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In the last Culture War Thread, in a very interesting exchange about why white people in America (and the so-called West more broadly) tolerate being constantly denigrated from every corner of the intellectual elite, the always-insightful @FiveHourMarathon had an interesting comment that resonated with me. He finds the grievance-oriented, victim-mindset side of the white identitarian sphere viscerally off-putting and pathetic. Why, he asks, should I be proud to be white, if in fact being white means being weak and crying out for forbearance and mercy from the ascendant coalition of white-hating POCs whose power and vengeful intent increases daily? Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim, and what appeal would that self-identification have for those well-adjusted, successful, thriving individuals whose allegiance the white race ought to covet most assiduously, especially if it is indeed true that whites’ prospects are at a historic low point? While the downvote totals indicate that his perspective was poorly-received by many of our pro-white posters (for understandable reasons upon which I will touch shortly), I found his comments extremely instructive and worth reflecting on - a splash of bracingly cold water which ought to invigorate those on my side who wake up every day and wonder how white people let ourselves get to this point.
The conversation dovetailed wonderfully with Jared Taylor’s excellent essay, adapted from a speech he gave at a recent American Renaissance conference, in which he delves deep into the historical antecedents of white people’s current malaise. In this essay, Taylor points out that the ethno-masochism which pervades Western elite consciousness is consistent with a more general philosophical framework that has characterized the European psyche for centuries. He illustrates that the individuals who drove many of the most influential social/political reform movements of the last 300 years - from the Jacobins and the abolitionists to the temperance movement - have all demonstrated a fairly consistent psychological phenotype: a sort of Protagonist Syndrome, obsessed with virtue (and particularly with displaying that virtue to other white people) and with uplifting the underdog, and driven by an atavistic hatred of fellow white people who don’t share that same temperament.
In a sense, the leftist psyche - and, as a former committed leftie, I think I understand this temperament pretty well, and am still an example of it in many ways - is an extension of the “Faustian spirit” that many right-wingers love to attribute to European Man. In this telling of history, the most important defining characteristic of the European soul is its driving need to conquer, to transform, to bend nature to one’s own ends. This boundless desire for conquest drove the great achievements of Western man - from conquering the globe, to unlocking the secrets of wielding nature’s forces to our own benefit, to curing disease, to landing on the moon - but I think it also drives the leftist desire to transform humanity itself. To improve humanity from its basic, crude, unworked Hobbesian “state of nature” and to unlock its true potential. Hermetic alchemy applied to the human spirit - never accepting limits, never taking “that’s just the way things are” as an answer, always believing that we can keep pushing the limits of what is possible. Combine this with an almost pathological altruism, the anguish one feels when contemplating the plight of the downtrodden, and it’s very easy to see why Faustian man is so driven to “correct” the obviously-unjust vicissitudes of random chance that have produced the current distribution of human fortunes.
I know that I personally still feel deeply this instinctive sympathy for the underdog. It’s so ingrained in our national psyche that it’s incredibly difficult to overcome it. It has characterized my experience as a sports fan, and it was a major formative element of my self-conception as a college progressive. Wresting myself out of that mental framework as I’ve drifted rightward has been, and in some ways still continues to be, a psychologically disorienting experience. On the one hand, the recognition that unequal distribution of talent and fortune is an unalterable fact of reality, baked into the human spirit, is a bedrock element of the right-wing worldview. Hierarchy is right and proper, and the strong and capable shall always prosper while the weak and mediocre will always vainly envy them. On the other hand, this offends Faustian man’s innate sense of limitless ability to transform the world. Much as Europeans looked at grim realities such as the ubiquity of deadly disease, or man’s inability to traverse the skies, and said, “I have the power to change that,” we have the unshakeable sense that the injustice of fate which has rendered some less fortunate than others is yet another so-called reality just waiting for us to apply our ingenuity and boundless power to correct. A mere engineering problem which our best minds are rapidly working to solve. And hey, if I’m the process of fixing this problem we also gain the opportunity to ostentatiously display our own virtue and gain relative status accordingly, all the better!
This instinctive desire to uplift the underdog is, ironically, only rational if one believes that one’s own interests are not threatened by that underdog’s success. If I can help the underdog get his piece of the pie while my piece stays the same size, that means that in reality I must have been stronger than both the underdog and the supposed overdog against whom he was striving - I was so far above the conflict that I could observe it as a spectator. The underdog becomes, then, a sort of prop or vessel through which I can achieve emotional satiation of my altruistic instinct, at little to no cost to myself.
Where, then, does this leave racially-conscious whites, who assess the state of the world around us and see genuinely foreboding trends which appear to pose a serious threat to our people? Who observe the rising chorus of hatred and envy echoing from the halls of power, who dismay at the ever-worsening fertility differentials, and who see our own elected representatives seem to revel in our decline? What is the optimal rhetorical strategy to appeal to successful white individuals in order to get them to see the disturbing portents and to realize that things are not looking good for us? That this isn’t, in fact, an idle game, but in fact deadly serious? Well, one very appealing strategy is to appeal to that characteristically-European sympathy for the underdog. It’s to say, “Look, guys, we are the weak and vulnerable party in need of special concern and uplift! I know that you’ve been trained by the media to view white people as the permanent bully in need of humbling and people of color as the noble and scrappy up-and-comer just looking for a fair shot - and yeah, at certain points in history that was even true! - but at this point in time the tables truly have turned. We lay ourselves at the mercy of the victors, and ask only for their mercy and indulgence. Quit picking on us!”
This is also, I think, the motivation behind much of the “JQ” discourse on the right; Jews can be portrayed as an all-powerful enemy, against which we defenseless whites are fighting an impossible uphill battle which we can only win through a herculean effort. “Feel bad for us! We, too, know what it is like to suffer systemic discrimination against our rapacious racial overlords! It’s not faaiiiiir!” However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. There haven’t been a whole lot of limits or setbacks that we’ve faced in the past that we haven’t been able to overcome with some ingenuity and some elbow grease; why should something like collapsing fertility rates be any different? The only way we lose is if we beat ourselves, and we can choose to start winning again at any time once we put our mind to it.
This is, I think, a far healthier mindset than the doom-and-gloom, woe-is-me, why-won’t-the-Jews-stop-picking-on-me mindset that so alienates @FiveHourMarathon. Our problems are real, but they’re ones that we ourselves created, and they’re ones that we ourselves -and only ourselves - can fix. We haven’t even begun to conquer the stars yet - how are we going to let ourselves get bogged down by such comparatively quotidian setbacks? We only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs - all we have to do is untie them!
I don’t know, I’ve been sick with the flu all week and I might just be deliriously rambling. I’ve been ingesting a lot of blackpills as of late, so this line of thinking is a useful whitepill to counteract their toxic effects.
It's all subjective - one man's whining is another's righteous indignation. But the fact is there is no winning quite like winning itself - the BLM activist that gets a professor fired for his 'microaggression' is cut from the same cloth as the 'whiners'. We simply look on her without contempt because she wields power, and power is at the end, what it's all about. In my experience the white-nats on Twitter aren't any whinier than anyone else - we're simply disposed to see it as whining because they're politically impotent.
There's also a point to be made that whining and appealing to higher authority is a strategy that works really well for some groups. It can therefore be hard to escape it as a model for politics. If all you've ever seen is politicians complaining about their oppression or marginalization, that's what you know.
