental and interesting new movie Megalopolis, that many of the tensions and power-struggles of centuries past are still with us.
His very loose mapping of Roman Empire power-struggles onto modern New York City politics ends up seeming to draw the unsettling conclusion, though, that while liberalism is effete, decadent, and ineffectual, and Trumpers (or violent rabble coincidentally wearing red baseball caps, anyway) are dangerous morons, the solution may be full-blown, more-highbrow fascism, complete with Adam Driver—who you’ll recall also played the Vader-wannabe from the Star Wars sequel trilogy—in a black quasi-toga expounding about the idiocy of the aristocracy and the populace alike, literally reshaping space and time to his will, like some sort of combination Howard Roark-turned-bad and Kang-the-Conqueror-turned-charismatic.
It being a Coppola (and pseudo-Roman) movie, we’re definitely left with more of an impression that Italian-looking fascism is where the action, the vitality, is than that anything Germanic is needed. Nonetheless, it’s arguably dangerous stuff—even with an ass-covering postscript that mentions in one short line that we should also take good care of the natural environment, as if just to keep Coppola in the good graces of liberal Hollywood. The end of the movie also says, consciously or not hitting a note that’s also contemporary-right-wing, that the important thing is to keep having bold conversations about what sort of future we want to build rather than accepting self-censorship or the limited options of our degenerate present.
I do wish, perhaps perversely, that the film were at least popular and accessible enough to inspire parodies. I’d suggest, for starters, an urban-planning fable called Snuffleupagus set on a decaying road called Sesame Street, where every time the gangly, birdlike main character describes his vision of a new city, people tell him he must merely have imagined it, and he’s left insisting, “It was right here, I tell you! It was real! It can be real if you believe!” Too, since Coppola, who first conceived Megalopolis back in the 1970s, might’ve seen ads at the time for the then-new film Godzilla vs. Megalon, and now uses Megalon as the name of the fast-growing building material that his megalomaniacal Driver lead character wields, a parody in which Driver keeps trying to build and Godzilla keeps knocking things down seems almost mandatory. Then, too, there should be a parodic documentary about pushy, half-mad creators trying to make such visionary films, called Mega-Coppolas.
In the serious, real world, all I ask is that people start seeing visionary planners, not just the chaos of everyday life, as menaces often as deadly as diseases.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey