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I think your rants would be better served by naming specific ways that reactionaries are progressive, instead of saying 'REAL americans can just tell'.
Let's try comparing the stereotypical reactionary's views to the conservative and progressive, and see where the clusters are. I don't think race is the most representative issue here, as progressive 'we must uplift the poor and oppressed' shades into the ethnic identity of minorities, creating a similarity that's mostly superficial in the US, but much deeper in e.g. third world left-wing nationalism. Picking a random issue:
"Thoughts on abortion?"
Progressive: "A woman has a right to choose and shouldn't be burdened with children if she doesn't want them. Free individuals should experience the joy of sex with whoever they want to without risking pregnancy."
Conservative: "A child's right to life is paramount, and killing them is wrong. That is that. A woman raising a child with her is beautiful, and is God's plan if she becomes pregnant. Sex belongs in marriage and is for reproduction. Abortion is the culmination of progressive disregard for morality itself."
Reactionaries are divided on abortion. The most common perspective is (slightly caricatured) :
"Abortion is satanic, it is the duty of women to raise children for her family and for her society. The fact a woman would even consider killing her child shows how progressives despise nature and God. Women should marry and have children, not have a series of sterile dalliances with random men."
Another, significantly less common, perspective is (less caricatured than you'd think):
"Abortion is good if the child is low IQ/degenerate/black. It's a crime if the child is white / smart. Only white and healthy women should have children, they should many children, and they should be raised in a traditional family".
You're asking me to believe that, because the last perspective and the first one are both pro-abortion in some cases, progressives and reactionaries are the same. But they couldn't be more different! One supports sex for pleasure and human connection, disposing of fetuses if the woman wants to - the other wants to abort potential low-iq and black people. The latter three support traditional values, the family, patriarchy, a moral force for having children, and oppose casual sex. The first is the opposite.
This what my series of effort posts on "Inferential Distance" been all about but sure, lets break it down real quick. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are 5 examples that spring immediately to mind.
First off because it applies directly to the topic at hand there is the question, where does "Identity" reside? Progressives believe that it resides with the identified. Conservatives believe that it resides with the identifier. In progressive spaces "identifying as [X]" carries a certain sort of weight. @Hoffmeister25 identifies as "right wing" and this being a largely progressive space we are expected to respect that on some level, same deal with biological males identifying as "Women" and vice versa. Coming from a conservative space these sorts of appeals seem nonsensical as these are not things one "identifies as", they just are. Identities are little more than heuristics for use by the identifier. See the whole bit in Scott's The Categories were Made for Man about whether whales should in the fishery department's jurisdiction or the agricultural department's. This is why the "I identify as an attack helicopter" meme had such legs. It perfectly encapsulates just how absurd most of the progressive rhetoric surrounding identity (sexual, political, racial or otherwise) sounds to the average conservative.
Second, is the question of internal vs external loci of control or where does the responsibility for an act ultimately reside? Conservatives believe that it resides within the individual whereas progressives believe that it is something external. That the actions of the individual are simply reactions to the conditions presented. Hence progressive' preference for some flavor of determinism or other "structural x-ism" as explanations for [current thing]. "Society is to blame" that sort of thing.
Which brings us straight into the third point. The question of whether social structures are imposed upon the indivual from the top down, or do grow organically from the ground up. Progressives maintain that most, if not all, social structures are imposed upon the from the top down. Conservatives maintain that that most, if not all, social structures grew organically from the choices made by individuals at each level and were never "imposed" at all.
While we're on the topic, Number 4 is the question of what is mankind's "default state"? War or Peace? Tyranny or Freedom? Progressives maintain that it is latter while Conservatives maintain that it is former. The thing that ultimately makes most progressives "progressive" is that they sincerely believe in capital-P Progress. That all that is needed for progress/good to triumph is for the barriers that are currently standing in its' way to be torn down. Meanwhile the conservative view is exactly what Chesterton was trying to explain when he made his fence analogy. Progressives see anti-discrimination laws as barriers to progress (who's progress is immaterial). Meanwhile conservatives look at the last two centuries of US history and conclude that this fence was built for a damn food reason.