I don't think that's true. For your example, I absolutely look on such a person with contempt, or as close to it as I ever get. That activist is a toxic troublemaker who is actively making our society worse. If anything her behavior is worse, not better, because she has power.
On the other hand, those who view your hypothetical activist without contempt are probably doing so not because she has power. Rather, it's because they agree with her ideology and approve that she is putting it into practice. But again, it's nothing to do with power or lack thereof.
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The media and cultural elites really revealed their hatred of poor rural white people during the Trump administration imo. I don't think most people realized what was happening during his presidency but now that it's over, it really feels like TDS was directed toward white people and especially poor white people with little to no cultural power or relevance. Before 2018 I was relatively happy or at least complacent to conform to the fashions and opinions of democratic elites, in the hopes that I could reap the benefits of being part of the ascendant class, but after experiencing the hatred this class of people spewed toward poor white people I really can't stand to associate with democrats anymore.
Circling back to your post, the point I'm trying to make is that I have much more sympathy for middle American white people after the past 6 years than I had before and I feel like white people have actually earned a huge right to feel like the underdogs at this point. I think a ton of people in the creative industry are feeling this as well FWIW, so many of us are sick of working for democrat tastemakers who constantly censor our work and ignore artists creating anything that could threaten their credibility or power. As artists/creatives we're used to rooting for the underdogs and when the legacy art media is constantly screaming at us that only BIPOC voices matter, and that poor white trash people will ruin their careers if they're associated with them, then the poor white trash people are, obviously, the underdogs.
At the end of the day, when you pick on losers, it makes you look like a bigger loser, and it grows support for the people you're picking on. The more the mass media and pop culture and everyone you meet piles on poor white people, the more it reveals how pathetic they are for doing so.
I see pop culture as actually having a fascination with poor or working class white people, just as long as they are quirky somehow. Or criminal. Tiger King. The hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Former mobsters moving to Oklahoma (Tulsa King).
The media's attitude toward Tiger King was actually kind of a huge thing that turned me against them around 2020. I watched Tiger King and my takeaway was, honestly, that they look like they're having significantly more fun in their lives than me or anyone who was poo-pooing the show was having. It really made me realize that I don't want to live my life confined by the tastes of people who can make fun of Joe Exotic while their own lifestyle is probably a really depressing routine of uber eats and gray buildings.
Additionally, I think the time before 2016 was way friendlier to quirky white working class people. For example, indie films like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, as well as indie folk music like Sufjan and Fleet Foxes were beloved by the NPR set until the entire indie folk quirk scene mysteriously vanished from the media's landscape in favor of queer/bipoc voices throughout the late 2010s
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These are minstrel shows.
"Minstel show" implies that it's an act, that the ones in blackface are nothing like what they are acting as (or alternatively, that the black people on display are made to act in a less dignified way than they realistically are). I don't think Kai (the hitchhiker with the hatchet) specifically is playing things up or pretending, he seems like the genuine article.
I believe to steelman gilmore606's point, it would be that they are minstrel shows in the sense that the blue team viewers like to watch this media to laugh at the antics of poor white people. So this mimics the spectacle of white people watching entertainment that makes them feel superior and to be able to point and laugh at an inferior class of people (long ago it was blacks, today it's poor whites.) We have replaced acting with reality TV, so we don't need to have rich whites pretending to be poor whites (though there are plenty of examples of exactly that happening in Hollywood today.)
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I’ve always seen this as HyperCalvinist philosophy in action. It’s actually somewhat older and goes back really to Romanized Christian dogma especially in the West where notions like original sin, total depravity and noblesse oblige are part of the cultural heritage we inherited from Christianity. Add in that Christianity isn’t native to Europe (hence up until the second century you don’t see a lot of gentile Christians). All of this creates a mindset of apology— we are wrong, need to repent, and that pride is the worst thing you can do, while humility is a virtue.
And we’ve been apologizing for 1500 years. It’s not bad if you’re actually guilty of a specific thing (this is one of the benefits of a confessional— you’re only guilty of things you’ve actually done) but turned to a generalized sense of evil that you and your people are generally guilty of, it turns pathological because there’s no absolutions possible. And without that, you apologize and move to the next thing, even more obscure than the first, with ever more obvious abasement as if to say “please please tell me I’m forgiven, tell me I’m okay, tell me I’m one of the good ones.”
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I think this European “spirit of the underdog” is really a unique domesticated instinct to protect the innocent member of the expanded tribe, and has nothing to do with weakness per se. White people love the ugly person actually being beautiful and everyone knowing it (innocent of the crime of being ugly); they don’t like a shitty team that plays shitty, they like a shitty team that is actually great (innocent of the crime of being bad at sports). White people love stories of innocent people getting justice, not weak people who aren’t innocent evading a crime. Weakness per se would bring all white people together to support, I don’t know, incel manlets and Nick Fuentes. But these people aren’t innocent, but in their eyes deserve their just deserts.
The issue is that culture from Uncle Tom’s Cabin down through To Kill a Mocking Bird and beyond to George Floyd emphasizes the innocence of black people in the face of white people being bad. You learn from these stories who the innocent (and pure) element of the expanded tribe is (not white people).
It’s interesting that most cases of blue eyes in mammals are the result of domestication, found in certain sheep, dogs, and Russian foxes, and that the dog breeds with blonde hair are particularly prone to innocent friendliness. It’s not impossible that Europeans are excessively sensitive to claims of innocence, or internalizing social hierarchies from media exposure, because it sparks something in a gene or two that code for domestic traits. There are supposedly already genes showing differences in European vs East Asian expressions of shame, sensitivity to parental judgment, and empathy
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"or is unfair to whites" - Mainstream and even supposedly radical MAGA GOP figures will almost never say this. Instead they'll talk about how it's unfair to asians, or latinos, or how it's bad because it implies negative stereotypes about Blacks. Rufo had to put it all Leftist policies within the label neo-marxist critical race theory so that he could defend whites without actually mentioning them.
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I don't think that (was) true. There was a great deal of energy in the US when Trump was first campaigning.
The American people had the sentiment that they could actually get in power, and every tiny step was punctuated by 'Are you tired of winning?!" or something similar, by contrast the other side was doing this
At Charlottesville, they were not saying 'please let us live', they were boldly, defiantly chanting 'Jews will not replace us!'.
Unfortunately, the top specimens of the white race have no incentive to get involved in the fight at this stage.
Things are pretty good, so far.
Once people started getting arrested and elections seemed completely unwinnable forever, what was left to do, politically?
Quite a few people I know have turned religious extremists.
I personally don't see the point of fighting for people who in their large majority have no interest in shaping the future.
Love your neighbor and if your neighbor has faith in anything, he will have children and be part of the future and matter politically.
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...There's a lot here, but I'm kinda done with the alt-right/WN arguments after the last couple threads, so I'll leave it at noting that this entire thread is the rhetorical equivalent of a giant, killer-asteroid-sized billboard painted with the words " @HlynkaCG 's thesis about the alt-right is indisputably correct."
This is because the traditional conservative opinion is unique amongst political views: only the non-intellectual conservative who is anti-change is truly 'right-wing': all other politics, including reactionary and fascist, are a type of progressivism. The reason is the intellectuality of the thing: if you believe you can rewrite reality as you experience it from summoned up abstract concepts you are a progressive. Hence 'conservatism' continually loses because definitionally it can nothing else. It is a question of philosophical rationalism first, not politics.
