Welcome to mystery-box liberalism Stop blaming ‘fascism’ and ‘Marxism’ for the system

In the massively popular Apple TV series Severance, characters communicate with The Board — the shadowy group or entity that controls their mysterious employer, Lumon Industries — through a retro-style two-way speaker. Whom (or what) composes The Board remains unclear. These uncertainties extend to other aspects of the show. Lumon’s offices and computer consoles, like The Board’s speaker, are reminiscent of the 1980s, despite the fact that this is a world in which late-model iPhones also feature. None of the cars in the Lumon parking area seems to date from later than the early 1990s. Adrift in time, the show’s aesthetics seem deliberately disorienting. A flurry of unresolved questions buffets the narrative, each the subject of its own frenzied fan theories online. When and where, exactly, does the show take place? Who is in charge? What is going on?

Severance is a classic “mystery-box” show. Prototyped by J. J. Abrams’s Lost (2004-2010), mystery-box narratives offer audiences a series of puzzles, with the promise that they will all be satisfyingly resolved eventually. In real life, there are no writers scripting our reality (so far as we know). However, the paranoid forms of political explanation taking shape on both the contemporary Left and Right share an affinity with the speculative uncertainties of the mystery-box show. 

Conspiracy theories (“fan theories” about reality) abound, and not just on the fringes of the far Right and far Left, but among the sensible denizens of the establishment center as well. The spread of a conspiratorial worldview reflects our current crisis of authority. But more than this, it distorts our understanding of what is really happening. We find ourselves searching for hidden hands and shadowy conspirators rather than facing our problems.  

In Britain since Brexit, neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have relished being in power. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sometimes seemed as if he were trying to pass himself off as the leader of the opposition, promising to “put things right” after the next election, rather than when he lived at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Since Labour came into power in August 2024, both it and large portions of the British media have often behaved as though Reform UK (with five MPs) and the far Right (with no MPs) were the actual government, and Labour only the beleaguered opposition. As with The Board’s speaker in Severance, it is by no means clear where the voice of authority in Britain is actually radiating from. The suspicion that political power always lies somewhere else, and that whoever purportedly possesses it is actually power-less, provides perfect conditions for conspiratorial thinking.

In the United States, meanwhile, the sense that power itself is out of power is a mainstay of political discourse. The Trumpians and the online-Right more generally are fond of speaking of an amorphous “they” directing the course of events. “They” don’t want you to know. “They” want you to live in fear. A permanent elite called “the regime” — a Left-leaning cabal comprising elements from the media, Big Tech, education, the NGOs, and “woke capital” — really controls things. The background assumption behind such rhetoric is that although it controls all three branches of government, the Trump GOP is, in fact, still at the mercy of malign and hidden forces.  

Like the world of Severance, our political imagination appears to be fundamentally adrift in time. Many on the Left have convinced themselves that their Right-wing political opponents are literal throwbacks to 20th-century fascism. Conservatives have succumbed to the same tendency: for them, the political opposition are really communists. For the Right, corporate DEI, “woke” capitalism, the use of critical race theory in schools, the increased emphasis on heritage justice issues, and the new zeal in progressive circles for open borders — all have become signs of old-school Marxism. 

Conservative commentators seem unable, however, to explain why supposedly extreme Left ideas have been so successful at capturing what were until recently slow-moving, conservative institutions and corporations. So they offer us spy-novel scenarios in lieu of political explanation. Conservative writers such as Christopher Rufo describe a multi-decade “long march through the institutions” by a global cadre of far-Left conspirators, who are now supposedly poised to bring about the revolution. As with the “Right-wingers are really fascists” thesis, there is a sense of time-slippage at work in these narratives. We are being invaded by the forces of a nightmare past. Unmask your opponents, and the eternal enemy will stand revealed.

A more plausible explanation can be found in the writings of the Left-conservative French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Rather than a battle between communism and fascism, Michéa sees a struggle taking place within contemporary capitalism. Two forms of contemporary liberalism — economic liberalism (or neoliberalism) and cultural liberalism (progressivism or so-called “wokism”) — are working together and reinforcing each other, in order to enable global capitalism to function. Indeed, according to Michéa, it is “dual liberalism” that typifies the current establishment.

Michéa, in his 2007 book, The Realm of Lesser Evil, describes contemporary neoliberalism as a “vast, humanity-crushing machine” that is busily “dissolving the extraordinary diversity of existing cultures into the icy abstraction of the global market.” Neoliberalism dictates that there must be unrestricted flows of capital, goods, and labor across borders. To achieve this, it redefines the world in terms of transparency and metrics. During the ’80s and ’90s, under the New Public Management or so-called audit culture, public sector bodies were compelled to recant their previous objectives and justify their existence in value-for-money terms. The long-term result has been a kind of capitalist version of the Leninist permanent revolution. When applied to institutions, it produces a new normal of continual restructuring. All existing organisational structures are turned upside-down and inside-out. Whatever was there before must be reformed. All sense of prior mission and long-term stability is lost.

