I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.