Both reactionaries and leftists justify their views on a presumed success in a different time, with the leftists believing it lies in the future and the reactionaries the past. Neither is true, as neither can transpose the entirety of the agents or things which they believe can bring this about (or rejuvenate it) into the present moment all at once, but have to do it piece by piece, with reality then defeating them in detail. Reactionaries claim that their preferred state having once existed, whether as they claim it truly was or no, yet this is no stronger a plea than the progressives, as the events that conspired to destroy that past state did actually manage it even when the state was at its strongest. It's the old question of anti-revolution: we shouldn't have had a revolution because we don't know what it might bring on and the complex system of a state can never be interfered with without suffering: we must have a counter-revolution because this currently existing state is so bad that huge change must be wrought to bring things back to order.
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Care to post a link to that thesis (or at least summarize it)?
Here you go. You've probably seen him make the argument a time or two before; he's been saying it for years now.
The first time I saw him make the claim, I thought, "that's crazy". But he kept hammering the point, every time providing additional examples. Quite a few of the posts in this thread make the point rather eloquently.
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I mean, I’m not really interested in picking a fight with Hlynka or with taking unprovoked potshots at his worldview, but it can simultaneously be true that 1. he has accurately identified that both the far-right and far-left have converged on a recognition that identity politics are valuable and that classical liberalism is a failed project, and 2. his proposed solution - “and that’s why everybody should be a Reaganite conservative who Doesn’t See Color™️ and worships at the altar of Martin Luther King, ‘content of their character’ yada yada yada” - is a total non sequitur and doesn’t even begin to address the actual reality we’re facing.
The use of Reaganite as a slur on the racial front bugs me. He tried to kill disparate impact theory (ie. the theory under which the government enforces affirmative action) but was overriden by congressional republicans, tried to stay friends with apartheid South Africa (the party led by McConnell I believe, overrode him again), and had some pretty based quotes. "To see those monkeys from those African countries - damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes!" Then again, he did screw up on amnesty for illegals but that seems more justifiable.
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The thesis I was referencing is that WNs and alt-righters are, in fact, Blues applying a fundamentally Blue worldview. You are jointly your own closest brothers and worst enemies.
If I can say to you, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing", and mean it, live by it, raise my children and build my community by it, what does any of the above or below have to entice me? The standard response is that Christianity has failed... delivered, generally, by people who willingly chose to abandon the faith of their fathers to embrace an alien and alienating worldview, and refuse to let it go.
Your post honestly deserves a more detailed response than that, but this, to me, is the core of the issue: You're looking for a banner to rally behind, but you've rejected the most proven banner known to man because it's incompatible with fundamental elements of the Blue worldview, which you still hold. Meanwhile, the Reds that comprise most of the people you're trying to rally have no interest in the alternative banners you offer, because they recognize their fundamentally Blue nature.
The biggest flaw of Christianity, which sets it apart from many other religions- including the pagan traditions of the fathers of their father, is that Christianity requires a superstitious belief in the literal truth of claimed miracles. Is such a religion sustainable?
Paganism was about worshipping symbols and myths of the people, with collective public and familial rituals, to direct society in a positive direction. Other non-theistic religions like Buddhism also do not require the allegiance of faith in the truth of claimed miracles. Whereas there is no shortage of superstition in Judaism, especially among religious Jews, the Religion is ultimately about The Chosen People and so it coheres even non-religious Jews who internalize that sense in a non-theistic manner.
Christianity on the other hand... it's ultimately about belief in the truth of claimed miracles that emerged from the body of Jewish superstition. It's in fact historically unusual in this regard. If those claims are false then the religion is a farce, whereas the Jews exist as a coherent people even if you don't believe in a literal Yahweh. Yahweh as nothing more than a tribal mascot of the Jews is infinitely more real than Christianity if you take away the truth of the miracles. If you don't believe in the literal truth of those miracles, even if you were to support the religion in every other way, you are a heretic and in the outgroup.
You think Christianity is based? That it promotes good morals and is necessary to save Western Civilization? Too bad, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in the literal truth of it. Or you can just pretend, and sit in the pews with a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you.
I've seen fairly large-sample Telegram polls in the DR and the polls were split exactly 50/50 on the Christian Question, making it highly divisive in that space. But the divisiveness is good, because it's a hard problem that has to be solved to move forward.
@Job mentioned he's seen people turn towards religious extremism. I've also seen the same, high-quality people (some previously atheist) who turn inwards towards their relationship with God and closely studying Christian doctrine. They avoid the alienation but what is that going to accomplish?
This isn't how anyone but weirdos like us think about things though. The majority of good christians are just followers. For them, believing in the "literal truth" of it is not challenging, but it also isn't a profound intellectual thing. Most people don't analyze the truth claims of their religion like that. They just believe and repeat and thats it. No bigger implications.
In my experience, you can participate without believing in the miracles, and not have a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you. The collective effervescence is there for you whether you intellectually accept the physical reality of miracles or not. Why can't you accept it symbolically like the pagans you refer to?
There are clear "game theory" advantages for social groups espousing wild shit. It represents a signal with a cost. A core selective challenge for social groups is to sort people who are actual team players from parasites. There is a minor cost associated with saying something crazy like "Jesus rose from the dead". It harms your credibility with every other group that doesn't claim that crazy thing. That cost acts as a clarifying pressure for people to either be all in on being truly members of christianity (who will cooperate with christians) as opposed to fakers who want to play both sides.
I'm not at all convinced by this. Any social group with good mechanics to maintain cohesion over multiple generations is going to have systems to make signaling group identity somewhat costly. I think many groups require their members to claim that actively believe weird shit, that's not just christianity. There are plenty of miracles professed by other religions. There are other methods to make signaling group membership costly, like wearing stupid looking clothes, or ritual scarification, etc. But publicly espousing weird nonsense is a really common trait. And it looks adaptive to me.
I do feel you on it being uncomfortable because I am also a weirdo that cares about things like that. Thats part of what is so grating about modern american progressivism - that it requests me to say so much weird stuff, so I don't. But if I thought it was "based" and would lead to healthy outcomes for me and mine - I might not be as bothered.
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It does not work this way.
"If YHWH is just ancient myth, if the bible is just book of ancient tales, why shouldn't I marry this nice Gentile in romantic interfaith Jewish-Catholic-Buddhist-Wiccan ceremony?
"Ancient tradition? You mean thousands of years of persecution, pogroms and genocide? Thanks, but no thanks."
Actual Jewish leaders do not share your complacency about great future for Jews in absence of religious faith.
Secular Jews seem no less inclined towards worshipping their own suffering and persecution. Their identity as the eternally, innocent persecuted is a pull factor rather than a push factor for secular Jews.
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Which miracles do you question?
Resurrection of Jesus for start.
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I'm not a white nationalist, but I would dispute the red/blue framing for understanding very online dissident right wing thought (which itself isn't really white nationalist or alt-right anymore than progressives or wokes are all antifa socialists).
To my perspective it is the blue worldview that is christian, and the non urban, lesser educated, bluecollar workers are decidedly not religious and not Christian. Furthermore they have been non Christian for all intents and purposes since the industrial revolution. It is only in what I read or hear about one country (the USA) that the reds are christian.
