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No, my claim is that there is a readily identifiable intellectual/philosophical tradition that starts with writers like Hobbes and Montaigne during the Protestant Reformation, progresses through thinkers like Smith, Madison, and Burke to become the "One Nation" (Tory), Abolitionist, and Republican movements of the 19th Century, which were then carried into the 20th by writers like Kipling, Lewis and Tolkien.
Furthermore, I maintain that this tradition exists distinctly from (and often in opposition to) the more progressive "Rousseauean" tradition from which the [current year] secular academic memeplex derives.
in other words the left-right spectrum is best understood as a religious schism within the European Enlightenment, and that left codes as intellectual not because they possess any great intellect, but because they were able to hollow out the institution of academia and wear it as a skinsuit.
If I were more like yourself and a few others on this forum I might have some comments why you in particular would want to misrepresent my views, but Im not, and I'm not going to make that comment because when you're born outside the Matrix you know in that the steak aint real.
Lewis and Tolkien (&Kipling?) certainly did not approve of any republican movements. And unless I misremember, Lewis is on record as saying he believed that socialism was the most Christian economic policy though he himself disliked it intensely. In general many of the English figures on that list were deeply dubious about American culture.
What everyone keeps trying to point out is that you have an incredibly specific interpretation of all those figures that is very distinctively postwar American.
There is indeed a vague tradition of pessimistic human-fallibility conservatism that is often opposed by a utopian human-perfectibility tradition. But they’re fuzzy, interbred and often linked with other elements. They are certainly not distinct enough for “only I / my tribe carry the true flame, and the rest of you are irredeemably corrupted by progressivism” style dismissals. They are also not quite the same as the progressive/conservative distinction.
Yes, I agree.
EDIT: plus the abolition movement was mostly Methodists and quakers (or utopian leftists) and Hobbes is best know as the great defender of absolute monarchy.
Unless I'm misremembering he talks about the political system Christianity aims for in Mere Christianity, and says that it would contain elements of conservatism, socialism, liberalism etc while resembling none of these as a whole.
No, you’re right. I apologise, it’s been a while. My only point is that these people do not fit into a nice beat tradition where they are build on each other.
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approving of a movement is not the same thing as being part of a movement or "a product" of it.
In fact, that's one of, if not the core, points of disagreement. Whether Stormfronters and SJWs like each other has zero bearing on whether or not they are they are drinking from the same well or using the same rhetoric. The old "Stormfront or SJW" question is a meme for a reason.
19th century Quakers were neither left-wing nor particularly utopian, likewise while Hobbes is memed as an absolute monarchist he was perhaps one of the most ardent individualists of his time precisely because his whole schtick is that 'agency ultimately resides with the individual.
That the mark of a true king is that men choose to follow him of their own volition
You’re clearly not wrong (horseshoe theory exists for a reason) but unless you can back up your intuitions about what movements people belong to then you’re left with either a very superficial analysis or visceral feelings of kinship/dislike. It seems rather similar to the way that the left decides certain figures or groups are progressive/fascist /colonial not because of anything they say or do but by squinting until they see a certain resemblance and ignoring whatever doesn’t fit. Because it’s in the eye of the beholder it’s hard to debate usefully.
More importantly to my mind, it ignores the role that circumstances play. As @FCfromSSC says, religious tolerance means a very different thing in a 99% Protestant country vs a 50/50 prot/catch country versus a 30% Christian, 30% atheist, 30% Muslim country, say. If you hold exactly the same political beliefs in these different places the results will be wildly divergent.
I feel like I've been pretty open about and consistant in my theory that there is a spectrum of philosophies between Rousseau on the left and Hobbes on the right.
I feel like you're trying to pull a "national socialism isn't actually socialism" or "real communism has never been tried" type card rather than acknowledge the argument being made.
What I struggle with is seeing how you get from
to
From where I’m standing there are many, many strands of conservatism. Pro trade-Union, anti trade-union; pro free-speech, pro obscenity laws; pro planned economy, pro free trade, pro protectionism; conceiving of the nation as a land and the people of that land, conceiving of the nation as a creed or economic zone; pro monarchy and nobility, pro parliament; so on and so on, and that’s just British conservatism, let alone French, German, or American.
To boil these down into a post-Enlightenment Rousseau vs Hobbes schism is already pretty subjective and lossy, but I can get where you’re coming from and we can debate to some extent.
Where you do lose me is when you jump from that to “all of you are traitors to the movement that you claim to belong to, and you’re too far gone to see it. It doesn’t matter what tradition you think you’re part of, I know what you are.” Not only is it frankly arrogant, it precludes all possibility of meaningful debate. You are the wise sage who knows how shit is, and your interlocutors are either errant sheep in need of guidance or secret liberals.
If you’ll forgive me for bringing stuff up from another thread:
I get that you’re trying to make a point about inferential distance here, but it’s an inferential distance between you and the person you’re talking to, not between Real Conservatives and Fake Conservatives.
You’re an interesting person and I would like to debate with you more, but at the same time I and mine have been conservative for generations and it’s very frustrating to be lectured by somebody from another continent about what that means, even indirectly. Hence this rather vehement reply.
At the risk of coming across as a shameless self-promoter. this is what my posts on inferential distance have been about. Academia has become overwhelmingly left wing/Rousseauean and as a result there is now a massive Leviathan shaped hole in the popular discourse that is immediately obvious to anyone outside of the secular academic memeplex but not to those dwelling within it.
Horseshoe theory is bullshit because it presupposes that the radical socialists cosplaying as X are somehow fundamentally different from the radical socialists cosplaying as Y, rather than just being two different flavors of radical socialist.
I'm not just quibbling about definitions of particular words, I'm rejecting the entire framework upon which your politics are based.
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