"Left" is that clade of political ideologies that have as their endpoint a state of normative equality as applied to every category of human distinction, economic, racial, sexual, etc. Leftism represents the secularization of the eschatological principles of Christianity, shorn of their transcendent significance. It represents the endpoint of a heresy which evolved out of late Calvinism, among other influences. Liberalism is a body of ideas that shares a relationship to leftism, but was born out of different Christian Protestant traditions (Anglicanism, English separatism) which emphasized compromise and the settlement of differences through consensus. Liberalism seeks to instantiate the progressive liberation of individual humans from constraints imposed by nature, social convention, and personal circumstances; in its current form, neoliberalism, this is achieved through scientific management on the part of credentialed elites. In America, right liberals are called 'conservatives,' and left liberals are called 'progressives.'
Over an against these are the "right," those philosophies that valorize transcendent order, reflected in religion, social hierarchy, family, and tradition. Rightist thought represents the continuation of philosophies that predates the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. This is why, in my view, only the right represents a credible challenge to the current order and the only source of human renewal.
I biked down to lake street in Minneapolis the day after those "fiery but mostly peaceful protests." My first thought when I saw the damage was, this looks like Syria. I know now what it feels like to be in an occupied city. I couldn't go for a walk in my neighborhood without my neighbors calling the police they wanted to defund. For months after, George Floyd square became the most dangerous place in the city. Homeless were thereafter allowed to turn the park system into a den of iniquity. People started acting like there was no law. Carjacking increased 500%. Working for the parks, every day I picked up heroin needles and broken car window glass.
I sold my beloved house I had been in for 16 years, with my twenty fruit trees, mushroom logs, the greenhouse I built with reclaimed lumber and sliding glass doors, my 1000 gallon pond and 200 species of plants, three days before the Fed started raising interest rates. I was not going to wait for the next Marxist firebombing and plandemic lockdown.
This was excellent on so many levels! Masterful writing and analysis! If John Carter was still doing the Iron Ring awards, I'm sure this would be a winner!
There's so much to be angry about today -- the ruling class is so diabolically evil and cannot even pretend to hide it anymore, thus they enable every kind of petty villain while persecuting every virtuous person who stands against it -- so I appreciate your ability to highlight the silver lining in all this: the regime is desperate, not confident, and they (at least the ones at the very top) understand their own weakness far better than we do. Black swan events may be rough for everyone in the short term, but such unforseen challenges are our friend, for our enemy lacks the strength or resilience to overcome them.
Hard to articulate but I can feel a different vibe among the thinking masses. Even liberals are realizing that their part has left them for the communists. It’s my hope that this all gets resolved without violence, but it seems that it’s almost impossible to do so by just voting our way out of this mess. Things will inevitably go back to based human instinct, and consequences will be dolled out one way or another. You can’t escape the fact that eventually when decent people get pushed hard enough they will fall back on violence.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." -- Robert Heinlein
Spotted you using a cyclical reference, or whatever it’s called when you mention something at the beginning and then again at the end. Very nice! Btw love your stuff and showed my mum, whose into teaching about your education series.
It never occurred to me that Rittenhouse put a stop to the Kenosha riots. Contrasting him with Michael Byrd is also very interesting to consider. Thanks for the great poast!
Well said, so well written. I have said all along, this is making them look weak. If we realize that, lots of people do. Biggest political blunder of the decade: making a folk hero of your political rival.
Fantastic piece. I've been feeling this for a while -- that the ongoing actions of the governing establishment are not those of strength but weakness -- but you really brought it home. Thanks.
This is why "left" and "right" are utterly meaningless -- there is no variable to which these terms refer that is consistently in play from one side to the other. They invariably end up referring to team sports, and as such the managerial state most surely IS "leftist."
But if the proportion of the individual in relation to the state is the variable, then "left" and "right" most certainly do have a valid meaning, and in that context also, the managerial state again most definitely IS hard leftist.
Otherwise, this is another fantastic essay, one I wish I could properly set to music.
Since I've nothing useful to add (because you "nuked the site from orbit", really), I'll nitpick instead.
Telling a fresh egg from a rock while blindfolded would be a doddle; the egg would smell of hen's ass for starters, and it would also be warm to the touch.
(Why yes, I keep chickens, how did you know?)
Not to mention that you'd have to find a type of rock with the same density as a hen's egg. Pumice, maybe?