Being a christian makes you just one subset of the blue tribe. Only atheists can be in opposition to a fundamentally christian derived worldview (blue progressivism) imho.
To someone from the UK who knows their ancestry is entirely working class/peasant for 500 years, and great grandparents spoke of their own grandparents speaking of their grandparents thinking god and church was all horseshit.... it really is hard to understand this american religion of your forefathers view.
It never was our religion, it was imposed. Top down, by the sword at times, and then by the zealot middle class as Britian underwent the pre industrial revolution demogrpahic and cultural spasms of the 1500-1750 period as far as I am aware.
The glib overly simplified history would then have the christian nutcases mostly leaving for the new world.
In this model dissident right wing anti left-progressive, anti woke, anti blue thought can be fundamentally anti christian at the same time, while simultaneously being non conservative (as that would require being blue-left-progressive-christian).
Christian conservatives and the woke are the same when viewed from far enough away.
Well, both movements are composed of humans, and as individuals we both shape our lives around metaphysical claims centering on questions of good and evil, wrongdoing and justice. Much of this debate hinges on how the boundaries should be drawn.
The entire red/blue analysis is based on analysis of American culture, and obviously isn't going to transfer well to foreign cultures. I'm skeptical of your claim that Christianity had no penetration into rural life in England, given everything I've read about British history in particular and European history generally; the explicit fights between various factions of the faith would seem to be fairly solid supporting evidence.
I've no disagreement that there's a dissident-right faction that's specifically anti-Christian. I also maintain that Christianity has been fighting Progressivism more or less since the invention of Progressivism, for reasons that have not significantly changed over time. But then, various factions of progressivism have likewise fought each other, so fights clearly aren't a workable way to determine how the boundaries should be drawn. Still, if you think Progressivism and Christianity are ultimately similar, shouldn't that similarity cash out in some sort of similarity in observable outcomes?
"Well, both movements are composed of humans" - on the internet no-one can tell if you are a dog.
With regards to christian pentration into rural areas I refer to the class distinction being one that Christian belief is a sign of wealth, working people less so afaik. I am arguing that it is top down and.most peasants or working class individuals did not, and do not actually have religious belief of any kind. Which seems inverted im the cultural analysis of the USA.
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All the "red tribers" who've done this for the past century have had their childrens' values turn much bluer, while also being economically and politically dominated by the blues. Just saying "god is really really good" doesn't actually do anything, and it certainly won't stop the 280lbs churchgoing christian from enjoying tiktok and pornhub.
If you don’t understand the differences in behavior between church attending and non-attending Christians, then you have no business pontificating on demographic or social trends in Christian communities.
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No, in fact, the failure to do this, and some other things as well, is what caused so many Reds to lose so badly for so long. The losses we have sustained are grievous, but I do not think they are terminal, nor is the dominance the Blues enjoy eternal. The conditions and the tactics they've derived such storied success from have more or less run their course, and will not be effective a second time. Policy starvation and its knock-on effects will bring them down, and it does not seem likely to me that they will recover.
Well in the first place, there's a good bit more involved than "just saying God is really, really good," hence the part about believing it, raising one's children by it, building one's life and community around it. In the second place, those things that you're evidently missing is in fact one of the only things that stop people of any weight from "enjoying tick-tock and pornhub", by helping them to understand why they benefit from removing such things from their lives.
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In East Germany the church was allowed to remain under only limited molestation, and to have it's own an associated political party, provided it proclaimed that actually Christians are perfectly loyal communists. I wonder how many people actually ended up believing this. It can even be supported biblically, but was clearly not the source of the East German Lutheran's professed values. No Christians had not been loyal communists, until the powers that be told them, and then they cited their faith to support it. The fact is the average evangelical Christian was perfectly fine with racial identity and segregation until power told them they were wrong. Evangelicals found a way to overlook the historic Christian opposition to abortion, and correspondingly the Southern States had the most liberal abortion laws until after Roe v. Wade. Belief in the morality of inter-racial marriage was at 4% when the laws banning it were struck down. It only reached 50% in the 1990s.
Christians, being a group of Humans, bend under pressure. Christianity has not yet broken. The Enlightenment's adherents began writing our obituaries three centuries ago. The Communists thought they were digging our grave a hundred years ago. Dawkins and Harris and the rest tried to write us off as irrelevant a decade ago, cheering on a social inflection that has now eaten their movement alive.
I like our chances, honestly.
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Well that, and it’s simply not how the 95 IQ rednecks that motteizans like to use as a median red triber think about race or recent racial policies. Cletus and Jamal mostly get along pretty well in person, and when they don’t get along they simply don’t interact and don’t get why Karen is so insistent that they do.
Red tribers are very aware that anti-white racial policies mostly do not come from people blacker than Meghan Markle, and they are aware that the median black thinks these policies are ridiculous. These ideas can be lain squarely at the feet of the blue tribe, which is mostly white and hapa.
Yeah, because the blues told them to! Those peoples' ancestors would be in agony if they saw their great granddaughters' mixed-race husbands today. This doesn't make them wrong, but does indicate the "red tribe" isn't as red as they used to be.
White women marrying black men- or partly black men- is an uncommon and not particularly red tribe phenomenon.
Actual rednecks and working class black people will just… not interact with each other if they can’t come to an agreement. This isn’t politically correct, but it does work at avoiding conflict.
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If the reds listened to what the blues were telling them at the time when anyone was in agony at the thought of their great granddaughters' mixed-race husbands, we'd probably still have an active eugenics program right now.
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Whitey bad, white woman racist cuz she won't look at me. Whitey did slavery, he lied and put papa in jail, he owes me money. This is not complicated, and doesn't require acceptance of some batshit academic theory. Your insistence that this kind of thinking is not common among blacks is utterly baffling to me. Have you ever been near lower class blacks; talking amongst themselves about racial issues?
Furthermore, specific racial contempt is hardly relevant given how they treat each-other without needing any ideological excuses for it. The question is can my child walk the streets in a neighbourhood where they are around without fear of being hurt. I don't care why someone threatens me and those I care about, just that they do.
Stop doing this. If you want to discuss race relations and your opinion of lower class black culture, do it without the diatribes and the caricatures.
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Worked with a whole bunch of them daily for about a year and a half in a factory. We never talked about racial issues; we mainly did our jobs and bitched about the usual annoyances of life. They were people, same as any.
If you live in a bad neighborhood, move. There are a lot of bad neighborhoods. There are a whole lot more good ones. Black criminals are not an existential threat to you or your family. Mostly they are a threat to each other, and to a lesser extent other blacks and the blues who live around them. There are significant racial problems in our society, but they are highly localized and can be avoided without too much trouble by most functional, net-positive citizens.
Well, I can only say that my personal experiences with American (as opposed to immigrant) blacks have been pretty universally hostile and this was before I had any racist tendences, but I guess personal experiences or tolerance must vary. Thank you for your anecdote.
''' Black criminals are not an existential threat to you or your family. Mostly they are a threat to each other, and to a lesser extent other blacks and the blues who live around them. If you live in a bad neighborhood, move."'
Yes, most whites in proximity to black violence tend to be blues, but that's because most people who haven't fled the big cities already are blues. Should I not have the right to live in the (severely declining) centers of our civilization if I want to be safe?
