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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I know that nationalism is passe, and anything resembling American exceptionalism especially so, but I do think that the US is exceptional or at least an extreme historical outlier in that it's founding was based on an adherence to a philosophy/culture rather than ties to a specific land, ancestry, language, or founding monarch. The closest historical examples that come to mind are late-republic/early-empire Rome and some of the Hellenic city-states, but even then only if you squint. Civis Romanus Sum and all that.

A common sentiment you'll encounter in more right-wing spaces is that we have allowed our culture to become infected with the disease of old-worldism and Europhilia. That is, a growing number of our professional and intellectual class seemed to be motivated by an explicit rejection of our nation's founding principles. They do not want to live in a world where...

"all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" or "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

...they want to live in a world "where the right sort of people" are put in charge and the lesser classes know their place and do not speak out of turn. They want to live in the old world of blood and soil, and might makes right, rather than embrace the new.

One of the reasons both the woke left and dissident right are held in similarly low regard by the mainstream right kind of ties into @FarNearEverywhere's post about "the problem of Susan". They've seen Aslan's kingdom, they've been shown that there is a better way, and yet still they lie to themselves. Still, they choose not to believe.

Neo-nazi's are regarded as particularly pathetic because their espoused philosophy has been shown to be a failure even by their own low standards. If we grant for the sake of argument the axioms of "racial interest" and "might makes right" then history has already shown us who the real "master-race" is and it is not the aristocratic nor5thern Europeans, it's the coalition of miscegenated hillbillies and mongrel sons of quakers that crushed the Prussian war machine not once but twice in 50 years. The Virgin Austrian Übermensch vs the Chad Audie Murphy and Curtis LeMay.

One of the reasons both the woke left and dissident right are held in similarly low regard by the mainstream right kind of ties into @FarNearEverywhere's post about "the problem of Susan". They've seen Aslan's kingdom, they've been shown that there is a better way, and yet still they lie to themselves. Still, they choose not to believe.

The woke left will not destroy the mainstream right's habitat and prospects any slower because you aim so much of your contempt at the dissident right. "No friends to the right" works for them, it will not work for you.

Aslan's kingdom is nothing more than death. If that's all you have to offer, your claim to be the inheritors of American exceptionalism is false. Yes, it was "Give me Liberty or give me Death", but the latter was the much inferior alternative.

The woke left will not destroy the mainstream right's habitat and prospects any slower...

They won't destroy it any faster either. the dissident right has made it clear that they wish to see us dead just as much as the woke do, so we would be fools to treat them as allies. Much like Hitler vs Stalin on the eastern front the best outcome is for us to let them fight, though ideally this time we won't make the mistake we did in 1945 by stopping before job was done.

it is not the aristocratic nor5thern Europeans, it's the coalition of miscegenated hillbillies and mongrel sons of quakers that crushed the Prussian war machine not once but twice in 50 years. T

I wasn't aware there were that many Quakers in the Soviet Union, regarding the latter one.

There were a few but not as many as there were in Finland at the time.

On the topic of American exceptionalism, I found Bret Devereaux's analysis last year to be quite compelling. The linked post is also one of the most emphatic exceptions to Betteridge's Law of Headlines that I've ever seen.

We don’t mean exceptional like that. It’s not just about being stronger and richer. We mean that we are better people than the world has seen before. Our culture is better. Our constitution is better. The freedom bit in that might get to the core. The rest of the world is free because we are free and sold them on it. Our mythos is better.