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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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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.

Right, and to the extent that Communists believe they will be governed by enlightened and benevolent socialist rulers, reactionaries believe they will be governed by respectable and benevolent aristocrats. Neither has a desire to participate in politics assuming that those with power will simply do it correctly.

The reality for the poor reactionary is that he's more likely to get a venal, greedy or scheming lord as he is to get a benevolent one, and he'll quickly remember why everyone got so sick of it and overthrew them.

This is just not true, communists want to participate in politics and this is a key component of their ideology. They don't want any rulers. And they want everyone down to small groups to rule themselves democratically.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional artifice to allow the state to wither away, if you remember. There is no "correct ruler". There is only the required politicization of the masses to the death until history finally synthesizes the perfect society.

I won't relitigate here the "but what if you get a bad king?" question since that's a matter over which large amounts of ink have been spilled and it is irrelevant to this discussion of the teleology of either ideology.