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That too, and it's a point I've brought up myself as well.
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Right, this is all well and fair, and I don’t disagree with much of it. Where I differ from you and Hlynka is that I don’t actually believe Red and Blue are true enemies. They’re two complementary halves of a syncretic whole - two equally-valuable parallel strains of the European psyche, which function best when they can strengthen each other by checking each other’s worst impulses. They’re the two components of a Babble & Prune machine, cyclically working in ostensible conflict in order to ensure long-term mutual success. The fact that Red and Blue are locked into what appears to be an existential conflict is due to a complicated mix of factors, which have been discussed to death here already, but in the long run both must succeed equally for European man to continue in the next step of his cosmic journey.
...and I reject this as just more "blue propaganda", specifically an unwillingness to accept the possibility that someone can be both "smart" and "wrong". One of the core tenents of the whole blue tribe memeplex is that behavior and morality exist completely independently of the other. It doesn't whether a man is a hard worker or a good father, what matters is what he thinks and what he feels. You see the alt-right and woke-left as having both recognized the value of identity politics. I see them as having been bitten by the same zombie.
Users like @Lepidus, and @SecureSignals like to talk about how the wokes' primary loyalty is to the black race and other such nonsense, but I find it difficult to see how any reasonable person someone could look at their rhetoric or behavior and come to that conclusion. It seems obvious to me that their primary loyalty (if one can call it that) is to politics. The reason guys like @the_nybbler and @kulakrevolt keep asking me questions like "what is the value you of your rule if it brings you to this?" is that they are so deeply embedded in their own blue tribe backgrounds that they don't know the answer to "what is the point of being a good man if it won't get you ahead in politics" and my reply is simply "to hell with politics". One of the most intelligent and true things EY ever said was that politics is the brain killer, and cynically that is why rationalists seem to be so obsessed with it.
The rest can be summarized as "what @FCfromSSC said" but only because they did a damn good job of summarizing things I've already said elsewhere.
…….Hlynka, the reason why people like me get so frustrated with you is that a lot of the time it just seems like you don’t actually take any time to really read what people actually wrote or even make an effort to evaluate our actual arguments; you have a handful of stock arguments prepared and you deploy them, regardless of their precise appropriateness to the specific argument or interlocutor you’re responding to, as a way to sort of rhetorically pump your shotgun and let us know we’re not welcome on your property.
And it’s not fair for me to get frustrated at you for doing this, because that’s the correct and appropriate strategy for Reds! I don’t mean that as an insult or to infantilize you, although I’m acutely aware that this is how it will be received on your end. What I mean would be more clear to you, I think, if you made an honest effort to understand the arguments in the “Babble & Prune” essay that I myself linked. Surely you’ve been kicking around these spaces long enough to have stumbled upon that essay before.
The entire thrust of that essay is that Blues represent the “Babble” half of the dialectic, meaning that their whole purpose is to come up with a ton of ideas, the majority of which will be wrong. So, not only can people be both “smart” and “wrong”, it’s probably on average more likely that a given idea formulated by a smart person is wrong than that it’s right.
Furthermore, I have talked extensively about my own major change in worldview within my own lifetime. That means that not only can smart people be wrong, I was one of the smart people who was wrong. Like, really wrong. Like, potentially irretrievable damage to my life outcomes type of wrong. If I had listened to Reds, and adhered to one of their prescribed life templates, my life would be unspeakably better right now. But, if I’m honest with myself, I was never going to - not when I was young and shit-hot enough for it to matter - because I’m a Blue. Much like Blues gravitate toward lottery professions, the Blue phenotype is a sort of “lottery ticket personality”: maybe you figure out how to split an atom or write The 1812 Overture, or maybe you end up penniless with syphilis in a snow-filled gutter at 30. There’s obviously variation - almost nobody is a “pure Blue” or “Pure Red” - and I am gravely weighing out the feasibility of giving the Red template my most sincere try, but certainly the bimodal distribution is real.
I understand why you loathe Blues so much. At the historical moment in which we live, they’ve been able - through what I consider egregious subterfuge and bad faith - to artificially inflate their own power over Red, throwing the Babble & Prune machine wildly out of balance, and now they’re presenting a very real threat of trying to turn your kids Blue and trying to destroy what you hold dear. Trying to take the outside view, though, I think it remains true that neither Blue nor Red can destroy each other without destroying themselves in the process.
Uh, you can totally have a society without blue types. It would have much worse art and much less innovation, but it would work. Because the things that make civilization work are by definition things that we already know how to do, which the red types are good at.
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Happy to serve.
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er, clearly hoffmeister and some of the alt-right believe that e.g. the libs and (for the alt-right) jews are both very smart (given both technical achievements and cultural influence) and wrong.
... both the alt-right and probably hoffmeister value "hard work" and "being a good father". Did this idea come from the left accusing people of being racist, and racism is a "think and feel" instead of a "behavior"? But "blue tribe morality" prescribe plenty of behaviors such as giving to the poor (note all the blue-tribe charitable foundations).
The value of being a 'good man' is always something though! "Being a hard worker" is valuable in that that work produces something useful for people. "Being a good father" is valuable in that it helps raise children! If you're 'being a good father' in a way that isn't helping a child, or "working hard" as a MLM marketer, you're not actually "being good". (this suggests that "being good" isn't an informative statement itself, that one needs to point to the actual thing being done). Those people are saying that the thing you're doing isn't actually accomplishing the thing you're claiming it is.
Unless I'm failing badly to understand you (which is possible), you seem to have completely failed to grasp the point @HlynkaCG is making here. No, things like working hard or being a good father aren't valuable because they produce good things. They are valuable in and of themselves. Even if you live on an island by yourself, working hard is good. Even if you knew for a fact that your children would die tomorrow, doing your best to raise them today is good.
You seem to be doing this thing I see a lot in this forum, where consequentialists advance a consequentialist argument for a virtue and think that they have understood their interlocutors' thinking. But every time I see that it's incorrect, because the consequentialists fail to grasp that their interlocutor simply does not care about the consequences as a reason for doing good things.
I don't agree with everything that @HlynkaCG said (for example, I do think that you can be a moral failure and still have true and valuable insights about other areas of life), but he's spot on about one thing. The reason to be a good man (or woman) isn't because it gets you anything. It just doesn't matter if you lose some culture war, or even a real war, because you stuck to your principles. What matters is that you stuck to your principles.
I'm directly arguing against that point. Also, I know I'm carelessly trampling all over hundreds of years of vigorously debated philosophy, and this is a massive tangent, but it seems to be a big part of hiynka's issue with blue-tribers.
What is working hard, and what is being a good father? These ideas are derived from attempts to benefit society or one's kin, or accomplish greatness, or something. If one looks at someone clicking away at league of legends, even if they're trying very hard to click, or someone who's working very hard at applying makeup properly to attract a mate - this isn't "hard work", because it's not benefitting society or yourself. Playing league or doing makeup well are somewhat mechanically challenging, take patience and knowledge, and aren't obviously less so than working as a janitor. The only thing that really distinguishes someone 'hard at work' on a tough, soft task like writing, from someone lazily arguing on the internet, are the usefulness, or interestingness, of the output! Same goes for 'being a good father' - what makes a "good father" still requires the """consequentialist""" judgement of what actually benefits the child! If a father, to benefit their child, feeds them bleach to "clean out parasites" ... are they being a good father? No. Replace bleach with ivermectin, assuming the right kind of parasite, and yes. Similarly if instead of bleach, it's 1700 and the child is fed some poisonous healing brew that isn't "obviously bad" in society's eyes. Saying these particular categories are "valuable in and of themselves" still makes most of the same consequentialist value judgements, with all the latent complexity, just hidden behind socially-claimed sanction.
