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Notes -
A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
It's a common criticism levied at reactionaries that they imagine themselves as aristocrats instead of the masses, but I don't think it connects because it's just not accurate. And in fact I think it's mostly projection, or the sort of attempt at symmetry that you're doing here, a common feature (and demand) of liberal ideology.
What more commonly animates reactionary thought is a desire for normalcy and a return to an understandable order of things. In fact it is more commonly a desire to escape politics and not have to deal with one's social order being constantly upended. The story is all too common: "I just wanted to play video games".
If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand. Mass politics is a leftist import that only really features in syncretic forms of reaction like fascism.
On this question, consider Wyndham Lewis' The Art of Being Ruled.
As for the more general consideration that the people who wish for more constraining social norms may chafe at too constricting ones, it seems as fallacious to me as pointing out that the people who demand slightly more liberal social norms may fall prey to anomie if all norms are destroyed.
A decent and stable equilibrium is what the object of desire here. The question of the dynamics and as to which direction for nomos is the slippery one has to be seriously examined for this to have any teeth. But I believe one will easily find that it is easy to destroy things and hard to create them, even social norms.
Now to compare this back to the yearning of communists for communism, it seems categorically different. Communists have a very specific and deliberate eschatology that most non revolutionaries do not have an equivalent to. And it is that yearning and that eschaton that are laughable, not the general desire for social improvement. Nobody ever laughed at lefties for desiring decent healthcare at an affordable price.
This is it. After the (imaginary) authoritarian socialcon revolution, I'll let my kids roam free in our safe, crime free neighborhood, I'll let them attend public schools without fear of them absorbing enemy propaganda. I'll work a normal middle class drone job (like I do now). I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same. I don't want to be a warlord or a artist. I just want to grill.
All of which, from a leftist activist perspective, constitute an unspeakable horror, of course.
Without an explanation of why, this feels like outgroup booing. Do you mean because the structures that make such an existence become invisible, and then invisible oppression? Or because there needs to be a consciousness raising among the people who live there? Or because not everyone will be able to live there, and those who inherited it have unearned privilege? Or for some other reason?
"The personal is political."
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"crime free neighborhoods" = helpless BIPOC languishing under the boot of a racist, murderous police
"public schools without enemy propaganda" = drag queens and honest LGBT activists and educators being barred from schools by homophobic, transphobic goons
"I just want to grill" = LGBT people and BIPOC suffering discrimination and oppression day and night while heartless normies don't give a crap
" I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same." = no tax money to be spent on muh programs and affirmative action
More effort than just a laundry list of strawmen, please. This isn't an argument or an answer, it's just "My outgroup is always evil and lying about everything."
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Your ability to attack strawman is unmatched, congratulations on your gold medal
I can do it too!
“Crime-free neighborhoods” = The only way you hit ‘zero crime’ is permanent curfew, door-to-door gun raids, and AI cameras tracking every cough.
“Public schools without enemy propaganda” = Public schools are union-run psy-ops that’ve been red-pilling kids for Marx since Dewey. Burn the system down, hand parents vouchers, and let the free market homeschool ’em.
“I just want to grill” = While you’re basting Costco rib-eyes, the CCP buys our farmland and the EPA writes a methane tax on your Weber. join the county militia— or enjoy your bug-burger future.
“I just want to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same.” = you fell for the WEF ‘15-minute serfdom’ pitch. They’ll fence your hamlet, meter your tractor diesel, and trade your barn for carbon credits while Davos elites keep their Gulfstreams. ‘Back to the land’ is code for ‘stay in your lane, prole.’
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