Before loads of people comment, a reminder that Lorenzo is in Australia and has probably gone to bed by now, so he'll be around to answer your questions in about eight hours.
This is really excellent! Thank you for such wide-ranging and in-depth thinking on what I believe is THE issue of our time. And it seems to me that the true fascist spirit can only arise today "from the left", because only the "progressive" narrative has the elements required to capture both the public imagination and the institutions. Worst, the factors that conspire toward this result today constitute a perfect storm. I'm going to have to check your "About" and find out who I'm reading...
Aug 27, 2023·edited Aug 27, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Even a defeat a victory as fighting always raises the costs to the opponent teaching them restraint the only way they’ll learn, and raising the value of yourself and your kin and kind by showing fight.
Absent fighting the Irish would have gone the way of the Picts and other vanished peoples.
I mean fight not talk, or vote, or get a lawyer, etc.
Democracy is both undesirable and an impossibility given the nature of ordinary people and the inevitability of an elite in any political system. What we require is a new and improved elite that can rid us of the one we have now. We should not embrace populism or double down on the failures of conservatism. Neither should we lionise democracy as a panacea or harp on about the virtues of classical liberalism. Something new is required.
Aug 27, 2023·edited Aug 27, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
I would like to add one more item to the list of how the politics of the transformational future are undermining democracy (I speak here as an American and Californian).
There are 2 contradictory aspects of our zeitgeist that work together:
1) The fact that so much of our social discord and misery is caused by massive income inequality, with the top 1% owning about half our wealth and the top 10% owning at least 80% of it. We all know this is a new Gilded Age, that there is a billionaire class that pulls the political puppet strings, but their wealth and power exist currently behind a high castle wall; and
2) Egalitarianism is the song that just about every outlet sings, Egalitarianism is preached by every rich and powerful person to the left of Mitt Romney, our ruling class claims total devotion to Egalitarianism, but this only manifests in trivialities like: racial balance in movies and Oscars, racial and gender balance in the C-suites, the reign of demography, where every sphere of society has to "look like America", and then of course ridiculous manifestations of Egalitarianism like every kid getting good grades etc.
Thus "Egalitarianism" in modern American discourse works like a shiny new chew toy to keep people dazed and confused at best, or at each other's throats at worse. We will fight to the death over "gender balance" in Star Wars, while then quietly surrendering to eat crumbs from the billionaire's table.
The narratives that uphold the Politics of the Transformational Future (which could be sloganized as "Let them eat Representation!") may be the biggest most effective weapon used and wielded to divide and conquer.
Really excellent essay! This point cannot be overemphasized: fascist (reactionary) movements are always a reaction against the threat of Marxism. If leftists want to prevent fascism is the USA, the most effective strategy would be to police their own bad actors rather than celebrate them.
My main response to this is that human nature has not significantly changed in the last 200 years; there have always been impairments to societies ability to talk to itself, policies have been pushed through universities via organizational capture for decades, and citizenry have been denigrated for as long as citizenry existed. The only new attitudes for Westerners are a focusing on patterns of structural oppression through notions of constraint-as-oppression.
This last feature of society *is* new, and it's very frustrating - but it's also a natural or even inevitable outgrowth of high levels of material security, which removed pragmatic checks on idealism. At one time, people valued things like social justice, but they also had clothes to wash, potatoes to pick, and fences to mend. Now everybody is flabby and socialized into a universe without limitations; of course "constraint is oppression."
> The “if you believe X you are a bigoted conspiracy theorist” stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is a hardy perennial in Pravda-model media.
Maybe you mean stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is hardly *novel*?
>Mass Fascism does not happen without mass Leninism. Mass Nazism does not happen without mass Stalinism.
Is that so? I think that the history of Japan provides quite a good example of how "Mass Nazism" can happen without anything even resembling strong socialist or communist movement. Not to say that there were no marxists at all, but they had no power to speak of.
“[U]sers of the social-leverage-and-status strategy often protect their sense of status by simply refusing to read or watch those who speak or write outside their prestige-opinion and luxury-beliefs ecosystem.”
Or, when their media echo chambers do present other opinions, it’s often done via “nut-picking” - presenting fringe figures as representative of the opposition. If suitably inane examples aren’t readily available, straw men will do nicely. Recall Barack Obama’s frequent declarations that “some people believe X, but I believe…,” or “some people say Y, but I say…,” when no sane person ever believed X or said Y.
Too few try to test their beliefs against the best opposing views in an honest search for truth. Instead, many look for ways to label anyone in opposition so that they can dismiss them and their beliefs without having to make an argument.