The idea is - i think - if you care about consequences over 'process', then you become corrupted by power / unrestrained / an evil leftist, and therefore, the argument goes, forget about the actual good things - i.e. consequentialistly pursuing "lots of good people" turns you into the progressive EA who forgets about his children and community. And to avoid this, we'll say "there are Goods - real moral actions you need to follow, that you can't reason around"! The problem is this still posits various ... good things, that are, purely observationally, justified by their consequences (your children and family are unhappy, your society collapses from deracination and lack of purpose), which are the 'principles you need to stick to' - but the complexity of causation means you can lose those goods too! The person 'sticking to their principles' is doing so because they're arguing those principles do maintain the children and family and society in a way the consequentialist doesn't, and that the progressive consequentialist, by abandoning them, gets confused or corrupted by power and forgets what's good - the issue is that saying 'there is a Good' doesn't make the goals of said 'Goods' go away - the children and society still physically exist, it's still worth actually helping your child, and when that conflicts with your list-of-virtuous-actions and you follow the Virtuous Action and your child learns less or your society collapses, nothing was gained! And progressives aren't failing because they forgot to follow the restrained-list-of-goods and were too rational, it's because they genuinely believe different values are Good and follow those!
But those principles are clearly and obviously there to achieve certain ends! If you follow your principle of "working hard" but your hard work is as an accountant in the Progressive Eugenics Department - or what if you're a subcontractor, and you just work at Ernst & Ernst, you just happen to notice you're doing accounting for the PED - or you are a "good father" in that you indoctrinate your child into the Blue Tribe, like the rest of your community does ... and how can you even know this isn't "working hard" or "being a good father" without tracing out the physical consequences of those actions?
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That is certainly a significant difference. I'll try to make the time for a more substantive comment soon.
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The only reason why it seems that way is simply due to the specific historical time period we're currently in. The same thing could have been said by the Mongols, or the Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age. The "all-time scoreboard" at the time as per this logic would have implied they were pretty fucking awesome, and yet their flourishing did not last. Just because the societies any given group of people have built are doing well at present does not mean that they are unassailable and able to overcome any threat with just a little elbow grease. It does not justify apathy nor does it justify a feeling of invulnerability.
I think part of the reason for lack of recognition of the problem among whites, rather, is that there is a not insignificant contingent of whites who are absolutely addicted to the idea of being Powerful and Awesome and very much enjoy all the rhetoric which states that they, as the Powerful, must take responsibility for everyone else and should not react to any hatred or vitriol thrown their way because how much can it really hurt them anyway? And they'll often attempt to ignore actual concrete instances of discrimination against whites and/or hand-wave it away in order to maintain this fantasy of being untouchable. People with this mindset will not realise how much this narrative they've happily assented to is actually hurting them even if and when they end up on the wrong side of a pervasive racial spoils system. I've been trying to get many whites to understand exactly why it is that they should be more than a little disturbed by the way things currently are, and it's been very much like pulling teeth despite my non-white (Asian) status granting me some preferential standing in these discussions.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily want whites to go full doomer and organise against racial outgroups and embrace the absolute mind virus that is grievance politics. But if the idea is that the current anti-white cultural trends are in large part the creation of white people (which isn't entirely incorrect), if "we only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs" (again, not entirely incorrect), then it definitely might be a very good idea for these whites to stop trying to tie their own hands and the hands of other white people by completely closing off all avenues that white people have to correct these trends. Because to be honest, I can't think of anything that would be more damaging than propagating these narratives of endless racial guilt and responsibility, and then letting whites become a numerical minority in their own countries. That's a point of no return I don't want to see crossed.
EDIT: added more
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«As is well known to you, these specialists of ours have been drawing to fit them for rule the information they need from our political plans from the lessons of history, from observations made in the events of every moment as it passes. The goyim are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results. We need not, therefore, take any account of them—let them amuse themselves until the hour strikes, or live on hopes of new forms of enterprising pastime, or on the memories of all they have enjoyed.»
You can guess the source, probably. In a more reductionist style: smugness grounded in historical accomplishment and not psychometrics has been the undoing of many a people, starting with the Chaldean Empire at the latest. The Book of Daniel is instructive here.
More to the point, yours is an understandable perspective; but one should note that contemporary leftist spirit is the opposite of Faustian. Barring unorthodox voices like Yglesias and Klein with their «supply-side progressivism» (presented as a novel vision and not a rebranding of common-sensical Modernist philosophy that follows from basic Enlightenment), current leftism is characterized by deep suspicion about technological solutions and by the expectation of dystopian scenarios that almost unites them with the trad far right, lack of commitment to specific conditional predictions – we know for certain what spells doom, but not what may positively suffice to avert it, short of doom with extra steps – and by utter reliance on zero-sum redistributive approaches. The best they can offer «underrepresented minorities» is more pablum about school funding, antiracist brainwashing and affirmative action. They scoff at AI and actively suppress genetic technology. They just want status quo with a revised gibs ratio. Self-professed Faustians like Musk freak them out.
As for whether victimhood can serve as a valid platform for whites. If anything can, that's the best option – the narrative of collective victimhood is the standard cornerstone of collective identity. You ask «Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim», but the crux is that if you don't have systemic power, you don't get to choose your identity – like those Jewish victims that the Western civic religion is built around didn't have the choice of converting into Aryans. If you are hated, if you are denied resources because a politically dominant coalition takes issue with your skin or ancestry and prefers you be deprived while they increase their share, then you – at least, you as you currently conceive of yourself – aren't welcome in the camp of victors, and will have to either prove your usefulness through ritual humiliations, or fight for the slice of the pie the collective identity you have been defined into gets. Your belonging to a group is largely constructed by your ghettoization. And if there is none, there isn't much point to having a group, and pursuing self-actualization as an atomized agent makes more sense. Doubly so for peoples without a strong collectivist and clannish drive.
I guess most whites think this is the case. Fair enough – they enjoy enviable standards of living, absolutely and relatively speaking.
This might be true of your average Democrat politician or shitlib bluecheck, but have you read any of the stuff the World Economic Forum is putting out? Or UNESCO? Say whatever you will about it - and I have endless negative things to say about it myself - but this is a group of people with an intense Will to Power and an unshakeable belief that they have the power to fundamentally transform humanity. They seem to have a boundless confidence in the power of technologies - both mechanical and social - to rewrite the bounds of what we consider possible. It is ultra-Faustian - here, some would helpfully remind us that Faust is, in fact, the victim of a demon, offering us a self-serving temptation which will lead us to ruin, and not in fact a role model to be emulated - and I completely understand why it appeals to so many capable and intelligent white people. It’s downright Promethean. The strain of European man who looks at every supposed limit or guardrail as an engineering problem to be overcome has a lot to be inspired by in the writings of the WEF, which is itself a recapitulation of the Hermetic mythos which has inspired so many generations of hyper-intelligent European aristocrats and autodidacts over the course of millennia.