Finally there is the question of Mysticism vs Materialism, more specifically (and particularly relevant to discussions of abortion)is whether the moral value/weight of a human life is something metaphysical, or if it is something material? Conservatives almost inevitably come down on the Metaphysical side of the debate typically quoting either the Bible or the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. In contrast progressives tend to maintain that it is something material, or at the very least something that can be readily measured and/or quantified. The specific quality in question might be intelligence, it might be strength, it might be membership in a particular social, political, or ethnic group, it could even be expected QUALYs according to some hypothetical super intelligence. The point is that it's there and can measured. The reason these debates tend to drag on endlessly is that progressive's by their nature want to make the debate about object level cases, "what if the baby has some horrible congenital disease?" "what if the baby is black?" "what if the baby grows up to be Hitler?" That sort of thing. Meanwhile from the conservative's view these sorts of questions only serve to demonstrate just how thoroughly progressives have missed the point. Life is life and has a value in to and of itself. End of conversation.
These 5 questions might not seem all that meaningful or relevant at a glance, but I think whether a person comes down on one side or the other has substantial downstream effects on patterns of thought and behavior even when the question itself is not being consciously considered. Maybe it's just a product of having a foot in both world but when I compare how the people I interact with in explicitly conservative/right-wing spaces seem to talk and think to the people I interact with here the differences really are quite stark.
In conclusion, I developed my theory that the Alt-Right is best understood as an offshoot of the progressive left after a couple of run-ins with the Takismag crew during the 2012 election when I was still serving as a local GOP Rep. My reasoning was/is straight forward, pretty much every alt-righter I've ever interacted with has A) come from an extremely progressive/left-wing background, and B) taken the "progressive" side in at least 3 of the above 5 questions if they didn't go a full 5/5.
Ultimately it all comes back to the first question in my list, my thesis is that there is a category to which both intersectional progressives and the alt-right belong, and whether they appreciate being in the same category together has no bearing on whether that category is useful or "cleaves reality at the joints". I believe that it is, and that it does.
edit: spelling/formatting.
Yep, there deserves to be a top-level post (perhaps there have been several already) but the alt-right definitely steals from the worldview of the progressives.
Ie there's this big hegemonic cultural force that is imposing a progressive view of race and inhibiting the success of whites. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like structural racism a la critical theory.
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Alright, so let’s take your model seriously and see how I actually think I score on your five-criteria test. I believe that there are a number of better, more useful models than the one you’re using, but it’s not terrible - it at least successfully allows you to perform a basic Schmittian friend/enemy analysis and to obtain a somewhat reliable result, and in that sense it suits a useful purpose for you. So, where do I fall on your grading curve? Well, let’s take them in order.
My actual stance is: it’s both. Some identities are less or more constructed than other identities. Most of the important ones we care about have at least some bedrock of objective truth behind them, such that a reasonable observer of sound mind would conclude, the vast majority of the time, that someone either is or isn’t a particular example of that identity, and the observer would need to have a strong ideological reason to conclude otherwise. Gender/sex is certainly one of these. There are weird edge cases and people who, through a ton of effort, manage to “pass” by fooling/manipulating observers’ perceptive faculties, but the vast, vast majority of people are readily identifiable as one sex or the other, and our human perceptive faculties are incredibly well-tuned to make accurate determinations about that identity.
Some identities are more ambiguous, or operate on a spectrum. Reasonable observers can disagree about whether a particular specimen is or isn’t an example of that identity category, based on what each observer is optimizing for. “Disability status” is, I think, one of these. Some people are profoundly disabled, and only a tiny minority of “critical disabilities studies” - AKA, hardcore social constructivists who are committed to a very wacky definition of disability” - would fail to recognize them as such.
Other people have health conditions or neurotypes that either confer both advantages and disadvantages, or otherwise confer disadvantages that are easily manageable using modern medical technology. Someone who is totally blind is very obviously disabled; lacking sight is strictly worse than being able to see, in pretty much all scenarios I can imagine. Someone whose vision is just not great, or who wears reading glasses to slightly reduce eye strain, is probably not someone almost anyone would call “disabled”. However, if there’s some concrete or social gain to be had by persuading others to view me as disabled - say, a scholarship, or a workplace accommodation - then whether or not I’m perceived as disabled suddenly has real-world consequences, and I’m going to use the tools at my disposal to try and persuade people to alter their perception of my identity. I can’t force them to see me as something different than what they genuinely see me as, but I can try to present an alternative model that they might choose to adopt, and thereby change how they decide to signify me. In that sense, my identity is still determined by the signifier, but I can actually influence their perceptual decisions. I think that race is one of these sorts of muddled identity categories that contain both objective elements and constructed elements, and that someone can either fall into a category or fall out of it depending on what the signifier wants to accomplish by sorting that person into a particular identity.