Right, metaphor duly 'literalised', on to this:
"Twenty serious men could have cleared the whole street of insane, junkie chomo-communists."
And then they'd been arrested, sentenced for being in the wrong, dispersed and disappeared into a prison system where other inmates would have taken care of them, said inmates having been informed that NN "is a Trumper and a racist".
Not so funny, that. Rittenhouse would have suffered that, if the incident hadn't been covered so well.
But you are not wrong: look at moslemsin Europe. They get their every whim catered to, for free, or else.
Might makes right. Not in any moral or ethical sense and it's a rubbish model for such - but factually, it's one of the ur-truths, unchaging and un-changeable too. Or as Brecht put it:
"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."
Well darn, that went to a dark place. On the positive side, the US is huge geographically speaking with lots of places suited to creating gated segregated communities. Just remember: the Good Society isn't based on who you let in, but who you kick out.
"The managerial state is not itself leftist; it is not committed to a project of equality or the amelioration of social problems arising from capitalism. It is a neoliberal oligarchy focused on globalization, creating homogenous populations managed through the creation and provision of material desire, corporatist, statist, and bureaucratic, but above all committed to progressive ends through the benign rule of credentialed elites."
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. Aside from the fact that managerial states are and have always been Progressive, the idea of the managerial state itself seems to arise from the results of the Progressive worldview. The monitoring and regulating of all aspects of life is only possible once the universal solvent of Revolution has been applied to the normal bonds of society. The vast bureaucratic apparatus which serves mainly to create work for itself results firstly from Prog ideas about technocratic governance and the value of education. The cumbersome and brutal mechanisms of mass education that feeds the beast arises not from the needs of the state, but from the Prog dream of mass education (plus blank-slatism and a whole host of riders). The shape of the managerial state comes from Leftism, not the other way around as you seem to have it
This is, however, a quibble. Excellent essay overall!
Governments showing strength and resolve externally is the rock. Governments showing strength and resolve internally is the egg. One is unbreakable by any amount of pressure from the human hand. The other requires a well-crafted praectorian hand of protection begins to stink after a few weeks.
"Left" is that clade of political ideologies that have as their endpoint a state of normative equality as applied to every category of human distinction, economic, racial, sexual, etc. Leftism represents the secularization of the eschatological principles of Christianity, shorn of their transcendent significance. It represents the endpoint of a heresy which evolved out of late Calvinism, among other influences. Liberalism is a body of ideas that shares a relationship to leftism, but was born out of different Christian Protestant traditions (Anglicanism, English separatism) which emphasized compromise and the settlement of differences through consensus. Liberalism seeks to instantiate the progressive liberation of individual humans from constraints imposed by nature, social convention, and personal circumstances; in its current form, neoliberalism, this is achieved through scientific management on the part of credentialed elites. In America, right liberals are called 'conservatives,' and left liberals are called 'progressives.'
Over an against these are the "right," those philosophies that valorize transcendent order, reflected in religion, social hierarchy, family, and tradition. Rightist thought represents the continuation of philosophies that predates the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. This is why, in my view, only the right represents a credible challenge to the current order and the only source of human renewal.
I biked down to lake street in Minneapolis the day after those "fiery but mostly peaceful protests." My first thought when I saw the damage was, this looks like Syria. I know now what it feels like to be in an occupied city. I couldn't go for a walk in my neighborhood without my neighbors calling the police they wanted to defund. For months after, George Floyd square became the most dangerous place in the city. Homeless were thereafter allowed to turn the park system into a den of iniquity. People started acting like there was no law. Carjacking increased 500%. Working for the parks, every day I picked up heroin needles and broken car window glass.
I sold my beloved house I had been in for 16 years, with my twenty fruit trees, mushroom logs, the greenhouse I built with reclaimed lumber and sliding glass doors, my 1000 gallon pond and 200 species of plants, three days before the Fed started raising interest rates. I was not going to wait for the next Marxist firebombing and plandemic lockdown.
This was excellent on so many levels! Masterful writing and analysis! If John Carter was still doing the Iron Ring awards, I'm sure this would be a winner!
There's so much to be angry about today -- the ruling class is so diabolically evil and cannot even pretend to hide it anymore, thus they enable every kind of petty villain while persecuting every virtuous person who stands against it -- so I appreciate your ability to highlight the silver lining in all this: the regime is desperate, not confident, and they (at least the ones at the very top) understand their own weakness far better than we do. Black swan events may be rough for everyone in the short term, but such unforseen challenges are our friend, for our enemy lacks the strength or resilience to overcome them.