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Do you think blacks got their current status in western society by "winning" it from whites?
Isn't this the official Civil Rights story?
Yes, but that doesnt mean its true. Black activism has always mostly looked how progressivism at the time thought it was supposed to look, and its successes were mostly given to them by white people either directly or by giving them things that materially imply them.
I mean, if our elites decided that riots will no longer be tolerated, what do you think happens? You of all people should know better than to think a reverse of the old race relations could really happen.
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I enthusiastically support movements away from doomerism and towards a "can-do" sense of empowerment. I'm on the sidelines of the race consciousness game, and Taylors essay and especially OP provided useful inside baseball commentary. I felt Taylor kind of embarrassed himself in the closing. In an essay deriding the smug and self-righteous left, he ends by declaring
To be blunt, I view most identity politics as an intellectually confused mind virus. However, I don't care who engages in it to the extent it doesn't produce unreasonable negative externalities (ie baseless riots, race war, or, perhaps worst of all, a mandatory Robin DeAngelo seminar). But as Taylor and OP note, you get more bees with honey.
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Quoting the comment you're talking about from last week:
This isn't insightful, it's the bog standard position of every white hating racist. "My problems are social problems, your problems are your problems" over and over and over again. I don't buy it.
Quoting you:
Right because the pocs got where they are by not complaining about anything.
And? Nobody said that it isn't useful to complain about how oppressed you are. But it sure as hell isn't something to be proud of, either.
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YMMV, but Asian-Americans don't seem to complain all that much and the POC groups that do the most complaining aren't anywhere that I'd like to be.
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Good post, I mostly agree.
The Left does express a Will to Power. They have a vision for the way the world should be, and they are enforcing their will and changing the world. There is no Right wing "Will to Power" beyond complaints of authoritarianism or complaints of being oppressed by those with that will.
But why does the Right seem incapable of asserting a positive vision like the Left? Can it move beyond the conservative-libertarian synthesis? Why is it so challenging for the Right to move beyond this clearly losing proposition, this "meta-rule" of "you lose or you lose more slowly." Can you answer that question without an answer that is going to immediately take us to the boundaries of the JQ? When I ask that question, I know what everyone is thinking. I know you venture to answer that with analyzing a basic psychology of European people (an analysis that I agree with) but it's ultimately ignoring big parts of the picture.
Our prevailing political system permits a left-wing Will to Power while only allowing a moderate right-wing opposition. It simultaneously enforces a taboo, and in some cases in Europe an outright legal ban, on avant garde or post-liberal, right-wing political thinking.
You could accuse me right here of engaging in grievance politics or demoralization, but I don't think so. This is about soberly understanding the power dynamics you have to operate in, and why those dynamics exist. That's not to say the situation is hopeless, it's to understand the goal and the obstacles to achieving those goals.
With that said, there is definitely too much grievance porn on the Right... someone will post a story of a Swedish girl being raped by a migrant or something and I agree that offers nothing constructive except demoralization and useless outrage. There's also too much vindictiveness and too much ressentiment.
But there's a very fine line between grievance politics and the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. A lot of conservatives want to write off Critical Theory as "grievance identity politics" but the DR is more likely to see it as something much more powerful, substantive, and subversive than that. There is a powerful force to cultural and historical critique that shouldn't be written off as pure grievance politics that doesn't accomplish anything. The Left has demonstrated the power of historical and cultural critique.
All successful "underdog" movements like liberalism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Zionism, Irish nationalism, etc. emerged from what could be simplified as grievance and victim narratives. But in reality those movements were all pushing a positive vision with a grave consciousness of the headwinds of the status quo.
I agree with the emphasis on a positive, affirmational worldview but it cannot win without consideration of the headwinds of the status quo. And it would be nice if "our only obstacle is ourselves" but that is just not true. The biggest obstacle is ourselves, but it isn't the only one. There are people rooting and working against your project for their own reasons, and that can't be ignored. It should be respected from an adversarial perspective.
I (a leftist) think this is a fundamental mistake:
A will to power is not permitted, it justifies itself.
The current ascendancy of liberalism itself wasn't permitted, it forced itself into existence from the ballot box and the bullet box. Likewise the progress into the future, however slow, will continue to create itself.
What does the right have to compare to the creative urge? 7000 years of people clinging to old, decaying systems being paved over by progress. Conservatives can win temporary victories, they can freeze progress or roll it back for a short time or even a long time; but conservatives can never win.
The future will always come.
This is the attitude of your progressive; which has been enfeebled recently by a 200 year long string of victories. But if those victories end, the progressive spirit won't end with them. If 1000 years of serfdom and empire couldn't do it, nothing can.
Yes, it will, but I have my doubts that you will like it.
I think the “right side of history” narrative is the left's greatest asset. Popularly, it casts history into a battle between faces and heels, where the faces are these plucky upstarts on their heroes' journey, who have invented every good thing, who are always good, are always right, and always win – and on the other side, the heels are the evil goons who hate goodness just because, who are always bad, are always wrong, and always, in the end, lose.
The main advantage of this narrative is that it means that, whenever there's some controversy, one doesn't need to think about ideas, or events, but only people. One doesn't need to spare a second's thought to the actual merits of the issue, but instead just look at who's on which side: which side has the faces, and which side the heels, and there you go: all that's left is to accept the inevitable. The bend of the moral arc of history is clear; the inexorable weltgeist has spoken. The future will come, like it or not – and, well, if you want to stay a face, you'd better try to like it.
The problem with this narrative is that it lacks predictive power, outside of the short-term. Though every point in support of it is true, that doesn't mean that they tell the whole story, as Scott's recent series on “bounded distrust” has talked about. To me, what it looks like is so much painting the bullseye over the bullet holes, and we can see this because we can still see the peeling remains of previous bullseyes over older clusters of bullet holes. Eugenics, prohibition, communism, harsher sentences for crack cocaine – the march of history hasn't vindicated these, and not only have these been left out of the current narrative of inexorability, not only have (most of them) been disavowed, but in the popular understanding, they're ascribed to the machinations of the heels.
If one is able to control what that popular understanding of history is, though – what's important, and what doesn't matter – then one can exert a great deal of power without even telling any lies of commission. “Whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past.” Unfortunately, those “whoevers” don't tend to last.
So the issue is this: you know which side looks like the faces today, but will they have been the faces in retrospect? Is the story one can tell oneself about what all the True Faces throughout history have in common something that is actually going to endure, or will it be cast aside when it is no longer convenient like all the previous stories of its kind?
Perhaps Cthulhu always swims left, or perhaps “left” is the direction in which Cthulhu is currently swimming. Or maybe even it's not Cthulhu at all, but instead Azathoth, the blind idiot god, not swimming with purpose but thrashing without, and all the stories we tell ourselves about moral progress are just rationalizations about the random swells of moral fashions rising and falling beneath us. (Though personally I doubt – and hope not – that it's entirely that far!)
Ultimately, I think your dilemma is this: if you hold your convictions firmly and sincerely, eventually, despite the grasp you think you have on the direction of progress today, its shiftings and windings will call upon you to abandon some of those principles and support things you and I now consider abhorrent. Either you hold to your sincere beliefs, and not let temporal popularity break your convictions, and then you'll get thrown into the pit with the rest of the regressive heels, or you can abandon them, in which case you may as well be a moral loose cannon, throwing your weight behind whatever way the ship is already rocking irrespective of whatever must be smashed in your path.