There are also identities that are either entirely or nearly entirely elective, and we pretty much all agree to just honor the signified’s decision to adopt that identity category. I adopted a particular English Premier League football team as “my team”, based on criteria which most would see as arbitrary - I wasn’t born in England, let alone in the particular part of England where locals support this team, and I’ve never even been to that part of England. Yet nobody really has anything to lose or gain by deciding to challenge my “fandom identity”, so this identity can be constructed by my choice without it really having any consequences that would cause people to look twice at it. Now, for the locals who were born into families who’ve supported that team for generations, their “fandom identity” is somewhat less constructed - they have objective considerations that make their identity somewhat more determined, or at least harder to choose otherwise. That being said, there is nothing stopping them from just deciding to support a different team instead - maybe becoming a Manchester City fan because you get to see your team win every week. Your family can get mad at you and call you a traitor, a plastic, or whatever, but if you genuinely internally experience happiness when Man City wins and dejection when they lose, you truly are a Man City fan at that point.
So, if I believe that identities can exist on a spectrum between “totally signifier-determined” and “totally signified-constructed” then do I pass or fail Criterion #1?
Again, I’m going to say “both”. I think it is fair to talk about people having a sort of “default orientation” or psychological trait that causes them to instinctively feel either less or more “in control”. My default psychological state is very much an “internal locus of control”; I blame myself incessantly for things that go badly in my life, reading some level of “if I had made a different decision, things would have gone differently” into pretty much every event in my life, including ones where objectively I didn’t really have that much control over the outcome either way. There are a ton of things about my life that I wish were different/better, and I very often ruminate over why I made the choices I made. In that sense you’d be correct to identify me as someone with a strong psychological “internal locus of control”.
That being said, we actually can analyze data and statistical trends to try and gain insight into what sorts of life outcomes track reliably with non-chosen factors, versus which ones don’t map to any identifiable trends and therefore seem to be one’s where personal agency and choices have a strong effect. I am one of many peoples who have observed that, based on data, the great majority of people end up with more or less exactly the same economic outcomes as their parents and grandparents. Now, this has been significantly less or more true in different countries and different eras. Some places and times genuinely do appear to have varying levels of social/economic mobility. The rise of what we might call the “middle class” took place in different societies at different times, and in some places it still hasn’t happened.
In no society above the level of the hunter-gatherer have people with an IQ of 85 - let’s assume here, for the sake of argument, that IQ is measuring something real and that this factor, whatever it is, has existed among all human populations in history - have, in aggregate, done better economically and socially than people with a 120 IQ. There are little exceptions here and there - like how in our society, we pay professional athletes and musicians far better than they were paid in other times and places - but the pattern does hold and can be measured.
And if IQ is in fact heritable, this means that there is some extent to which outcomes genuinely and objectively are deterministic. Now, we can respond to this as a society in any number of ways! We can suppress knowledge of it, on the premise that the psychological health and “sense of agency” of our citizenry would be profoundly harmed by the widespread acceptance of this knowledge. I’m not even going to argue that this is wrong! (I do think it’s wrong, but I’m not going to make that argument right now.) And certainly it is possible to overestimate how deterministic outcomes actually are. Smart and well-meaning people can overfit their conclusions to insufficient/inconclusive data! Maybe that’s what I’m doing! I don’t think I am, but it’s a real and important question.
So again, we have a situation where there is both a “default psychological orientation”, and there is the objective data (assuming our measurements and collection methods are reliable), and the way that each individual interprets the latter is to a great extent influenced by the former.
I actually don’t think this is really a useful or coherent model at all, so I’m not sure how to respond to it or which side of this illusory binary I’m supposed to fall on. “Both”? “Neither”? “N/A”? In general I don’t think I really understand what people are referring to when they talk about “structures”. I know, it’s odd for a former (self-identified) socialist to admit this, but the whole concept always just sort of bounced off me. I don’t know if society actually has “structures” or not, or which direction they’re imposed from if they do exist. I guess I’m gonna have to say “I pass” on this part of the test and let you decide which bucket to sort me into.
I think I believe in progress with a lowercase p, but that only some parts of society can progress, whereas on most axes moving in one direction or another isn’t “better or worse” but rather a series of trade-offs. Medical knowledge, for example, can definitely progress. We can in fact develop better - meaning both “more accurate” and “more useful” - models of the human body and the way its internal processes operate. The “four humors” model was not very good, and smart well-meaning doctors had to do their best under that suboptimal model, whereas modern doctors have a better model which allows them to more reliably cure ailments and save lives. Probably most scientific knowledge is like this, although I’m at least sympathetic to arguments that certain types of knowledge were better off without. It’s not a ridiculous concept.