Before loads of people comment, a reminder that Lorenzo is in Australia and has probably gone to bed by now, so he'll be around to answer your questions in about eight hours.
great work
This is really excellent! Thank you for such wide-ranging and in-depth thinking on what I believe is THE issue of our time. And it seems to me that the true fascist spirit can only arise today "from the left", because only the "progressive" narrative has the elements required to capture both the public imagination and the institutions. Worst, the factors that conspire toward this result today constitute a perfect storm. I'm going to have to check your "About" and find out who I'm reading...
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
In America it’s fight or die.
Even a defeat a victory as fighting always raises the costs to the opponent teaching them restraint the only way they’ll learn, and raising the value of yourself and your kin and kind by showing fight.
Absent fighting the Irish would have gone the way of the Picts and other vanished peoples.
I mean fight not talk, or vote, or get a lawyer, etc.
The US is not a democracy. It’s a republic.
Democracy is both undesirable and an impossibility given the nature of ordinary people and the inevitability of an elite in any political system. What we require is a new and improved elite that can rid us of the one we have now. We should not embrace populism or double down on the failures of conservatism. Neither should we lionise democracy as a panacea or harp on about the virtues of classical liberalism. Something new is required.
Whenever the topic of progressivism is raised I think of the following quote:
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.
H.L. Mencken
Any rationale that argues for more government power to “fix” societies problems can only end in tears.
I would like to add one more item to the list of how the politics of the transformational future are undermining democracy (I speak here as an American and Californian).
There are 2 contradictory aspects of our zeitgeist that work together:
1) The fact that so much of our social discord and misery is caused by massive income inequality, with the top 1% owning about half our wealth and the top 10% owning at least 80% of it. We all know this is a new Gilded Age, that there is a billionaire class that pulls the political puppet strings, but their wealth and power exist currently behind a high castle wall; and
2) Egalitarianism is the song that just about every outlet sings, Egalitarianism is preached by every rich and powerful person to the left of Mitt Romney, our ruling class claims total devotion to Egalitarianism, but this only manifests in trivialities like: racial balance in movies and Oscars, racial and gender balance in the C-suites, the reign of demography, where every sphere of society has to "look like America", and then of course ridiculous manifestations of Egalitarianism like every kid getting good grades etc.
Thus "Egalitarianism" in modern American discourse works like a shiny new chew toy to keep people dazed and confused at best, or at each other's throats at worse. We will fight to the death over "gender balance" in Star Wars, while then quietly surrendering to eat crumbs from the billionaire's table.
The narratives that uphold the Politics of the Transformational Future (which could be sloganized as "Let them eat Representation!") may be the biggest most effective weapon used and wielded to divide and conquer.
Cheers and thanks for another great piece!
Really excellent essay! This point cannot be overemphasized: fascist (reactionary) movements are always a reaction against the threat of Marxism. If leftists want to prevent fascism is the USA, the most effective strategy would be to police their own bad actors rather than celebrate them.
My main response to this is that human nature has not significantly changed in the last 200 years; there have always been impairments to societies ability to talk to itself, policies have been pushed through universities via organizational capture for decades, and citizenry have been denigrated for as long as citizenry existed. The only new attitudes for Westerners are a focusing on patterns of structural oppression through notions of constraint-as-oppression.
This last feature of society *is* new, and it's very frustrating - but it's also a natural or even inevitable outgrowth of high levels of material security, which removed pragmatic checks on idealism. At one time, people valued things like social justice, but they also had clothes to wash, potatoes to pick, and fences to mend. Now everybody is flabby and socialized into a universe without limitations; of course "constraint is oppression."
> The “if you believe X you are a bigoted conspiracy theorist” stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is a hardy perennial in Pravda-model media.
Maybe you mean stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is hardly *novel*?
>Mass Fascism does not happen without mass Leninism. Mass Nazism does not happen without mass Stalinism.
Is that so? I think that the history of Japan provides quite a good example of how "Mass Nazism" can happen without anything even resembling strong socialist or communist movement. Not to say that there were no marxists at all, but they had no power to speak of.
“[U]sers of the social-leverage-and-status strategy often protect their sense of status by simply refusing to read or watch those who speak or write outside their prestige-opinion and luxury-beliefs ecosystem.”
Or, when their media echo chambers do present other opinions, it’s often done via “nut-picking” - presenting fringe figures as representative of the opposition. If suitably inane examples aren’t readily available, straw men will do nicely. Recall Barack Obama’s frequent declarations that “some people believe X, but I believe…,” or “some people say Y, but I say…,” when no sane person ever believed X or said Y.
Too few try to test their beliefs against the best opposing views in an honest search for truth. Instead, many look for ways to label anyone in opposition so that they can dismiss them and their beliefs without having to make an argument.