Or, maybe, I am wrong, and at last we know, now and forever, the true way forward. Frankly, that would be a great relief, that we won't ever have to change direction again (as a lot of what bothers me about this progress is its churning: revolutions aren't much fun to live through, especially the “eating their own” part.) But I can't bring myself to believe that now is the time when the churning will stop, so I'll do my own best to find a solid place to stand.
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Got kids, do you?
Your kids will be more liberal than you, and their kids will be more liberal than them, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Sucks to suck, if guess.
I'm marginally less liberal than my father, who was considerably less liberal than his father. Best as I can reckon, my community has experienced no significant liberal drift in living memory, and still directly draws on insights from our forebears hundreds and even thousands of years ago. I am entirely aware that your tribe intends to cuckoo mine of our children. I'm quite confident that it won't actually work. Too many unhappy people turning against your Utopian project as the consequences accrue.
In any case, you claim Liberals have a monopoly on the "creative urge", ignoring the part where they observably suck at the task of creating new and fully-formed human beings. I mean, I'd be happy to fight you on art or music or literature or whatever else, but approximately none of that will actually matter in a century.
So the question remains: got kids?
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You got a three-day ban the last time you did this. When we ban you for being antagonistic, that doesn't mean "Come back and do the same thing again and see if the mods notice."
Banned for a week this time.
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To me this seems backwards. You occupy the space of the future, conservatives occupy the space of the past, you have no more claim to the enlightenment than a conservative that includes the enlightenment in their definition of conservatism, less actually as much of the current progressive agenda is in direct opposition to it. This is the same hiding the defeats of the past so common of whig history. How can you be sure that what you believe in is the glorious future that was the end of slavery and not the doomed project of prohibition? Did the progressive eugenics projects justify anything else that you'd proudly place under the leftist banner as self justifying future efforts?
Please do not let this reading of the past that you enjoy delude you into thinking you cannot err, that your punches cannot harm innocents, that you cannot cause catastrophe. The nightmares of history come from such confidence.
...And yet Enlightenment ideology reliably produces views like the ones you're responding to, and has since the Enlightenment itself. At some point, one really should ask why, if such views are antithetical to the Enlightenment, does Enlightenment ideology so reliably produce them?
I'm not so sure the causality is so simple here. As for why I still support the enlightenment, I guess I can just put it as simply as because I like it and I'm not going to let people with opinions I abhor dictate what I support. If I must be the only principled libertarianish type person in the world then so be it.
Terminal values are, in fact, terminal, and there are certainly hills worth dying on. I think it's worth interrogating why one holds them, though. The Enlightenment did not invent the concepts of charity, tolerance, liberty and so on, and its record at implementing them is questionable at best. Are these what you value, or is it truly the specific mechanisms of their pursuit?
The specific reference to the enlightenment in the first comment you responded to was more to pick landmark movement in the past that would have been considered some value of progressive in its time and show how t=0 progressives might not actually get the credit for what look in hindsight like whig history milestones and instead the enlightenment conservatives get that mantle because it's the argument they're actually making here and now. So it's a bit awkward to pivot to defending the enlightenment quo enlightenment. I was defending it from the left and now to defend it from the right I'd need to see where we're drawing the borders around it. If this is gut desire to be in my proper place ruled by a monarch for my own good, I think I've demonstrated in the various threads involving the royals here that I inherited a lack for that organ that I can trace back through my father's side to the revolution. Mob rule? I'm a little more skeptical. How all this crumbles down to specific value positions would take some time to do in detail.
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The future has no political orientation. I would argue this is a very distorted view of history, almost Whig. Even the conception of 'Conservatism' you seem to think of as a failed endeavor is a thoroughly contemporary political notion that will not be recognizable in even 100 years. Roman democracy collapsed and was surpassed by an empire for 400 years. Tell an Islamic scholar in 1258 about the notion of ever-continuing progress and i doubt he will believe you. Even modern perceptions of this are distorted because of our geographical location and cultural biases. Russia enthusiastically attempted to enter some sort of western hegemony in the 90's and it failed spectacularly. In 500 years (if we avoid the possibility of nuclear destruction) It is possible that this liberal hegemony has become the focus and identity of the entire world, but it also just as likely that humans of the future will look back at our ideals much like we look back at astrology or early medicine. Things that had good intentions at the time but ended up being fruitless and ultimately against a proper organization of the world.
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Perhaps a mistaken idea that the rules of the game apply fairly to all? "Other groups have rode to power using the wave of victimhood to empower their racial supremacist movements, why wouldn't it work for us?" They haven't cottoned on to the fact that, as someone around here put it, the meta rule is that you lose.
Calling attention to anti-white racism isn't the same as claiming whites are "powerless victims", which is a form of strawmanning. Asian-Americans have above-average levels of education, incomes etc... doesn't mean that they can't be victims of hate-crimes or a more subtle form of discrimination in society (e.g. university admissions).
The problem for whites is that too many other whites have an instinctual distaste for collective group politics. As whites were the supermajority, this wasn't a big problem but as their shares will slowly diminish, it will become increasingly obvious that being an individualist in a system where other groups largely compete as collectives is a losing strategy.
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Someone somewhere tweeted that in a hilarious irony white nationalists are gonna go extinct for the same reason as liberal whites eventually will, their undying devotion to people who hate them. That majority whiteness seems to be a pre-condition for the kind of relatively free individualistic western society, does not mean that there aren't a lot of spiteful whites who must be excluded or supressed for anything decent to exist. Why should their neurosis of self hatred be excused simply because it's one that whites have a greater predisposition to?
It's madness.
Well white nationalists are just old school liberals basically.
People elected Trump because Hitler wasn't running, but Hitler was still somewhat of a liberal as well.
White-run liberalism is not happening ever again.
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Also, despite Jared Taylor being on the let's recruit Jews side of the white nationalist divide, 2 of his 3 examples of white self-hatred are Jews.
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Are white nationalists devoted to liberal whites, though? It doesn’t seem so.
They are and I don't entirely blame them. Liberalism contains most of the smart and capable people in the white race, while conservatism contains many of the dumbest. People are failing because they are being discriminated against by evil people/systems at least makes some sense. Conservatives' "blacks are natural conservatives, but are kept degenerate because liberals give them too much shit" borders on the most batshit take imaginable. It's hard to blame someone for choosing a consistent ideology that's blatantly wrong on the facts, when any moment that they look around to get the other side, they get insane ramblings and a reification of those blatantly wrong facts.
Black-majority countries certainly seem decidedly more conservative than white-majority countries on most issues, especially LGBT rights. Feminism is outlier. For whatever reason, SSA countries have a much higher share of female participation in political elites than their income level would typically predict, but that's atypical for most social issues. So US conservatives might not be as wrong as you imply here, though that "natural conservatism" is clearly weak enough to be subdued in a US context.
Black Americans are clearly not in possession of particularly progressive social values, but the black community’s mores would not exactly fit in with the moral majority either- it includes default out of wedlock births, very high divorce rates, acceptance of drug use, etc, etc. Thinking the LGBT movement is weird does not make you a consistent social conservative.
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