In terms of whether or not different “modes of societal organization” can be said to be “better or worse”, such that movement in one direction along such an axis represents a total improvement for all humans and a move in the other direction represents a setback, this I basically don’t believe at all. We can imagine hypotheticals where this would be true - the imaginary society where everyone is immediately crippled and tortured at birth and lives a life of unremitting forced agony would pretty obviously be improved by people no longer doing that to infants, but such a society has never actually existed and I don’t imagine why it would ever be brought about, so it’s not useful to reason about it. In general, humans today are actually less physically healthy, live shorter and more painful lives, experience less day-to-day leisure and personal agency, etc., than the hunter-gatherers of 10,000 years ago. That being said, the hunter-gatherers would never had successfully landed a man on the moon, or built Notre Dame, or discovered germ theory, because their model of society wasn’t built to optimize for those things. (In fact, it wasn’t “built to” do anything. There was no top-down planning or political theory, as far as we know. It was just an emergent, locally-adaptive way of life, with people who probably didn’t think about whether or not there were other ways to live.)
The advent of agriculture and permanent settlements necessitated the advent of political and economic centralization, private property, and rigid social hierarchies. Was this “progress”? It certainly made life better for a certain class of people. A different set of skills and proclivities was now emphasized, leaving people who excelled at the old values probably less well-off. This was both good and bad! There was no ultimate teleology that such societies were “working toward”, and in fact there were many peoples who remained hunter-gatherers even after farming was introduced, and who competed against the farmers rather than adopting their ways. Was agriculture and “centralized society” always destined to win out and eventually wholly replace hunting and gathering in nearly every place on earth? I don’t know, we can’t do any experiments about this which would help our reasoning, so we’re stuck reasoning based on aesthetics and trade-offs and questions like “Which society would I personally be better off in?” “Which one seems to have led to the most society-wide gains in knowledge/self-mastery/martial glory/egalitarian distribution of resources/whatever considerations my ideology tells me are most important?”
I want humanity to colonize the stars, and therefore I think that the transition from decentralized and communitarian societies to centralized hierarchical superstates was a step in the right direction insofar as it might this outcome more likely. The transition was “progress” along that one particular axis that I care about, even if it may have been a regression among other axes that are more important to other people.
On this criterion, I’m just going to fully admit that I’m on the “Materialist” side of this binary, and in that one sense I am unambiguously closer to the “progressives” than I am to you. If this is an issue where it’s important to you to identify Schmittian friends and enemies, I’m your enemy in this specific battle. I just think you’re thinking about abortion the wrong way, and that my way is better. I have no hope of persuading you of this (not because of anything deficient about you nor me, but just because our Inferential Distance™️ is too vast) so I’m not going to attempt to. Ultimately, if abortion becomes the Big Split, I’m going to end up on the other side from you. Fortunately I don’t think abortion will ultimately end up being the determining issue that decides how different political factions re-align in the coming decades. I don’t actually want to be your Enemy - I want you and I to each be able to live very different lives without interfering with each other’s ability to do so - so I certainly hope I’m right about that.
Soooo how’d I do on your test? Again, I don’t actually accept the framing of your model, but if you insist on continuing to rely on it, I hope this will at least be a useful exercise in helping figure out more clearly where and how you and I disagree so strongly. Contrary to your assertion, I don’t expect you to call me “right-wing” because that’s my chosen identity. I honestly believe that the most useful political models, the ones that cleave reality at the joints, show me to actually merit that perception by the “signifiers” such as yourself. If I have not persuaded you otherwise - and I’m betting I haven’t - them you’re welcome to keep calling me whatever you like, and I’m welcome to continue disputing your nomenclature.
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Isn't the
Perspective the same as the
Perspective if only applied to my high-IQ, non-degenerate, white in-group?
That is something that they share. But there's a big difference in how they get there
The conservative is committed to universalism / believing that we need to help the low-iq and black as much as the high-iq and white. They both suffer, feel, and experience life in the same ways, after all. It's a deeply Christian idea. Also, I think they get to anti-abortion in large part via 'the baby is a weak and vulnerable person so killing them is extra bad'.
The 'maybe it's killing babies, maybe it isn't, it's fine either way' reactionary believes what's valuable in a person is specific to - I'd like to say their capacity for impact, contribution, and deep experience, but it's usually just a confused form of contrarian racist tribalism. But for the idealized reactionary of which maybe 50 exist, the vulnerability of the baby plays much less of a role than their potential to be a Great Man, and then their potential to be a productive member of society. (not a comment about anyone on themotte, just those people generally).
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