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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.

I'm not sure how to communicate this without sounding snarky, but you sound exactly like a Stalinist to me. Modernity has killed more people than any other event in the history of mankind, and immiserated Man in ways hitherto unimaginable, yet we ought to be grateful because technical advances whose causes are only tenuously related should see full credit attributed to the policy of the Party and nothing else.

Yet we see regimes that do not actually hold to such ideas benefit from industry without necessarily encountering the same cultural issues. Could it be that improving the human condition and reducing everything to reason and commerce aren't actually joined at the hip?

I think the Enlightenment is a failure, because it did not reach its own goals. I don't think it's an total failure because we did create useful institutions and discover useful truths along the way, but I don't regard the Soviet Union as a total failure either for the same reasons.

Still, Managerial Totalitarianism is a cruel farce and must be destroyed for the welfare of mankind.