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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.
We could debate all the fundamental philosophical problems of liberalism (classical or otherwise), but what I think is the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.
Ironically, despite the contemporary right-wing movements often being accused of being reactionary, it's really the anti-woke liberals who are reactionary in the quite literal and plain meaning of the word. They think we can just turn back the clock on political and philosophical development of the last thirty, fourty, fifty years and (re)establish a liberal utopia and the last fifteen years of woke will disappear forever like a bad dream, like it never happened. Remember, this
'SJW''woke' thing is just a fad that college kids will grow out of once they enter the real world.Contemporary right-wing thought doesn't do this. It's decidedly post-liberal, not liberal or pre-liberal. It has, with maybe a few exceptions, fully embraced that liberalism has had its political moment, it has failed and the question is how to address those failures. The dialectic has progessed, one might say. Even the ironically named 'neo-reactionaries' aren't really reactionary in any meaningful sense, other than just borrowing basic, well-worn concepts from eons past. Their politics are still clearly post-liberal. I would even argue 'MAGA' (insofar it is a coherent political movement) is post-liberal, again despite the ironic name.
So my question to all those who just want to 'retvrn' to the liberalism of decades past - how to you plan to address or reform liberalism so it will won't cause woke again? What do you acknowledge are its problems? How would your changes keep the essence of liberalism so despite the changes it could still meaningfully be called liberalism? How would it not just be simply nostalgia for a past that can never be returned to, if it existed at all?
This is why I think of myself as both a neoreactionary and a right revolutionary, they aren’t opposites at all rather they’re synergistic and actually necessary for one another.
Neoreaction is at its heart the recognition, mourning of, and ultimately a plan for the restoration of a lost future. It’s about triangulating where we could have been without the malign influence of the cluster of intellectual cancers that have been slowly withering down our collective will to live and will to power, and then grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it as hard as possible in that direction.
There’s no going back. If you’re fifty years old and unsatisfied with your shitty life, there’s no use trying to be young again. It’s actually pathetic to even try, we collectively recognize people doing that as living in deep denial. But it’s not too late; through honest introspection you can identify your mistakes, begin to heal and learn to love life again.
I’m not even remotely interested in indulging classical liberal’s collective midlife crisis.
I’m absolutely here. Liberalism, even in mild forms like the enlightenment are a total disaster. It’s basically a slow rolling auto-immune disease of the body politic that eventually kills its ability to reject destructive ideas. The reason those cancers took hold is because they appealed to the kinds of people who should have zero say in the government of a state. People who cannot control their own lives, people who have no understanding of how a society ought to be run, and people with malignant empathy for things that if allowed let alone encouraged by the public purse will rot the country from the inside out.
Even if you could somehow avoid the woke virus, there are other equally bad cancers: relativism, communism, cultural Marxism, various forms of decadence and depravity, tolerance for criminality, disrespect for achievement, loss of meritocracy, loss of basic virtues and politeness. We’ve become a decadent and dying society completely unwilling to acknowledge the rot, and denigrating anyone who says something is wrong.
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