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Notes -
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
I regret to inform you that there have only ever been seven sincere classic liberals. The rest were embarrassed reactionaries.
I'm quite serious, if hyperbolic. Genuine "social liberal, fiscal conservative"-types are incredibly rare. It's just not a very popular belief set (if you find traditional social hierarchies objectionable you probably feel the same way about economic hierarchies; likewise if you support traditional social relations). What it does have going for it is that it offers an intellectual framework for pushing back against anti-discrimination laws and other elements of social liberalism without openly defending bigotry.
That's not to say there are no genuine classical liberals, but they're not a faction with power or influence.
I don't know if "social liberal, fiscal conservative" is a fair gloss of the people that self-identify as classical liberals. What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?
I think there's an unfortunate impulse to take the default political compass too seriously - "we are auth-right, so our archenemies must be lib-left". I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant - just because they are noticeably and loudly for allowing some things that you don't like, this doesn't mean they are permissive in the anti-authoritarian sense. Even the Mao-era CCP, a type specimen for auth-left if there ever was one, allowed and tolerated some things that the auth-right wouldn't, such as parading people through town naked, vigilantism and (locally) cannibalism. Conversely, it's easy to come up with lots of things that are allowed in the perfect MAGA world and forbidden in the perfect BLM world.
I disagree. Many people in the movement come to it with a normie-auth mindset, but the principles really are against social hierarchy, and continue to have their influence. This is also why SJ social groups are notoriously dysfunctional, in ways that auth groups usually arent until you get to "everyone here is a basketcase anyway" levels of extremism.
I don't really see them being against social hierarchy - to me this perception seems like another instance of conflating "they don't accept my version of $thing" and "they are against $thing". What is "trust the science"/"trust experts" if not an appeal to social hierarchy? What is the "progressive stack" if not an outline of a social hierarchy? Do you imagine established SJWs sassing an Ibram Kendi?
There are always a few Youth Guards early on in the pipeline who take the stated principles a bit too literally, and in turbulent times they might even be fielded as useful tools, but as they age and learn to integrate cognitively dissonant positions more effectively, they fall in line. On the other hand, it's not like there isn't plenty of dysfunction and backstabbing in auth-right movements as well.
I think its not surprising that a movement against society has failed to eliminate society, even amongst themselves.
As I said, all directions of extremists are dysfunctional to some extent, but in terms of whats the most respectable that youll encounter a given level of dysfunction... Im not sure there even is a level of white nationalism where drama motivated by something other than sex or money becomes common.
In fairness, aren’t neo-Nazi drug addicts definitely a thing?
But is it related to the Naziism? As in, how many people at that level of Nazi are addicts, and how does this compare to genpop/demographic controls? Depending on how you count the Aryan Brotherhood, maybe yes - Im not aware of anything otherwise.
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