Rather than resisting neoliberalism, Michéa observes, many progressive elites have allowed themselves to be recruited into its service. Whereas socialist politics was once concerned with protecting the interests of working people and safeguarding national populations, the progressive or neoliberal Left is hostile to the nation-state and any sense of continuity with the values of past cultures. Elites have thus created a highly selective, pared-down version of Left-wing ideology that is compatible with the needs of global business, and manifests itself as the current iteration of “woke” cultural liberalism. 

This new liberalism embraces the principles of openness and boundary-breaking, and focuses on overcoming what it identifies as society’s dominant norms. In doing so, it claims to free people from the oppressive structures that restrict human potential. In reality, it is attacking the last vestiges of the pre-capitalist traditions that once made societies distinctive entities. Unburdened by past values or cultures, nations can be redeveloped in the standardized terms of the new global capitalism. 

Schools and universities have accordingly aligned their teaching curricula with environmental sustainability goals and “global challenges,” and now go about the business of producing outward-facing global citizens, rather than passing on traditions. Heritage institutions, such as museums and art galleries, have sought to make themselves relevant to the current moment by critiquing their own former missions, turning their collections into exercises in moral repentance rather than commemoration. Dissent has become compulsory, so long as that dissent is aimed at the status quo. Of course, what this means is that our actual dominant norm is the compulsion to attack dominant norms — which conveniently fulfills the larger neoliberal project of dissolving all prior structures. 

Cultural liberalism and economic liberalism are not opposing forces. Rather, they work together to further the interests of the current system. Once we view the contemporary workplace through the lens of this dual liberalism, much that might have otherwise seemed puzzling begins to make sense. Corporate DEI and environmental and social governance frameworks are not, as many on the Right would have it, forms of “Marxist” indoctrination that have somehow captured the corporate sphere. Instead, they enable the extension of managerial logic into new domains, both legitimizing private enterprise and providing new opportunities for growth. 

The “woke” capitalism that emerged in many corporate workplaces during the 2010s was a particularly evocative example of dual liberalism at work. Corporate managers once defended the value of the work they did in the old “audit culture” terms of efficiency and value for money. After the 2008 financial crash, however, capitalism sorely needed a new justification. The restatement of corporate missions in moral terms, as well as the new corporate tolerance for workplace activism, reassured progressive employees that their workplaces and professions had meaningful responses to contemporary crises. And management’s newly compelling moral framework silenced dissent. How could anyone defy managerial decision-making when management had become fluent speakers in the languages of social inclusion and environmental justice?

By the end of the 2013 film The Congress, much of humanity has mentally migrated into a simulated world, leaving their withering bodies (and the physical world itself) neglected and abandoned. Our current tendency to operate within a dreamland of historical analogies is strikingly similar. The ubiquitous accusations that one’s political opponents are really fascists or communists are an easy means to win an argument — but also to evade reality. 

In truth, dual liberalism creates problems for both Right and Left. As Michéa observes in The Realm of Lesser Evil, Right-wing conservatives champion free markets and then purport to be shocked by the world those markets create. Their focus on communism allows them to not follow economic incentives to their logical conclusions. And it also allows them to blind themselves to the fact that woke is simply what neoliberal capitalism had evolved to look like in the late teens. Right-wing populism of the sort offered by Reform UK has no intention of breaking with economic liberalism, and thus no answer to economic problems. Instead, the party proposes reviving exhausted Thatcherite economic policies. There is no recognition that these policies have already been tried and that they led here, to this precise — and problematic — moment.

The realities of dual liberalism are just as disquieting for the Left. While progressive rhetoric might resist marketization, progressive principles — choice, openness, autonomy — inevitably create spaces and opportunities for the free market to exploit. Relaxed border policies and the low-wage precarity of the gig and outsourcing economies are inextricably linked, as much as moral defenders of the former might decry the social consequences of the latter. Whereas anti-globalization was until recently a mainstream position on the Left, suggestions that we should reimpose restrictions on cross-border labor flows are now increasingly labeled “fascist” or “far Right.” The influence of the economic strand within dual liberalism — a deep commitment to flows and radical progressive change for its own sake — has rendered the contemporary Left strikingly different from previous Left-wing traditions.

One of the complaints from viewers of mystery-box shows is that their final reveals are usually disappointing. The buzz surrounding online fan theories conceals the less-appealing reality that the writers don’t have the answers, and are making it up as they go along. We can have answers, if we choose to, but we must wrench ourselves out of the dream world of rhetoric, and confront the escalating problems that face us in the real world.

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