Hard to articulate but I can feel a different vibe among the thinking masses. Even liberals are realizing that their part has left them for the communists. It’s my hope that this all gets resolved without violence, but it seems that it’s almost impossible to do so by just voting our way out of this mess. Things will inevitably go back to based human instinct, and consequences will be dolled out one way or another. You can’t escape the fact that eventually when decent people get pushed hard enough they will fall back on violence.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." -- Robert Heinlein
Man, I'm glad I found you. Hell of a thinker and writer.
Spotted you using a cyclical reference, or whatever it’s called when you mention something at the beginning and then again at the end. Very nice! Btw love your stuff and showed my mum, whose into teaching about your education series.
It never occurred to me that Rittenhouse put a stop to the Kenosha riots. Contrasting him with Michael Byrd is also very interesting to consider. Thanks for the great poast!
Well said, so well written. I have said all along, this is making them look weak. If we realize that, lots of people do. Biggest political blunder of the decade: making a folk hero of your political rival.
Fantastic piece. I've been feeling this for a while -- that the ongoing actions of the governing establishment are not those of strength but weakness -- but you really brought it home. Thanks.
>The managerial state is not itself leftist
This is why "left" and "right" are utterly meaningless -- there is no variable to which these terms refer that is consistently in play from one side to the other. They invariably end up referring to team sports, and as such the managerial state most surely IS "leftist."
But if the proportion of the individual in relation to the state is the variable, then "left" and "right" most certainly do have a valid meaning, and in that context also, the managerial state again most definitely IS hard leftist.
Otherwise, this is another fantastic essay, one I wish I could properly set to music.
Since I've nothing useful to add (because you "nuked the site from orbit", really), I'll nitpick instead.
Telling a fresh egg from a rock while blindfolded would be a doddle; the egg would smell of hen's ass for starters, and it would also be warm to the touch.
(Why yes, I keep chickens, how did you know?)
Not to mention that you'd have to find a type of rock with the same density as a hen's egg. Pumice, maybe?
Right, metaphor duly 'literalised', on to this:
"Twenty serious men could have cleared the whole street of insane, junkie chomo-communists."
And then they'd been arrested, sentenced for being in the wrong, dispersed and disappeared into a prison system where other inmates would have taken care of them, said inmates having been informed that NN "is a Trumper and a racist".
Not so funny, that. Rittenhouse would have suffered that, if the incident hadn't been covered so well.
But you are not wrong: look at moslemsin Europe. They get their every whim catered to, for free, or else.
Might makes right. Not in any moral or ethical sense and it's a rubbish model for such - but factually, it's one of the ur-truths, unchaging and un-changeable too. Or as Brecht put it:
"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."
Well darn, that went to a dark place. On the positive side, the US is huge geographically speaking with lots of places suited to creating gated segregated communities. Just remember: the Good Society isn't based on who you let in, but who you kick out.
"The managerial state is not itself leftist; it is not committed to a project of equality or the amelioration of social problems arising from capitalism. It is a neoliberal oligarchy focused on globalization, creating homogenous populations managed through the creation and provision of material desire, corporatist, statist, and bureaucratic, but above all committed to progressive ends through the benign rule of credentialed elites."
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. Aside from the fact that managerial states are and have always been Progressive, the idea of the managerial state itself seems to arise from the results of the Progressive worldview. The monitoring and regulating of all aspects of life is only possible once the universal solvent of Revolution has been applied to the normal bonds of society. The vast bureaucratic apparatus which serves mainly to create work for itself results firstly from Prog ideas about technocratic governance and the value of education. The cumbersome and brutal mechanisms of mass education that feeds the beast arises not from the needs of the state, but from the Prog dream of mass education (plus blank-slatism and a whole host of riders). The shape of the managerial state comes from Leftism, not the other way around as you seem to have it
This is, however, a quibble. Excellent essay overall!
Great commentary. If we lose faith because of all the lies, we are lost. We have to stand up together. I suggest everyone reading this start a substack and mail every contact in their phones. Here's how: https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/198-this-is-your-conscription-notice#details
“chaotic nihilism of the underclass” perfect description.
Fantastic!
Governments showing strength and resolve externally is the rock. Governments showing strength and resolve internally is the egg. One is unbreakable by any amount of pressure from the human hand. The other requires a well-crafted praectorian hand of protection begins to stink after a few weeks.
Excellent post.